January 2026
To our patients:
Our mission at Woodinville Pediatrics is to optimize the health and well-being of your children
and families. However, the world is changing rapidly around us and the way healthcare is
financed and delivered is being threatened in a significant way. New legislation is reducing
funding for safety net programs like Medicaid and the process by which vaccines are approved
and recommend are being manipulated at the highest levels.
For decades, we have relied on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to
provide evidence-based recommendations on current and new vaccines. Previously, the
members of this committee were required to go through an extensive vetting process to ensure
they had the expertise and knowledge required to evaluate the studies and evidence around
vaccines and immunization practices. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) also had a
seat at the table to ensure the recommendations made sense for the practicing pediatricians
delivering the bulk of these immunizations. We believed in this process and have uniformly
followed these recommendations since the inception of this practice.
On June 9, 2025, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) fired every single sitting
member of the ACIP and without any transparent vetting process, quickly appointed 8 new
people who mostly align with his anti-vaccine bias. We anticipate these changes may impact our
ability to provide your children with life-saving immunizations in the future.
In its last meeting, the ACIP made some changes to Hepatitis B vaccine recommendations that
did not make sense to the medical community at large. More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
the Secretary of Health and Human Services who oversees the CDC decided to bypass the
ACIP recommendation process altogether and remove 6 vaccines from the routine
immunization schedule. These included Hepatits A, Hepatitis B, Rotavirus, Meningococcal,
Influenza virus vaccines and the RSV antibody injection. These vaccines have saved countless
thousands of lives.
Because of all these changes, Woodinville Pediatrics will no longer follow the CDC vaccination
schedule for children. We will be using the American Academy of Pediatrics schedule for
vaccines which is up-to-date and evidence based.
The physicians of Woodinville Pediatrics have reviewed the science and the evidence behind
the vaccines we recommend and administer. We know that these vaccines save lives. The
senior partners at Woodinville Pediatrics have been around long enough to have seen the death
and disability caused by disease like polio and meningitis. We became unwilling experts at
extracting spinal fluid from the backs of tiny babies because we had to check for meningitis so
frequently. But, we stopped doing these procedures years ago. In fact, we no longer even stock
the special needles and supplies to do spinal tap procedures because Hib and Pneumococcal
vaccines have mostly eliminated meningitis in babies. Younger physicians up to now have been
mostly spared from those experiences but as we see in the measles outbreak in Texas, we may yet have the unfortunate opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with these terrible diseases.
Woodinville Pediatrics is committed to providing the best possible care for your children. We are
working closely with the Washington Chapter of the AAP, the Washington State Department of
Health and the Immunization Action Coalition of Washington to ensure that vaccines remain
available to you. We are doing everything we can to provide the immunizations your children
need to stay healthy. If you have any questions about this letter or immunizations in general,
your doctor will be happy to discuss that with you on your next visit.
The Physicians and Staff at Woodinville Pediatrics
