Hello and welcome to the Ostrome Upton, a podcast about infectious diseases and public health,

featuring Dr. Michael Osterholm.

Dr. Ostrome is an internationally recognized medical detective and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or Sidrap, at the University of Minnesota.

In this podcast, Dr. Ostrome draws an over 50 years of experience in infectious disease epidemiology to provide straight talk on the latest infectious disease outbreaks, counter misinformation and disinformation about vaccines, and distill the complex and ever-evolving public health threats facing our world.

I'm Chris Dahl, reporter for Sidrapp News, and I'm your host for these conversations.

Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Oostrom Update podcast.

Looking back over the past two months of my podcast scripts,

I realized just how heavily we've focused on the efforts by Health and Human Services

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to undermine the U.S.

vaccine infrastructure. And I would truly like to be able to focus on something different, like the

current flu season, but because the federal assault on U.S. immunization policy continues, that's

where the focus needs to remain. By now, you've probably heard that on January 5th, Acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Jim O'Neill signed a memorandum that reduced the number of CDC recommended childhood immunizations from 17 to 11 to align the country more closely with Denmark, which recommends 10 vaccines for children.

It was a move that, while not entirely unexpected, was still shocking,

both in the way it was announced and the lack of any underlying scientific data to justify such a

decision. And experts fear that it will likely create confusion for many parents. Making these changes

amid ongoing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases shows a disregard for the real

confusion families already face, the president of the infectious diseases Society of America said in a

statement. The changes to the U.S. childhood immunization schedule and all of the implications of those changes

will be the focus of this January 15th, 2026 episode of the

Ostrome update. We'll also discuss some recent comments by Secretary Kennedy on kids and flu

vaccines, bring you the latest on this winter's severe flu season, answer an ID query on

respiratory syncyticial virus vaccine guidance, and share an update from the vaccine integrity project.

...