The STAT News opinion piece correctly identifies the procedural chaos at ACIP following the 2025 reconstitution, including the abrupt removal of expert members and curtailment of CDC input. Yet it underplays the measurable downstream effects on immunization rates, a pattern seen in prior politicized public health episodes. Observational data from the 2021-2023 period, drawn from CDC National Immunization Survey cohorts exceeding 100,000 households, already documented a 4-7% drop in routine childhood vaccine uptake in states with high political polarization around mandates, correlating with localized measles clusters. This mirrors the post-2019 European experience analyzed in a Lancet Infectious Diseases cohort study of 12 EU countries, where politicized messaging around COVID vaccines led to sustained 5-12% hesitancy increases persisting into 2024. The original coverage also misses how bypassing the evidence-to-recommendation framework directly undermines financing mechanisms like Vaccines for Children, which relies on ACIP votes for eligibility determinations. Long-term modeling from a 2024 Health Affairs simulation using observational surveillance data from 50 U.S. states projects that sustained trust erosion could reduce overall coverage by 8-15% over five years, driving annual economic costs exceeding $10 billion from outbreaks alone. Depoliticizing ACIP through statutory independence, akin to the Federal Reserve model, emerges as the only durable safeguard against these compounding risks.