Virginia’s Department of Health is recommending infants ages 6 to 11 months receive a MMR vaccine — earlier than the age recommended by the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Doctors and other vaccine experts told The Defender that Virginia’s guidance is “reckless” and “not grounded in science.”

Virginia’s Department of Health is recommending infants ages 6 to 11 months receive a MMR vaccine — earlier than the age recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Doctors and other vaccine experts told The Defender that Virginia’s guidance is “reckless” and “not grounded in science.”

The state’s recommendations also include an accelerated measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination schedule, advising that infants get the second dose in the two-dose MMR series 28 days after the first.

Virginia’s recommendation comes in response to a recent measles outbreak in Buckingham County, which as of Tuesday had reached 54 cases.

The state’s MMR vaccine guidance was included in a May 13 letter from Virginia State Health Commissioner Cameron Webb. The recommendations call for infants ages 6 to 11 months to “get an early dose of the MMR vaccine,” and two more doses at the AAP’s recommended ages, at least 28 days apart.

The CDC and AAP recommend a minimum age of 12 months for MMR vaccination, except in “special situations,” such as international travel.

Dr. Paige Perriello, a Charlottesville-based pediatrician, told local news outlet 29 News-WVIR that while the two-dose MMR series is typically started at 12 months, the vaccine can be administered earlier “during an outbreak” of measles.

According to the Virginia Department of Health’s measles dashboard, of the 54 reported cases, only 6 (11%) have resulted in hospitalization. No deaths have been reported.

Dr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician and author of “Making Our Children Well — A Parent’s Guidebook: Empowering Healthy Families with Nutrition and Homeopathy,” told The Defender that the recent cluster of measles cases in Virginia is far from an outbreak.

“Even at 54 cases across an entire state, we’re talking about an illness with a case fatality rate near zero in the developed world,” Perro said. “The modern risk of severe outcomes from measles in the U.S. is extraordinarily low.”

Perro said Virginia’s recommendations are “reckless in several ways.” She said infants under age 1 are more susceptible to vaccine injury, because “the infant blood-brain barrier and immune system are even less developed at that age.”

“You’re injecting a live attenuated virus cocktail into a system with minimal capacity to handle it safely,” Perro said.

Perro also criticized the “accelerated two-dose schedule,” which calls for the second dose for infants under age 1 to be administered 28 days after the first dose, instead of the standard schedule, which spaces out the doses over several years.

Currently, the recommended CDC and AAP childhood vaccination schedules call for a two-dose series of the MMR vaccine at 12-15 months and another two-dose series between the ages of 4 and 6.

Read More: ‘Reckless’: Virginia Recommends MMR Vaccine for Infants as Young as 6 Months