Vaccines erased deadly diseases, but the Trump administration is helping to bring them back again |
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a Make America Healthy Again summit in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 12. Kennedy is a know skeptic of vaccines.
A person is vaccinated during an immunization event at the Los Angeles Care and Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan Community Resource Center in Panorama City on Oct. 24.
In October, I met with five physicians at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where I had once been a medical student. Four were pediatricians doing post-doctoral training in pediatric infectious diseases, and the fifth was their program director.
I recounted a case of a 13-year-old boy whom I had cared for as a student in 1968 and who had been admitted to the hospital for what should have been a minor problem. Within 18 hours, he died from an overwhelming bloodstream infection. I was devastated.
An autopsy revealed the presence of meningococcal bacteria, an infection known to cause rapidly fatal illness, and which is now preventable by vaccines that I spent decades helping to develop. When he had been admitted, I learned that the child previously had the usual childhood illnesses: mumps, chicken pox and measles. Those words, and the boy’s death, now feel like relics of another era.
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I asked if any of the physicians had ever seen a case of mumps, chicken pox, measles or congenital rubella syndrome. None had. And none had seen a case of Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) meningitis, another bacterium that causes serious infections in children. As a young physician, I had cared for scores of children with these infectious diseases. Today, these diseases are virtually gone. Why? Safe and effective vaccines.
Yet, in 2025, measles has reemerged in........