Vaccines may not be the most spectacular of all the miracles of modern medicine, but they are arguably the most beneficial. They have virtually eliminated the infectious diseases of childhood, including measles, diphtheria, mumps, rubella, smallpox and polio that were once the sources of unimaginable worry and grief for parents everywhere.
Vaccines are estimated to have saved over 150 million lives in the last five decades, cutting infant mortality by 40% globally and over 50% in Africa. Closer to home, of all babies born in the US in 2001 alone, a 2005 study showed that vaccines prevented 33,000 deaths and 14 million illnesses. Vaccines are also the most cost effective of all medical interventions, easily yielding the greatest amount of benefit received per dollar spent.
Like all medical treatments, vaccinations have side effects and risks, but they are rare and mostly insignificant, like a sore shoulder. There was for some time a concern that vaccines or the mercury in them caused autism, understandably so because autism was becoming much more frequently diagnosed just as vaccine use was expanding worldwide.
The scientific community took the threat seriously. Today, many exhaustive studies involving hundreds of thousands of children have all shown the same thing: vaccines don’t cause autism.
Yet in spite of the record of success and all the lives and dollars saved, experiences with Covid have lead Americans to become less trusting of vaccines. Before Covid, America was a world leader in vaccination rates with 95% coverage. Since 2020, though, the percentage of children receiving the recommended vaccines has declined by 2% or about 70,000 children.
The result has been a resurgence of childhood diseases once considered vestiges of the past. Measles was considered to be entirely eliminated in 2020, yet last year multiple outbreaks sickened hundreds of children. Cases of chickenpox, whooping cough and pneumonia are all on the rise. Trend lines don’t look good.
Clearly, millions of Americans have become skeptical of medical authority, especially that coming from government. What happened to cause Americans to adopt behaviors that re-introduced these diseases into the population and caused needless suffering?
The answer is that our public health establishment became politicized, shilling for approved government policy rather acting as honest, reasonably humble stewards of the public good. The bonds of trust were broken because we were often manipulated rather than informed, we were proselytized rather than respected. Vaccines were rushed to market and their benefits oversold.
Fairly or not, the bulk of criticism has centered on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Chief Medical Adviser to the President on Covid. Dr. Fauci was a respected, competent public health physician until he became a celebrity. Signature prayer candles, action figures and other trappings apparently caused him to lose his way.
For example, Dr. Fauci early on warned against dependence on mask wearing, citing “unintended consequences” and noting that they didn’t provide much protection. Yet he later repeatedly overstated the known benefits of masks and never disavowed his previous declarations, leading many to conclude that his counsel seemed rooted more in shifting public perceptions than actual evidence.
Fauci also had the exasperating habit of changing his estimate regarding the percentage of the population needing to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, the point at which protection effectively extends to all, vaccinated or not. He finally admitted that he changed his statements based only on his assessment of what the public was ready to hear.
He recommended mandating six feet of distance from others in public, although he later admitted it was nothing more than a personal guesstimate. He initially was an enthusiastic supporter of gain-of-function research in China’s Wuhan lab, but later evaded questions and denied involvement when the consequences of the catastrophic lab leak became known.
What Fauci left unsaid was equally harmful. He neglected to point out that participating in a George Floyd riot was as unhealthy as mingling in any other crowd in 2020 and that there was no evidence supporting school shut downs.
Fauci indignantly informed his critics that “I am the science”. But the days of authority-based science are past. Fauci’s self-serving deceptions broke the trust relationship with the American people. We may be reaping the consequences for years to come.