How Fragile Is Our Vaccine Infrastructure?

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Speaker 2 For all the parents listening, I bet you remember this moment. You have this tiny new creature in your life.
You feel vulnerable. The new baby seems extra vulnerable.

Speaker 2 And one of the first things you have to do to this tiny creature is let the doctor inject into her small amounts of disease.

Speaker 2 But you almost certainly have to do it for a kid to go to school, which makes vaccines a very real way that people feel the presence of the state in their lives.

Speaker 2 And so, vaccines turn out to be a very excellent way to examine this moment we've landed in, where people who deeply mistrust the government are suddenly in charge of critical parts of it.

Speaker 2 I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.
And today, we're going to talk about vaccines.

Speaker 2 More specifically, the anti-vaxxers who Trump has nominated to run our health institutions and how they might change our world.

Speaker 2 One critical dividing line between the two parties right now, maybe the critical dividing line, is trust in expertise, in authority, in institutions.

Speaker 2 And this showdown, which in the coming administration will play out over lots of arenas, the military, education, intelligence, It's been brewing in the vaccine world for years, maybe centuries.

Speaker 2 Let's start in the modern world with Trump's nominees, who they are, what they believe, and what they might do. To help me with that, we have Atlantic Science Writer and editor Daniel Engber.

Speaker 2 Dan, welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 Thanks, Anna.

Speaker 2 So when Trump announced RFK as his pick to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, what was your reaction?

Speaker 5 I thought, I can't believe this is really happening.

Speaker 5 So I remember Trump had a meeting with RFK in early 2017. And RFK, do you remember he came out of Trump Tower and he was like, I'm going to be the head of a new vaccine safety commission.

Speaker 5 And I and many other science journalists immediately got to work thinking about what will we do if that happens?

Speaker 5 And then it didn't happen. Trump was just sort of toying with him as he toyed with Mitt Romney and many others.
So in the back of my head, I kind of thought, well, maybe that's going to happen again.

Speaker 5 And, but it's different this time.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And it's not just RFK, right?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 I mean, so RFK has been tapped for health and human services, but then there's a whole host of kind of contrarian characters in public health who are similarly being put up for important positions.

Speaker 6 President-elect Donald Trump has selected one of the nation's most prominent critics of COVID-19 era lockdowns and mandates to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker 7 Trump tapping yet another television personality to join his administration, this time Dr. Mehmed Oz.
Trump naming the TV doctor to oversee Medicare and Medicaid for more than 160 million Americans.

Speaker 8 Former Florida Congressman Dr. Dave Weldon for CDC director.

Speaker 9 Dr. Marty McCari as FDA Commissioner.

Speaker 8 Fox News medical contributor Dr. Jeanette Neshiswat for Surgeon General.

Speaker 5 What all of these people seem to have in common, with the exception of Weldon maybe, is they were critics of the COVID response.

Speaker 5 But other than that, I mean, there are clear differences among these people, too. Some of them are, you know, very conventional thinkers on the value of vaccination.

Speaker 5 Others are really on the kind of anti-vaccine end of the spectrum.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's talk about this broad category of anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or vaccine doubters. Who are they? And what do we know about what they believe?

Speaker 5 Well, I think RFK is kind of like the king of the anti-vaxxers.

Speaker 4 There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

Speaker 10 I I do believe that autism does come from vaccines. You know, all I've said about vaccines, we should have good science.

Speaker 5 I mean, he describes himself as not being anti-vaccine. I don't think there's anyone who describes themselves as being anti-vaccine.

Speaker 5 So, you know, perhaps we should retire that term or maybe we should use it despite these people's protestations.

Speaker 5 But in any case, he's very worried about the conflicts of interest behind the decisions that are made to approve and distribute vaccines, and particularly concerned about safety issues with certain vaccines.

Speaker 5 The Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine in particular. He's spread a lot of doubt about that and its potential link to autism, which has been demonstrated not to be a real connection.

Speaker 5 And also, he has a lot of concerns about mercury in vaccines. And he stepped away from it recently to run for president.

Speaker 5 But he was in charge of children's health defense, which described doubts about vaccines arising during the pandemic as the pandemic's silver lining and as good news that vaccination rates were dropping for the nation's children.

Speaker 5 So I would say this is a radical organization on vaccine issues. So that's RFK.

Speaker 5 And then Dave Weldon, the former member of Congress from Florida, who has now been nominated to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Speaker 5 He has a long history of also being wary of vaccination, believing in the link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Speaker 5 He invited Andrew Wakefield, who's best known for producing a study of the MMR vaccine and its alleged link to autism that has since been debunked. So Weldon invited Wakefield to come to Congress.

Speaker 5 You know, this is a couple of decades ago, but still,

Speaker 5 that's the track record we have for Weldon, who has not really done a lot in public life recently.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, now Weldon said in an interview that, like you said, he would not describe himself as anti-vaccine. His own children are vaccinated and that he administers vaccines in his own clinic.

Speaker 2 So help me understand how to categorize these guys. I mean, we've got RFK and Dave Weldon, who are specifically associated with skepticism about vaccines.

Speaker 2 How would you, as a science journalist, characterize their skepticism? How should we understand it?

Speaker 5 Okay, well, I mean, fully out of the mainstream is how I would describe it, just in the sense that what we're talking about here really is rejecting standard public health advice, and standard public health advice is very mainstream.

Speaker 5 So more than 90% of the nation's children are getting this sort of standard set of immunizations. They're required for entry into school at kindergarten.

Speaker 5 This is like not particularly a controversial issue for most Americans, it's even an understate, for almost all Americans, right? So it's more than 90% of kids are getting these shots.

Speaker 5 And the people who don't, it often is as much to do with access or various other reasons that have nothing to do with like an ideological opposition or a dispositional skepticism of vaccines.

Speaker 5 So I would say

Speaker 5 this is a fringe belief.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, So we have people who you describe as having a fringe belief in charge of varying health organizations.

Speaker 2 What does that mean? What can they do?

Speaker 5 Well, it is unclear, right? In simple terms, the vaccine mandates for children, let's say, to get into public school, that's handled at the state level.

Speaker 5 There's nothing RFK could do or any of the people that he appoints under him to change the requirements for kindergartners in California or New York or Florida. That's going to be handled locally.

Speaker 5 So that's just one thing that's off the table. However, as Secretary of HHS, Kennedy would have control over the recommendations

Speaker 4 made by the CDC.

Speaker 5 And of course, Dave Weldon also would be in that line of decision making.

Speaker 5 So at the CDC, there's a committee that comes together and decides which vaccines are going to be recommended for which age groups, and they decide sort of the nature of the recommendation.

Speaker 5 If it's, I mean, there's sort of these technical distinctions here, but is it a strong recommendation?

Speaker 5 Is it a recommendation that the vaccine be discussed between the patient and their health care provider? That sort of thing.

Speaker 5 Now, once those recommendations are made, insurance companies tend to pay for the vaccines, and state public health officials tend to mandate them. So everyone takes their cues from CDC on this.

Speaker 5 Not always, always, but generally, this is how it works. So what happens if people with fringe beliefs are in control of this committee?

Speaker 5 If that committee starts making recommendations, let's say, I don't think this is going to happen, but against

Speaker 5 recommending the MMR shot for children, what would happen at the state level? Who knows? That would be, I think, uncharted territory.

Speaker 5 But again, the decision, the actual decision would be made, the policy decision would be made at the local level.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So right now the state of affairs is that there are this fairly standard and commonly accepted list of vaccines that are approved year by year by the CDC, and then that translates down to insurance companies and schools.

Speaker 2 And it's basically a kind of routine process now. Like it doesn't have that many hitches, even though there's some number of people who opt out of getting vaccines for their kids.

Speaker 2 Mostly it's just gone through as a standard part of American childhood.

Speaker 2 Check, check, check, get these vaccines.

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And sometimes, you know, the vaccine schedule will change. The standards set will change.

Speaker 5 And when there are new vaccines in the mix, the HPV vaccine, for example, or the COVID vaccine and COVID boosters of recent years, then there's real discussion.

Speaker 5 Well, this booster, should it be recommended for people of all ages or only older people?

Speaker 5 Should there be different guidance for young men, let's say, given that there's some evidence of some adverse heart-related heart-related effects for young men who take the mRNA vaccines.

Speaker 5 So then there's no business as usual. There's discussion and debate and decisions are made, right?

Speaker 5 There's another part of it which I should mention also, which is the federal government administers something called the Vaccines for Children program, which provides something like half of the immunizations for children in the country.

Speaker 5 That's a multi-billion dollar program. That's just another place where if you had vaccine skeptics in control,

Speaker 5 who knows what might happen.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, just so I understand, that's like, you know, let's say there's a group of people who only can get their vaccines through a public clinic.

Speaker 2 This is federally funded, like federally funded vaccines. So if people can't afford vaccines or don't have insurance, their children can still get vaccinated and go to school.

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, yeah, vaccination rates for children have increased pretty dramatically since the early 90s. And that's largely due to this program.

Speaker 5 And the issue, again, it's not like there were lots of vaccine skeptical parents in the early 90s who have now been converted to the proper way of thinking, in quotes.

Speaker 5 No, it's just that there were a lot of children who didn't have access to vaccines and now they do because of the Vaccines for Children program.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, OK. I have to say what you just described seems like a tremendous amount of influence or potential influence over routine vaccinations.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's

Speaker 5 like I said, it's kind of uncharted territory. It's hard to know how these things will play out, right?

Speaker 5 You know, at the level of the CDC recommendations, if there was just a dramatic shift in what was being recommended, how would the system respond?

Speaker 5 It's really hard to imagine, right? Because I think you would still have most doctors in the country believing that these vaccines were extremely important for their patients.

Speaker 5 You would still have most parents believing that. I mean, the large majority of parents strongly endorse the value of vaccines and many, many local health officials.
So I don't know. I mean,

Speaker 5 it's hard to say. I do think

Speaker 5 about what's going on in Florida as maybe a case study.

Speaker 5 So, you know, Ron DeSantis, when he was challenging Trump for the nomination, seemed to have made a decision to run as a vaccine, as the vaccine skeptical candidate.

Speaker 5 Trump's history here is a little weird, right? He took credit reasonably for Operation Warp Speed, which developed the COVID vaccine really quickly.

Speaker 2 Seemed proud of it, in fact.

Speaker 5 Was proud of it, endorsed it initially, and then kind of following his constituents drifted a little bit in the other direction over time, and then came out against vaccine mandates in schools.

Speaker 5 And then, you know, seems to have an ambivalent attitude towards the COVID vaccine, let's say. But DeSantis, I think, saw this as an opening and said, okay, I'm going to really lean into this.

Speaker 5 There are a lot of, you know, Republican voters for whom this is an important issue. So DeSantis himself had been very excited about the COVID vaccine initially and then kind of turned against it.

Speaker 5 And he brought in a guy named Joseph Latipo to head the Florida Health Department in the end of 2021.

Speaker 4 And Latipo

Speaker 5 has been, among other things, quite an aggressive opponent of COVID vaccination, not just of vaccine mandates, that's kind of the standard position.

Speaker 5 Latipo has been warning people in Florida that the COVID mRNA vaccines are potentially unsafe and that no one should get them ever.

Speaker 5 At first he was like, well, you know, they're dangerous for young people. And most recently he's just said mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous, period.

Speaker 5 For a statewide official to be so aggressive about recommending against

Speaker 5 the use of a CDC recommended vaccine, that's very unusual.

Speaker 2 So what happened?

Speaker 5 So he's been in charge since late late 2021. Now, I should say that a lot of the action on COVID vaccination was over by then, right?

Speaker 5 So people were, the people who were going to get vaccinated, many of them had already been vaccinated. And then COVID booster uptake has been low everywhere.

Speaker 5 But what I thought was quite interesting is when I started looking at the stats for Florida, it was really hard to find like a Latipo effect.

Speaker 5 Again, this would be an effect of having the person in charge of your statewide public health department recommending against vaccination.

Speaker 5 Like you might think, coming to this fresh, that, well, that person is going to have so much power and control. Their word is going to be so influential.

Speaker 5 So you would expect their, you know, vaccination rates, COVID vaccination rates in Florida to fall off a cliff. They didn't.
And age-adjusted COVID mortality rates did not increase under Latipo.

Speaker 5 It was just kind of hard to find evidence for that Latipo effect that I was looking for, which I, again, was sort of imagining as this is what happens when you put someone who's suspicious of vaccines in charge.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, right.

Speaker 2 So what do you conclude from that, that it's just a political position but doesn't necessarily have much influence either on the medical establishment, people's personal decisions, doctor's offices, parents, anything like that?

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, yeah. I mean, it just sort of supports my general belief that there's a lot of inertia in the system and, you know,

Speaker 5 people are going to behave the the way they're going to behave by and large.

Speaker 5 It's not as easy to push parents as a giant group of people in the United States to suddenly stop vaccinating their kids.

Speaker 5 So that's kind of my baseline expectation is that it is hard to budge this system. But again, I've never in my life seen people like RFK and Dave Weldon standing

Speaker 5 on the bridge, right? So this is just something that we haven't seen before.

Speaker 5 So it's not really analogous to Latipo in Florida, who's just one state surgeon general saying, don't get your COVID booster.

Speaker 5 A worst case scenario is there's some dramatic shift in policy at the CDC. There could be dramatic shifts at the FDA, which approves new vaccines.

Speaker 5 They could choose not to approve them. Or there could be new safety requirements for vaccines, which just slow things things down.
I mean, that's another bad scenario that, you know,

Speaker 5 it's not like vaccines are banned or taken away, but just the release of new vaccines is slowed dramatically. I mean, we could have another pandemic in the next few years, H5N1, bird flu, right?

Speaker 5 And so if we have RFK and Dave Weldon in charge, like how fast is the next operation warp speed? That's very unclear to me. And that strikes me as a potential terrible scenario.

Speaker 5 What RFK could do, what someone in a position of power could do, is just create obstacles, right?

Speaker 5 If the big dramatic success of national vaccination over the past 30 years has been providing access to children who didn't have that access before.

Speaker 5 If that's what brought the measles vaccination rate up from 80 something percent to 90%,

Speaker 5 then just undo that, right? Like just create obstacles for people to get the vaccines they want.

Speaker 5 Just take away the whole choice architecture that leads people to get vaccinated if they don't have strong opinions on it one way or another. Take away the clinics that provide the shots, right?

Speaker 5 That's how you would lower the rates if you really, if that was your only goal.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And just to be clear, no one said they're going to do that. You're just giving them free advice here.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 4 All right. Excellent.

Speaker 2 Well, we'll stay on top of this subject since we've never seen a thing like this before. Dan, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Next, how we got to this moment of mistrust and the winding path of vaccine acceptance in the U.S.

Speaker 4 What's kind of ironic is that, you know, vaccine safety and vaccine skepticism really don't track together.

Speaker 2 That's after the break.

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Speaker 2 We're back from break. I'm joined by health journalist Arthur Allen, who wrote the book Vaccine.
Arthur, welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 Thanks for having me, Hannah.

Speaker 2 So we are about to see vaccine skeptics have power in a way they never have before, which must be strange for you, who's been tracking them for a long time to see people who are mistrustful of big government suddenly running the government.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's a very weird moment.

Speaker 4 It certainly is. I mean, when I wrote my book and it came out in 2007, it was like there were two journalists interested in vaccines in any way.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, the idea of the skeptics were just totally fringe. I mean, that's what everyone thought.
And now here they are inside the castle.

Speaker 2 I know. It's so strange.
So let's reel back since you're a rare person who knows this movement really well. What are the roots of the skepticism? Like, where does it start?

Speaker 4 Well, there are a lot of strands to skepticism about vaccines. The basic thing is that vaccines are given to healthy people, often to kids, and the whole idea of them is a little bit frightening.

Speaker 4 And when they succeed, nothing happens. And so, you know, there's very little kind of rah-rah for vaccines like in the Vox pop because most people alive today haven't seen the worst of what they do.

Speaker 4 So that, I mean, that's an important like condition because what happens is that, you know, there are people who just think that putting something in your body like this to prevent a disease goes against God or isn't natural or is you know a pharmaceutical plot.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's many different strands and they all kind of tend to come together and have at the moment.

Speaker 4 If you go back far enough, I mean, the first inoculation in North America was in the 1720s, and it was considered, you know, they were trying to vaccinate against smallpox.

Speaker 4 And it was a dangerous procedure, but it was actually beneficial and it was widely adopted for the next 80 years. But at that time, you know, it was considered ungodly.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, not that people would take the craziest medicines. This has always been true, that people will take any kind of crazy medication to treat an illness.

Speaker 4 But the idea that you would prevent something in the first instance was considered sort of to go against religion.

Speaker 4 And there were also people who argued and eventually successfully that you know vaccination was a gift from God.

Speaker 2 But initially it was a sense you were like injecting disease or sin or something like that into a pure

Speaker 4 right. And especially with a baby.
You know, like you were injecting this sinful material into a baby, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, so time went on after the 18th century. There were several vaccines that came about.

Speaker 2 In the early parts of vaccine history, were there times when skeptics had a point like they were right to be suspicious of the pushing of certain vaccines?

Speaker 4 Well, actually, you know, a contaminated smallpox vaccine is why we have an FDA.

Speaker 4 I mean, around 1902, there was this terrible outbreak of tetanus, and it killed a number of kids in Camden, New Jersey, and in a bunch of other places. There were also deaths.

Speaker 4 And it was a smallpox vaccine that hadn't been properly made and was contaminated.

Speaker 4 And so there were frequent reports, if you look in the literature from these days, like I extensively looked through everything in Pennsylvania, like the first 10 years of the century.

Speaker 4 And swollen arms were really common, you know, bad infections. You know, there weren't any antibiotics.
So you had a bad infection. There wasn't much you could do about it.

Speaker 4 And the public health people in those days, it was like a new tool that they had, and they were pretty brutal at times.

Speaker 4 I mean, they were forced vaccinations where they would chase down workers and they would, you know, pull them out of like drain pipes to vaccinate them and this kind of thing.

Speaker 4 And the vaccines were not entirely safe and they were very varied. Some were, some weren't.
And so like I said, that was one of the things that led to the creation of the FDA.

Speaker 4 So that's smallpox. And then, you know, you have time marches on and medicine starts to have some legitimacy.

Speaker 4 And then after World War II, you know, it really has legitimacy because you've got antibiotics, you've got a bunch of, you know, viruses were kind of discovered and worked on by the military during World War II.

Speaker 4 And the fluta vaccine was developed. It wasn't very good, but a ton of other things were developed.
And all this research was done into viruses, and it led to the polio vaccine.

Speaker 14 Once the Public Health Service authorizes its release, the polio vaccine can begin to protect American youngsters.

Speaker 4 And so the polio vaccine came, you know, there was a trial involving like, I think, a million and a half kids. So here's an unlicensed vaccine.

Speaker 4 You know, three million parents are happy to have their kids vaccinated with this thing. And luckily it worked.
And, you know, in 1955, that was this, you know, huge moment of celebration.

Speaker 4 And, you know, church bells rang and this kind of thing.

Speaker 14 In 1955, over 10 million children received one or more injections of SALT vaccine, including this boy, the president's own grandson, David Eisenhower. Eisenhower.

Speaker 4 And it was at a time of great confidence in the system, you know, and in the government, we just wanted World War II. So that's a period.

Speaker 4 And then we have measles vaccine came in the early 60s, and other vaccines came along.

Speaker 4 But there was sort of, as a footnote to the polio vaccine campaign, there was a...

Speaker 4 several bad batches of vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories and some also by Wyeth that gave kids polio because it was an inactivated polio vaccine that hadn't been properly inactivated.

Speaker 4 So, that was a little bit, that caused them to pause the vaccination campaign, but it really was like a blip. And to me, that's a very significant moment because that was possibly one of the worst

Speaker 4 vaccine accidents in sort of the modern era, but it really didn't do much to stop public confidence in vaccination.

Speaker 4 Really, the first blow to vaccination in a way that had ripples on a national level was the swine flu affair of 1976, which was a soldier at Fort Dix, New Jersey died of the flu.

Speaker 4 It was a new strain of flu, and the CDC, the public health authorities thought, uh-oh, this is like the new pandemic coming down the line.

Speaker 15 This virus was the cause of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that resulted in over half a million deaths in the United States, as well as 20 million deaths around the world.

Speaker 4 They convinced Gerald Ford and there was a mass vaccination program.

Speaker 15 Influenza is serious business. During major flu epidemics, millions of people are sick and thousands die.
Well this year you can get protection.

Speaker 15 The vaccines are safe, easy to take, and they can protect you against flu.

Speaker 4 And it turned out to be like a nothing burger of a flu pandemic. There were some side effects from that vaccine, not really that many, but some causing some paralysis.

Speaker 15 One of those who did roll up her sleeve was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy, an active woman, when in November of 1976, she took her shot.
By the following week, I was totally paralyzed.

Speaker 15 So completely paralyzed, in fact, that they had to operate on her to enable her to breathe. The diagnosis? A neurological disorder called Guillain-Beret syndrome, GBS for short.

Speaker 4 So that was kind of a big fall-on-your-face moment for public health.

Speaker 4 And then following that, there were started to be lawsuits over the Whipping Cough vaccine.

Speaker 4 The Whipping Cough vaccine, the whole cell pertussis vaccine, had been around since the 30s, but there had been reports sort of all along that it was a very reactive vaccine.

Speaker 4 And if you talk to vaccine experts, reactive doesn't mean the same as dangerous.

Speaker 4 But for a parent whose kid gets the vaccine and they have 103 fever or, you know, they have seizures, which, you know, can be benign but like are terrifying, you know, it was a nasty piece of work.

Speaker 4 It was also very effective. But there were a number of cases of lawsuits starting in the early 80s, and it was starting to really catch on as a legal issue, like, you know, as bestos or something.

Speaker 16 Almost 100 pending lawsuits across the nation raised questions about the danger of the vaccine, which has been routinely used in this country for some 40 years.

Speaker 4 And this was, you know, a crisis for the vaccination program because a bunch of vaccine makers were getting out of the business. They were like frightened of the liability issue.

Speaker 4 They weren't making a lot of money on these vaccines anyway. I mean, Pertussis' vaccine at the time probably cost like 15 cents a dose or something.

Speaker 17 13-year-old Karen Pfeiffer of Milwaukee suffers from permanent brain damage and seizures, which developed after immunization as an infant.

Speaker 17 A court agreed agreed that the vaccine was at fault and awarded her parents $3 million.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, so in sort of more contemporary times, that was the first big like anti

Speaker 4 vaccine skepticism moment.

Speaker 2 Okay, so to summarize, basically over the decades, there were problems that came up with vaccines. Some of them were somewhat serious.
Most of them, it sounds like, but they were minor.

Speaker 2 Like in the scheme of the ways that vaccines generally protected people, there were nonetheless some minor issues with vaccines until the 70s when those issues, for whatever reason, captured the public imagination.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 4 And also it's important to point along that sort of all along when during the period of when vaccines are causing this or that sort of minor issue, there's a parallel universe in which vaccines are like causing everything.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 what do you mean? Apparently. You're like blamed for like causing kids to be autistic, causing, you know, rock and roll, causing, you know, headbanging, causing, you know, crime.

Speaker 4 I mean, the pertussis vaccine was blamed for like everything. I mean, the anti-vaccine movement really kind of had a moment of incredible growth during all of that.

Speaker 4 And then in the 90s, the sort of mainstay of the anti-vaccine movement, you know, really was created during the whole controversy over autism because autism has increased over the past three, four, five decades, and no one is that sure what the cause is.

Speaker 4 And people were pointing fingers at vaccines.

Speaker 4 And a paper was published to that effect in 1998 and then refuted repeatedly, but it continues to live on that idea.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, so at this moment, then how safe would you say vaccines are, like compared to their long history of safety?

Speaker 4 Aaron Trevor Brandon, I mean, I think they're as safe as they've ever been. I mean, they're tested through a number of procedures that look for really big danger signals.

Speaker 4 And then as soon as they go on the market, the CDC has a system for looking for danger signals that I think is probably better than anything they have for drugs. I mean, it's pretty good.

Speaker 4 It's not like it's a perfect system, but I personally would sort of have confidence that it would find anything.

Speaker 4 fairly obvious or significant.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So given that vaccines are relatively safe now, that there's a system in place for monitoring their safety after they come out, how do you explain why the vaccine skeptic movement at this moment, when vaccines are at their safest, would get so much momentum?

Speaker 4 I mean, I think there's a lot of money behind them. There's a hardcore of people who are skeptical of vaccines.
And any new technology in particular, they're like immediately distrustful of.

Speaker 4 I mean, you just saw all the crazy stuff that went on, you know, that Bill Gates was putting microchips in the vaccines. So I think there's just an inherent mistrust.
And then

Speaker 4 the COVID experience, you know, that got so polarized.

Speaker 4 And arguably, public health went a little bit overboard in, you know, how long schools were kept closed in some places or, you know, closing beaches that wasn't really necessary. So I think the

Speaker 4 turn against vaccines became part of the whole like mistrust of the government, which was very polarized.

Speaker 4 I mean, it was like, you know, for a lot of people, Tony Fauci was a hero, and it seemed like he was kind of a hero for everybody for a while.

Speaker 4 And then he became this demon who they want to throw in jail to this day. What's kind of ironic is that, you know, vaccine safety and vaccine skepticism really don't track together.

Speaker 4 Vaccine skepticism has to do with confidence in the government. Vaccine safety, you know, is a progressive thing that in general has gotten better over time.

Speaker 2 So was COVID a moment when what was once a relatively fringe theory gained more mainstream acceptance? Like it just got folded into a resistance to lockdowns?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think so. I mean,

Speaker 4 it's kind of interesting. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak at Disneyland.

Speaker 9 That outbreak linked to Disneyland is now considered the worst measles outbreak in California in 15 years.

Speaker 4 This led to a decision by the very Democratic legislature in California to tighten requirements on the school vaccination.

Speaker 18 Tonight, California's controversial mandatory vaccine bill is one step closer to becoming law. The bill would eliminate the personal belief exemption for children attending school.

Speaker 4 Up to then in California you could get an exemption for your kid from vaccination on fairly flimsy grounds, religious or philosophical, and they got rid of that.

Speaker 4 And there was a huge backlash against that. There were movements all over the country to tighten rules.
And that really gave a shot in the arm, so to speak, to the anti-vaccine movement.

Speaker 4 And so that movement was there. And then the pandemic sort of joined them with all these like Moms for Liberty and all these other sort of anti-government groups and anti-public health people.

Speaker 4 But the anti-vaccine core was quite strong before the pandemic.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So, now that some people who are sympathetic to the movement are in power, what are the kinds of things you think they could do?

Speaker 4 Well, I think the thing that people don't realize about the vaccine sort of enterprise is it's actually pretty fragile. I mean, drug companies come in and out of the vaccine business readily.

Speaker 4 Like the industry's interest in vaccines is not that big. I mean, some of them make money now.
The Shingrix makes money. The Pneumocaccus vaccine, which a lot of older people get, make money.

Speaker 4 The rest rest of them, you know, I'm sure, I don't know, they probably break even on some of them or maybe make a small problem, but they're not like blockbuster drugs.

Speaker 2 When you say it's fragile, you're saying any amount of cultural pressure, political pressure could easily deter.

Speaker 2 There's no great incentive on the part of the pharmaceutical manufacturers to continue to innovate and create vaccines.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 4 And the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, that's at the CDC, when they make a recommendation for a vaccine, that automatically makes it available to poor kids through the vaccine for children.

Speaker 4 So Trump or RFK can take over the advisory committee and stack it with his people who could get rid of it altogether. There's no,

Speaker 4 it expires during Trump's term unless it gets renewed.

Speaker 2 So for you, who's tracked this for a while, what's the worst case scenario?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 there have been 16 measles outbreaks in the country this year. Whooping cough is on the upswing.

Speaker 4 That's partly because it's cyclical and because our current vaccine doesn't completely prevent infections, sort of like the COVID vaccine doesn't.

Speaker 4 Pertus, I mean, it can be a very nasty disease, but it's usually not fatal unless you're a baby.

Speaker 4 And so there could be low levels, but growing levels of these diseases that just you know, kind of happen and nobody really does anything about it. And it'll lead to chaos in emergency rooms.

Speaker 4 It'll lead to, you know, more strains on the healthcare system. And it'll lead to deaths and misery for kids.
What worries me is like,

Speaker 4 in a way, you almost think, oh, gee, if like five kids died of measles, would that like turn things around?

Speaker 4 But it's almost more worrisome to think, well, there could be five deaths of kids and it won't turn things around.

Speaker 2 So it sounds from what you're saying, it seems like skepticism of government health agencies runs in waves. Like there are periods when there's high trust in public health.

Speaker 2 Right now, we're in a period of pretty low trust post-COVID. When is public trust high?

Speaker 2 Like what is something that could turn this moment we're in now from extreme skepticism of government health agencies back into trust?

Speaker 4 Well, I think unfortunately it would have to be some kind of a disaster that public health comes in and resolves.

Speaker 4 And it could be, you know, a terrible measles outbreak or epidemic or whooping cough epidemic that kills a bunch of babies.

Speaker 4 I mean, based on the historical example, that's when public health is really popular. I mean, and look at polio.

Speaker 4 I mean, that was like probably the high moment for public health, you know, in this, in the last 150 years. And that was this disease that everybody was afraid of.

Speaker 4 They came in with a vaccine and they wiped it out.

Speaker 2 Right. So it's essentially what you're saying.
It would have to be a tragedy. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, we won't look forward to that.

Speaker 2 But thank you. Thank you for explaining this all to us, and thank you for coming on the show.

Speaker 4 Well, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 That was Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine. He's also a writer for the Kaiser Family Foundation Health News.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend.

Speaker 2 It was edited by Claudina Bade and fact-checked by Sarah Korlevsky. It was engineered by Robs Merciak.

Speaker 2 Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hannah Rosen.
Thank you for listening.

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