Vaccines are safe and effective. Don’t let anyone say different. Here are the facts. | Opinion

The World Health Organization launched a landmark program in 1974 to make vaccines more available and, therefore, more effective around the globe. The Lancet published a study in May that called it “the single greatest contribution to improved infant survival over the past 50 years.”

That’s saying something and should be cause for celebration. Too often it’s cause for concern.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it plainly: “Vaccines do not cause autism.”

Even so, distrust is growing among some parents, political classes and government skeptics. It doesn’t help that the Public Health Service, the precursor of the CDC, withheld a therapy for life-threatening syphilis over four decades from 400 Black men in the infamous Tuskegee study. And it doesn’t help that vaccine skepticism grew during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 on.

In South Carolina, the problem has contributed to a decline in vaccination rates that experts like to see at 95% for diseases like measles to boost protection and minimize transmission. For the first time in years, students with required immunizations in the four regions of South Carolina — the Lowcountry, the Midlands, the Pee Dee and the Upstate — are all below that threshold.

Warning bells have been ringing for years. In 2020, a University of South Carolina freshman wrote an essay for The State calling for state officials to set stricter immunization requirements for college students. In 2022, state medical professionals called a decline in fully vaccinated students “very concerning.” Last year, South Carolina and Louisiana had the highest flu transmission of any state at one point. This month, experts are again urging South Carolinians to get flu vaccinations because the flu poses a risk that can lead to hospitalization and in extreme cases death, especially for older residents.

The state recommends that everyone older than 6 months get a flu shot annually, but South Carolinians don’t always listen. Last flu season, fewer than 1 in 4 people got flu shots: 55% of adults 65 and older, only 17% of people aged 19 to 64, and just 21% of youth 18 and younger. Nationally, flu vaccinations have fallen below 50% and are trending downward in recent years.

Against this backdrop, President-elect Donald Trump’s views on vaccines are dangerous. Trump has been a vaccine skeptic for more than 10 years. In March 2014, he tweeted: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shots of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes — AUTISM. Many such cases!” In September 2014, he tweeted: “I am being proven right about massive vaccinations — the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.”

Discredited research tied the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism in 1998, but an article on it was retracted and its author lost his medical license. Meanwhile, reputable studies repeatedly show no link between vaccines and autism. They show vaccines save lives.

Eight years ago, vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy said he met with Trump at the president-elect’s request “to make sure we have scientific integrity in the vaccine process for efficacy and safety of vaccines.” He said he would chair a vaccine safety commission for Trump.

Luckily, he was never given the position.

Kennedy has long questioned vaccines. “Autism is caused by vaccines,” he flatly told Reason’s John Stossel in August. Stossel pushed back, referencing studies like one of every child born in Denmark over a decade that found the MMR vaccine “does not increase the risk for autism.”

But now Trump, again as president-elect, has nominated Kennedy to be his secretary of health and human services. On Sunday, Trump told NBC’s Kristin Welker he “was open to anything,” including having Kennedy look into the issue of vaccines and autism.

“I mean, something is going on,” Trump said. “I don’t know if it’s vaccines. Maybe it’s chlorine in the water, right? You know, people are looking at a lot of different things.”

The research into the WHO immunization program found that vaccinations — and, therefore, herd immunity — against diseases like diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis and smallpox averted 154 million deaths, mostly children younger than age 5.

More than 100 million were younger than 1.

The researchers calculated that every averted death led to 66 years of full health on average. That translates to 10.2 billion years of health on a planet that for all its faults and factions has enjoyed massive gains in almost every aspect of society, from ways of life to standards of living.

Yet their upbeat report ended with a warning that our ways and our standards are at risk. “We are at an historic moment in infectious disease control,” it said. “Continuous engagement of communities in vaccine uptake is crucial since hard won gains can so easily be lost. The next 50 years hold great promise, but need collective and sustained determination to deliver.”

If vaccine skepticism is more prevalent in America, from the president and cabinet members of the United States down, medical professionals need to combat it with a full-court press. They need more resources to share with skeptics, more reasoned politicians and more public service announcements touting vaccines’ benefits in general. They need people knowledgeable — and proud to tell others — about the lives they have saved over decades and the lives they can save.

It’s hard for each of us, let alone all of us, to look too far into the future when so many of us live paycheck to paycheck or decide weekly whether to prioritize groceries or gas. Yet the strength of any society is how much its people pull together for the common good of our grandchildren.

Vaccines shouldn’t be divisive. They’re about shared responsibility. Reservations can be eased by a doctor or family member or friend with the facts and the right demeanor. It shouldn’t take a mandate to want to get a shot. It should take thinking about how measles was eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 and this year a South Carolinian returned home from a trip with it in September.

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