Reality Check: Vaccines Have Saved Millions of Lives

Vaccines work by training your immune system to recognize and fight harmful viruses or bacteria without making you sick. They do this by introducing a harmless part or a weakened version of the germ so your body can learn what it looks like. Once your immune system has seen that version of the germ, it creates special cells to remember the invader. Then, if you’re exposed to the real germ, your immune system can quickly respond and destroy it before you get seriously ill.

• Until the early 1950s, parents lived in terror of their children contracting polio, which in 1952 alone killed 3,000 children and paralyzed far more. Because of vaccines, the last death from polio in the U.S. was in 1979, and the U.S. was declared polio-free in 1994. But vaccination rates are falling for a number of reasons, especially because of the political assault on vaccines by fascism, and the first polio case in an unvaccinated person in the U.S. in 30 years happened in 2022.
• Until the mid-1960s, about 48,000 people a year were hospitalized with measles. After widespread vaccinations, only an average of 33 people per year were hospitalized with measles between 2001 and 2022. Now, because of falling vaccination rates, there are new outbreaks of measles, and some people have died.

There is a mountain of scientific evidence of vaccine safety, and vaccines have saved many, many millions of lives around the world for over 100 years. Smallpox alone once killed millions and has now been wiped out because of vaccines. Yet the Trump administration—with Kennedy leading the charge—has launched an assault on vaccines and public health practices. 

The Trump/MAGA/MAHA Assault on Vaccines

Here are just a few of the things they have done:

• On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to formally exit the World Health Organization (WHO), the organization that coordinates international response to global disease outbreaks. This greatly weakens the WHO and means that many, many people all over the world and within the U.S. will be hard-pressed to get care, especially in cases of global outbreaks like COVID. 

• In May, Kennedy announced that the government will no longer recommend COVID vaccinations for healthy children and pregnant women. Kennedy said, "We're now one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to make America healthy again." The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists argued that this policy will do great harm, and said, "It is very clear that COVID infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic.”

• In June, Kennedy halted U.S. contributions to Gavi, a program that provides vaccine access in low- and middle-income countries. Since 2000 Gavi has vaccinated more than one billion children and prevented an estimated 17 million deaths.

• Canceled a large grant of $600 million to develop a vaccine for bird flu. This means that the U.S. will be unprepared if the virus becomes an epidemic among humans.

These and other policies of Trump fascism, if the regime is able to carry them out, will cause hundreds of thousands of deaths here and around the world, or perhaps many more if there is a major epidemic. These fascist policies will introduce uncertainty and foster ignorance about questions that have been long settled scientifically. This will lead more and more people to not get vaccinations. The lack of vaccinations will then open a pathway for infectious diseases to spread, including to children and others who can’t get vaccinated because of medical conditions. 

This is what happened with measles—in some isolated communities, vaccination rates fell and the germ spread quickly, allowing localized measles epidemics, including deaths of children. Kennedy blamed the parents by lying that the children were malnourished (they weren’t) and claimed that’s why they got measles, which was more anti-science bullshit.

On top of it, Trump fascism is also weakening and tearing down the institutions that scientists and others have developed to make new vaccines and scientifically evaluate vaccines.

Even in the best of times, health care under capitalism is shackled by the profit motive and works within and reinforces the extreme inequalities unjustly enforced by the system. But there have been advances in medical science and public health and advances in life expectancy under capitalism. A doctor wrote in the New York Times: “Nowadays, all around the world, an overwhelming majority of children live to adulthood. For much of history, almost half did not.” Vaccines are one of the main reasons for this, even as the profound inequalities of capitalism-imperialism still mean that, as revolutionary leader Bob Avakian sharply points out, there are literally millions of needless deaths of children every year. But Trump/MAGA fascism is on a rampage to damage and even destroy what is positive and scientific in medicine and public health and to take things to a hellish place.

Kennedy Purges Actual Scientists and Brings in a Panel of Quacks, Nutjobs, and Charlatans

On June 9, Kennedy abruptly fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The ACIP is supposed to be the main expert panel advising the U.S. government on vaccine approval and use. The fired members were experienced and tested in applying scientific standards to vaccines. 

Kennedy replaced these scientists with eight people (one quickly resigned). At least four of them deny and undermine the firmly established scientific fact that vaccines have played a key role in combating disease and saving millions of lives. During the height of the COVID pandemic, one of these quacks—Robert Malone—promoted the use of untested treatments and attacked the COVID vaccine as causing “a form of” AIDS, which was a ludicrous and literally murderous lie. Another new member of ACIP picked by Kennedy fought against the use of masks and social distancing and argued that COVID should be allowed to spread—which would have been a disaster. Another led an anti-vaccine group aligned with Kennedy. 

Kennedy’s new ACIP committee met last week for the first time and, among other things, passed a recommendation to ban use of the preservative thimerosal in flu vaccines based on unscientific conspiracy theories that claim thimerosal causes autism. We will cover the bogus bullshit blaming autism on vaccines in a future article in this series. But for now, it should be noted that the supposed “link” between thimerosal and autism has been disproved in dozens of scientific studies over a number of years. At the ACIP meeting, an anti-vaccine activist was allowed to give a presentation before the vote, and the actual CDC scientists who had studied thimerosal were not. This was a vote consciously based on anti-scientific garbage.

ACIP also announced a review of the entire childhood vaccine schedule. One doctor wrote: “America risks unraveling the infrastructure that keeps children vaccinated and without polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, bacterial meningitis and all the other horrors.” There is also an international dimension: the ACIP’s recommendations have been used as an international standard. The transformation of the ACIP from a scientific body to one that promotes anti-science will have international reverberations, leading to an even higher rate of needless disease spreading internationally.

There is important resistance to this in scientific circles. The American Academy of Pediatrics boycotted the ACIP meeting in protest, as did other groups. Some scientific bodies announced that they would set up their own groups, separate from the government, to apply science to evaluating and recommending vaccine use. 

Dr. Fiona Havers, a top vaccine expert at the CDC, resigned after the purge of ACIP. In an interview with the New York Times she said, “If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.” 

All this poses big questions: WHY is the Trump regime doing this? What connection does it have to the kinds of thinking that fascism needs to promote among people? Why is it important to struggle for science in opposition to this madness—and how to do that? And what is the relation to going at this madness and the overall movement to make it impossible for this regime to continue to rule? We will cover these critical questions in part 2.