The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccination group, is considering changes that could prompt vaccine manufacturers to stop selling shots in America, according to ProPublica. Stanford epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo built a model simulating how polio, measles, rubella, and diphtheria could spread if vaccination rates dropped or vaccines became entirely unavailable, running 2,000 simulations for each disease over a 25-year period. The researchers' modeling predicts that without vaccine access, measles could kill approximately 290,000 people, polio could paralyze 23,000, rubella could result in 41,000 babies born with congenital syndrome, and diphtheria could cause an average of 138,000 deaths—with worst-case scenarios far more severe. Kennedy has been transforming the Department of Health and Human Services from an agency that championed vaccines into one that questions their safety domestically and globally. The HHS dismissed the findings in a statement but did not address the modeling directly.