Two senior Biden administration officials warned Wednesday that there could be dire consequences for the nation’s children if the country were to relearn lessons about the public health benefits of vaccines.
The comments, which came as the country waited to see who will hold key health positions in the new Trump administration and how much influence anti-vaccine figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could exercise, were made by Mandy Cohen, the director of the new government. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at an event in Washington, and Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, at a scientific conference in Boston.
Both warned that the country could pay an unnecessary price if it adopts policies that undermine the uptake of childhood vaccines in particular.
“I think we only briefly remember what it is like to hold a child paralyzed by polio, or to comfort a mother who has lost her child to measles. It wasn’t that many generations ago, but it’s far enough away that people have forgotten it,” Cohen told an audience at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit.
“No one wants to see a child paralyzed, a child dying from something we can prevent.”
Speaking at the 12th International mRNA Health Conference, Marks said he fears American children will die as a result of embracing policies that are not based on science.
“What I learned in parenting when my children were three or four years old… the whole country may need to learn…. The natural consequences of not believing the science or the potential benefit of these vaccines could be that we have unnecessary deaths,” said Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. ‘I’m sorry to say that. I hope it doesn’t have to come to that, but it looks like we’re there now.
“I like to respect people’s opinions, but for me this is not a matter of opinion. It’s just black and white. We know what the safety profile of these vaccines is. We know how many lives they saved, and I think we just need to repeat that and let people make their choices,” he said.
Marks’ comments came in response to a question about Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo called earlier this year that the country will stop using Covid-19 vaccines made using mRNA technology. It has been reported that Kennedy has recommended Ladapo — who often espouses positions contrary to established public health policy — to serve as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which would give him authority over the FDA and the CDC.
Cohen is a political appointee; she will not be CDC director in the new administration. Marks is not a political appointee. He led CBER during the first Trump administration. Still, in his response, Marks alluded to the fact that his future could be uncertain.
“I probably can’t say much more because I’d like to keep my job – at least until I get home,” he joked.
Cohen’s comments were in response to a question about a comment Kennedy made in March on the social media platform .”
Without directly addressing Kennedy’s claims, the CDC director described vaccines as society’s bulwark against diseases that are no longer common because of high vaccination rates.
“I don’t want us to go backwards and remind ourselves that vaccines work,” she said. “They protect our children. They are our best defense against these terrible diseases that fortunately we have not seen yet, but are starting to see around the world as vaccine rates are lower post-pandemic.”
When asked about the spirits at the CDC these days, Cohen acknowledged that there is a sense of unease, saying, “When public health works, it is invisible. We like to be out of the news and we are kind of in the news.”
She admitted she was concerned about talk in some Republican circles about restructuring the CDC in a way that would sharply scale back responsibilities and shift the CDC’s focus toward infectious diseases.
“I worry when I see proposed budgets that eliminate our ability to work on overdoses and on suicide,” Cohen said. “What do you think is killing people under 50? The number one reason for this is unintentional injury… which is a combination of suicide, overdoses, car accidents and for children, drowning is the number one thing that kills our children.”
Cohen said the CDC has been working hard to learn from mistakes in the Covid-19 response and strengthen its ability to respond to the next emergency, whatever it may be. “We need an entity like the CDC as well as our larger public health ecosystem to protect people’s health every day,” she emphasized. “And I think we need that not just for the security of health care, but frankly, we’ve all learned, for the economic security of our country. Our economic security could be turned upside down by a small virus.”