Public Health Experts Groan as RFK Jr. Pitches Vaccines as 'Personal Choice'

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Posted on 11/18/2024 5:22:08 PM PST by DoodleBob

…Kennedy has said he is not against all vaccines…He has said he would not ban vaccines if confirmed, previously telling MSNBC that "if vaccines are working for somebody, I'm not going to take them away."

"People ought to have choice and ought to be informed by the best information, so I'm going to make sure that scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them," Kennedy said.

The problem with that line of thinking, according to public health officials who spoke to Newsweek, is that it does not take into account that for vaccines to be effective at scale, a significant portion of a population has to be immunized in order for that population to develop "herd immunity" from a disease.

Herd immunity is also what keeps those who cannot be vaccinated, such as people with certain medical conditions, safe from infection. When many people choose not to vaccinate against a certain virus or disease, this communal protection weakens, increasing the risk of outbreaks.

…

States' abilities to handle vaccines in their own way will be one way public health officials may be able to curb a rise in vaccine misinformation, Dr. Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of the Global Health & HIV Policy Program at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Newsweek.

"States determine and can keep school requirements, can educate the public and encourage vaccination. But of course if the national discourse were promoting a choice message which translated into more hesitancy this would be hard to fully counter," she said.

Kates said that states moving away from these requirements could "seriously affect population health," emphasizing that there is a "balance between choice and population health, based on science and evidence."

(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...

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1 posted on 11/18/2024 5:22:08 PM PST by DoodleBob

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