A titan of vaccine development sees his field's achievements slip away

[lostincalifornia]

Stanley Plotkin, the ‘godfather of vaccines,’ knows what comes next

..... the world is changing, and public health gains are being lost. In a pair of recent interviews with STAT, Plotkin expressed dismay at seeing the achievements of his career and his field slip away. He knows what lies ahead: Lots of kids will contract illnesses that could be prevented, and some of them will die.
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But the health gains achieved through vaccination over the past seven decades are in peril. Vaccination rates have been eroding, a trend that has picked up steam in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, to the nation’s top health position. Kennedy and some of the people he’s placed in key roles across HHS and its agencies have made sweeping alterations to vaccination policy, undermining vaccine confidence in the process.

Plotkin knew what would happen if Kennedy became health secretary. “Oh, I expected it,” he said of the myriad changes that Kennedy has overseen. “I did everything I could when Kennedy was up for confirmation, to convince people like Senator [Bill] Cassidy to vote against him — and failed.”

Beyond Covid and Kennedy, he attributes the declining confidence in vaccines to memory — more precisely, the fact that today’s younger generations have no recall of what used to be — as well as the dissemination of anti-vaccine propaganda on social media and the shortcomings of science education in schools.

https://www.statnews.com/2026/03/02/stanley-plotkin-profile-godfather-of-vaccines-worried/

[mopinko]

1. darwin lives.