JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
One of the names being floated to head the Department of Health and Human Services under the second Trump administration is Joseph Ladapo. He's the Florida surgeon general. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also been mentioned. Both men are vocal vaccine skeptics, and this makes pediatricians nervous. NPR's Maria Godoy reports.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Vaccine hesitancy has been growing in Florida. The routine childhood vaccination rate for kindergartners is now at 90.6%. That's the lowest in more than a decade, and it's well below the threshold needed for herd immunity against highly contagious diseases like measles. Lisa Gwynn is a pediatrician in Miami-Dade County. She says she spends a lot of her time countering vaccine misinformation.
LISA GWYNN: It's probably 50% of our job now in pediatrics - is explaining to parents the importance of vaccinating their children.
GODOY: Gwynn says earlier this year, she saw the consequences of not getting routine childhood vaccinations firsthand.
GWYNN: We just had a measles outbreak right around the corner to the elementary school that my daughter went to. And there was five kids that contracted measles, and they were not immunized.
GODOY: When a measles outbreak occurs, the CDC advises parents to keep unvaccinated children at home to stop the spread. But Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's advice was quite different. Here's Jeffrey Goldhagen, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida.
JEFFREY GOLDHAGEN: He sent a letter to parents basically saying, if you want to keep your kids home, you can keep your kids home. If you want to send them to school, you can send them to school. It violated every premise of how measles should be addressed.
GODOY: Vaccine hesitancy was growing in Florida long before Ladapo became surgeon general. But Goldhagen says battling the problem has gotten harder.
GOLDHAGEN: It has accelerated during COVID. It accelerated post-COVID and is particularly accelerated because of the anti-vaccine stance by this surgeon general.
GODOY: Ladapo has become a frequent target of critics, who say his stances on vaccines go against established science. Last year the CDC and FDA sent Ladapo a letter reprimanding him for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines and fueling vaccine hesitancy. Pediatricians say anti-vaccine attitudes that grew during the pandemic are now impacting all childhood vaccinations. And it's not just in Florida. Routine childhood vaccination rates have been dropping in the majority of U.S. states. Gwynn worries those rates will drop further if the people in charge of national health policy doubt the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
GWYNN: I'm very concerned, as are all pediatricians across the nation. One of our primary roles as pediatricians is keeping children safe, and the most effective way to keep children safe from preventable communicable diseases is vaccines.
GODOY: If rates continue to drop, many worry that other childhood diseases could come back.
RANA ALISSA: The vaccines we have in the U.S. prevent 21 deadly disease - 21.
GODOY: That's Dr. Rana Alissa. She's the president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. She's careful not to blame any one person for vaccine hesitancy, but as it continues to spread, she's worried that devastating diseases like polio could reemerge.
ALISSA: People think that getting the disease is easier than or is safer than getting the vaccine. I have no idea where this came from.
GODOY: She says many people have lost trust in public health science and the country needs leaders who will help get that trust back. Maria Godoy, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
