The New Yorker:

It’s clear that we’re on the precipice of a surge in preventable diseases. But how bad will it get?

By Rivka Galchen

Since its inception, in 2000, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which works with local governments to bring vaccines to low-income countries, has helped administer 1.9 billion vaccines and reached a billion children. Global vaccination work has nearly halved the global infant-mortality rate, saved more than a hundred and fifty million lives, prevented innumerable costly hospitalizations and long-term disabilities, and strengthened local health services in many remote places. “I can’t imagine a more successful, cost-effective public-health organization than the Gavi alliance,” Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine researcher at Texas Children’s Hospital, told me. “I mean, you had close to half a million kids dying of measles every year when Gavi was launched, and they got it down to less than fifty thousand deaths. And made similar gains with pertussis—which is whooping cough—diphtheria, tetanus, H. influenzae b meningitis, you name it.”

In the United States, we’re somewhat blinkered about what vaccination means to the other ninety-six per cent of people in the world. On Wednesday, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that the U.S. intends to withhold the amount that the Biden Administration had pledged to Gavi, 1.6 billion dollars. He claimed that Gavi had “ignored the science” about vaccine safety. He had already dismissed all seventeen members of the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, before saying that his hand-picked replacements would review the U.S. childhood-immunization schedule.

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