This week’s FDA Matters column, entitled “The Midterms Are Coming. Vaccines May Play a Role” is coauthored with Dr. Michael Miller and can be found here. It is a “call to action” to ensure that candidates understand that opposition to vaccines is harmful to their community.
In the winter months ahead, we expect ongoing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. That is likely to stimulate public and media attention to the preventable morbidity and mortality associated with measles, whooping cough, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and other contagious illnesses. Some communities will be hard-hit economically because of worker absences due to personal and family illness.
Ordinarily, public health concerns don’t have the immediacy or salience to affect elections. However, the state-to-state spread of this year’s record measles outbreaks offer irrefutable evidence that anti-vaccine policies are not just a geographically isolated concern or a mistake with far-off consequences.
We believe vaccine policies will have concrete health and economic consequences in the short term, sufficient to make them a potential election issue in the 2026 midterms. To understand why, please read our column at here.
Other recent FDA Matters columns can be found at: https://www.fdamatters.com.
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