Public Trust Remains Central to Vaccine Success

“As medicine and science are under attack, our community will sustain itself,” Demetre Daskalakis, MD, MPH, chiefe medical officer, Callen-Lorde, said to the crowd gathered for the keynote session on the first full day of the American Thoracic Society 2026 International Conference. Daskalakis paid homage to the history of vaccines, urging his fellow experts to keep educating their patients about the importance of continuing to get their developmental and yearly vaccines, even in the face of immense change in the US approach to vaccines in the past year.

Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, began his presentation by focusing on how the US has approached infectious diseases in the past, especially when it came to the vaccines that could potentially address the rapid spread of these diseases.

“This vision of a vaccine moonshot, where we can and could and should prevent preventable diseases using vaccines,” he explained.

The US vaccination programs that were most successful were those that relied on 3 particular pillars: scientific innovation, political will, and community support.

Diseases like polio and smallpox were targeted first among the vaccine programs particularly because of how much public perception was shaped by the epidemics of polio. The polio vaccine in itself was able to help with the belief that these diseases could be prevented. A similar breakthrough was found in measles, which was viewed as a common form of disease despite the mortality and severe complications associated with the condition. In the 1960s, live and inactivated measles vaccines were approved in the US, and in 1971, the combination vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella was introduced.

“Then we had political will through the Johnson administration, the Carter administration, many things happened to increase vaccine coverage to almost 96%, over the level of community immunity or herd immunity that you need to control measles as an outbreak-prone disease,” said Daskalakis.

However, he noted, budget cuts in the 1980s led to a resurgence of measles between 1989 and 1991, necessitating the Vaccines for Children program, which helped to eliminate measles in the US.

“When we hear that equity interventions don’t work, I refer you to…the impact of Vaccines for Children over the last 30 years,” said Daskalakis. “508 million illnesses were prevented because of the Vaccines for Children program and that vaccine schedule. It avoided 1.1 million deaths in kids…and it saved $2.7 trillion from societal costs.”

The measles vaccine is a perfect example of the vaccine life cycle, which begins with basic research and ends with postapproval monitoring and research. RSV is another area where this can apply, as the first year of major prevention products was able to reduce the hospitalizations in infants aged 0 to 7 months between 28% and 43% after going through scientific review, according to Daskalakis.

After the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, as HHS secretary, a shift happened in the CDC. “There was concern, but there was no fear, because career scientists and career public servants always know how to deal with this,” said Daskalakis. “You’re kind of like an antigen-presenting cell, where you’re just taking in all the antigen and processing it so that you can re-present it to everyone and then come up with an immune response.”

According to Daskalakis, however, RFK did not converse with the CDC on these new prevention options, leading to changes in vaccine schedules¹ and an overhaul of the panelists for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.² Although some of these policy changes have been stayed temporarily, the damage, he said, has already been done when it comes to maintaining trust from the American public. Future communicators need to be able to bridge the gap again.

“We should build bridges but not accidentally build dams. We need to make sure that we are able to communicate in a way that makes sense, but we need to be careful that, as we build those bridges, we don’t accidentally block the flow of truth, science, and justice,” he said.

Daskalakis concluded by urging experts to raise their voices when it comes to promoting vaccines and the safety in taking them to prevent diseases. “Science, the work that you do, is the vaccine against mis- and disinformation,” he said.

References

1. Grossi G. CDC reduces US childhood immunization schedule from 17 to 11 diseases. AJMC^®. January 5, 2026. Accessed May 17, 2026. https://www.ajmc.com/view/cdc-reduces-us-childhood-immunization-schedule-from-17-to-11-diseases
2. Bonavitacola J. Vaccine skeptics among CDC vaccine panel replacements named by RFK Jr. AJMC. June 12, 2025. Accessed May 17, 2026. https://www.ajmc.com/view/vaccine-skeptics-among-cdc-vaccine-panel-replacements-named-by-rfk-jr