A public health expert excoriated a Trump administration official for suggesting a potentially deadly disease should be allowed to rip through the population to see what happens.
Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and newly installed chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, spoke with the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” and seemed to question whether vaccines were still necessary for measles and polio, reported Statnews.
“As you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then,” Milhoan said. “Our sanitation is different, our risk of disease is different, and so those all play into the evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk for a vaccine or not.”
“When … we talk about the risk of, let’s say, measles, many of those risks of not getting measles without having a vaccine was in the 1960s,” he added. “We take care of children much differently now.”
Polio continues to spread in Pakistan and Afghanistan, although it’s been nearly eradicated elsewhere, but measles transmission has hit rates not seen since the early 1990s in parts of the U.S. Milhoan however suggested that better sanitation and less crowding could be more effective than vaccines, and he argued that current outbreaks could show just how much risk those diseases actually pose.
“What we’re going to have is a real-world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles,” he said. “What is the new incidence of hospitalization? What’s the incidence of death?”
That suggestion flabbergasted Harvard professor Joseph Allen, who is director of the university’s healthy buildings program.
“This is an insane quote from the ‘top CDC vaccine expert’ who seems to want to run a measles experiment on our kids,” Allen said.
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