Vaccine mandates have been all over the news recently. Florida plans to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren, an initiative that is either a victory for personal choice or a setback for community health, depending on your perspective.
But on the frontlines of health care, in physician offices, hospitals and clinics, we have a simple request: Let’s focus on the facts and the science when it comes to vaccines.
Immunization is one of the greatest achievements in human history. Four million lives a year are saved globally through childhood vaccinations. In my lifetime, we have seen the eradication of many debilitating and fatal diseases like polio that paralyzed about 15,000 children across the nation each year as recently as the 1950s.
We eradicated measles in the U.S. in 2000. Before the vaccine, there were 6,000 measles-related deaths each year in the U.S. And for many years, the only cases we saw were imported from somewhere else in the world. But now, we’re in the midst of the biggest outbreak in decades. Virtually all of the cases occurred in non-vaccinated children.
We are also seeing cases of whooping cough exploding in the nation. Since June, there have been more than 1,000 reported cases, compared to only a few hundred at the same time last year, according to the CDC. It’s so frustrating to think that all of this is preventable.
We must also be mindful that hundreds of major medical and public health organizations worldwide support vaccination through rigorous scientific review as a safe and effective way to prevent infectious diseases. Here are just a few of them: the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Nurses Association.
The bottom line is that we must always follow the science – as a health care organization, as an industry and as a nation.
I will never forget the harrowing days of the Covid-19 pandemic when we did not have a vaccine. In the first six weeks, we went from zero to 2,000 hospitalized patients, the vast majority of whom did not survive, a scenario that played out across the nation.
We retrofitted every inch of unused space, including converting a hospital cafeteria into a 73-bed COVID unit in just days. Our teams scoured the globe for personal protective equipment as we burned through gear. Our ICU nurses held up iPads so families could say goodbye to loved ones. We lost 1.2 million Americans in the pandemic and nearly two dozen of our own teams.
Consider the stunning achievement of Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine that was produced in record time by President Trump’s first administration. We transformed a defunct racetrack in northern New Jersey into a vaccination mega site in a few weeks, partnering with the state of New Jersey, the New Jersey State Police and the National Guard, ultimately administering 4,000 shots a day. I still consider it one of our finest moments as a health network.
It’s encouraging to know that the vast majority of Americans believe in vaccines, even though the numbers have dipped in recent years. Nearly 80 percent of people said parents should be required to have children vaccinated against preventable diseases like measles, mumps and rubella to attend school, according to a poll released in June by the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
As parents, our deepest instinct is to protect our children. As a health care leader, father and grandfather, I believe that the best way to honor that instinct is to use the proven tools that science has given us. By vaccinating, we are not just giving our child a shot. We are giving them a future free from the shadow of diseases that can kill them or radically alter their lives. We are protecting the most vulnerable among us. We are honoring the generations before us who dreamed of this protection, and we are safeguarding those to come.
Robert C. Garrett is CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health, New Jersey’s largest health network with 18 hospitals, more than 500 patient locations and the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine.
