Dem
47
GOP
53
When Secretary of HHS Robert Kennedy Jr. talked to the Senate during his confirmation hearing, he assured Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, that he was not anti-vaccination. Kennedy lied. Cassidy was either too dumb to realize that or smart enough, but afraid of what Donald Trump would do to him if he cast the deciding vote to kill the nomination. Now Cassidy is seeing the consequences of his vote.
Kennedy is rapidly moving toward having the federal government no longer recommend a list of many childhood vaccinations. He wants to emulate Denmark, which doesn't mandate all vaccinations but makes many of them voluntary. That seems to work in Denmark.
However, there are key differences between the health care systems in the U.S. and Denmark that Kennedy failed to address. The basic difference is that Denmark has a universal, free health care system that is easily accessible to every Dane. Some of the vaccinations that are currently mandatory in the U.S. are not in Denmark, because if a child gets one of the diseases prevented in the U.S. the child can always get to a hospital in a minimum amount of time and get an effective treatment for free. Except for people on isolated islands, no one in Denmark ever has to drive for many hours to get to a decent hospital, as is true in rural areas of the U.S. (and which is getting worse as Donald Trump's policies are forcing rural hospitals to close). And care in Denmark is always free, which is certainly not true in the U.S. As a consequence, the U.S. has chosen a system of prevention whereas Denmark has chosen a system of "let a few kids get sick and then get them quickly to a hospital for excellent and free treatment." If Kennedy wants to adopt that system, he also needs to arrange for everyone in the country to be fairly close to excellent and free treatment for kids who get a disease that could have been prevented in the first place.
For some diseases, like hepatitis B, every pregnant woman in Denmark is screened for the disease. For those that have it, the baby gets a vaccination. That works because the system is airtight. Every pregnant woman is screened. That is certainly not the case in the U.S. for many reasons, not the least of which is that some women get no prenatal care at all in the U.S.
In short, there are many differences between the U.S. system and the Danish one. Adopting the entire Danish system would probably work well, but that is impossible in the U.S. for political, geographic, financial, cultural, and other reasons. Cherry-picking just one aspect of it and leaving everything else the way it was is a recipe for repeated epidemics and many childhood deaths. If Kennedy forges ahead, there will be a lot of stove touching and maybe some changes in the future.
It is also noteworthy that Kennedy has cherry-picked Denmark as his model. It has the fewest required vaccinations of any European country. Why didn't he try to emulate France, which requires vaccinations for 11 different diseases, or Italy which requires 10? Or Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Poland, which require 9 vaccinations? What makes Denmark a better model than France, a much bigger country than Denmark, other than it fits his crazy theories better?
If federal vaccination requirements disappear, it is possible that blue states will require vaccinations and red ones will not. Then we will read about polio and hepatitis and meningococcal disease epidemics in Texas but not in California. The parents of children who die in Texas might just complain out loud and ask why this is happening in their state but not in blue states. Who knows? (V)