Cnn
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While Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the choice of President Donald Trump to lead the United States Ministry of Health and Social Services, supported his anti-Vaccin rhetoric during his confirmation audiences of the Senate, he has a long history of Vaccinal skepticism. As is ready for a full vote of the Senate in the coming days, CNN examined the origins and efficiency of prevention for only one of the vaccines that Kennedy has put several times in the past: the polio vaccine.
Kennedy, the son of the former American prosecutor general, senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, wrote several anti-vaccine books, put pressure on the congress to give parents exemptions from the vaccination of their children and has made largely underestimated allegations in the past 20 years that vaccines have been insufficiently tested, in particular by suggesting that polio vaccines increase sensitivity to future polio cases. However, he recently told a crowd of journalists that he was “everything for” the polio vaccine and minimized his anti-vaccine record for senators this week.
Here is what we know about polio as a disease, its vaccines and the likely number of lives saved by inoculation.
In its early stages, polio – known as polio – causes fatigue, headaches, stiffness and members’ pain after exhibition to poliovirus, according to the World Health Organization, or which . One in 200 infection leads to paralysis and approximately 5% to 10% of paralyzed patients die when their respiratory muscles become immobilized. The disease mainly affects children under the age of 5, but any unaccompanied person is sensitive if they are exposed.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, frequent polio epidemics made it one of the most feared diseases in the United States, the largest epidemic killing more than 3,000 people in 1952, according to American public health data.
“As long as polio is still present in the world, the advantages of child protection against paralysis far exceed the risks of this very effective vaccine, especially for the inactivated polio vaccine used in the United States,” said Declared Dr. Jesse L. Goodman, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Georgetown, in an email in CNN last month. Non-vaccinated children are “at risk of potential exposure and the potential of paralytic polio,” he continued.
Here is an overview of the trend of the disease in the past 100 years: approximately:
The first polio vaccine was developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and approved for use in the United States in 1955. It is a vaccine against inactivated polio inactivated which is still used in some country today.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dr. Albert Sabin developed a second, oral vaccine, and it was introduced as part of a vaccine calendar in the United States in 1961. It was so profitable and easy to administer that it quickly became the most common polio vaccine for national programs immunization from around the world. Although it is no longer used in the United States, it is particularly effective for use in developing countries.
Here are the differences between the two most commonly available polio prevention options:
Polio vaccines have helped eradicate the wild form of the disease in many regions of the world, including Americas, Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa, according to WHO. Former Czechoslovakia was the first country to demonstrate that the national eradication of wild poliovirus was possible in 1960, Due to a robust vaccination campaign in which around 93% of children received the oral vaccine. Wild poliovirus is always endemic in certain regions, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Polio vaccines prevented 29 million cases of paralytic polio between 1960 and 2021, compared to a counterfactual world without vaccines, according to researchers’ estimates.
Expanding to examine all vaccines, a historical study of May 2024 conducted by which estimated that 154 million lives had been saved by vaccination programs covering diseases, including smallpox, tuberculosis, measles and polio during of the last 50 years, including 101 million infants.
After a few controversial days before two Senate committees, Kennedy’s appointment could see a full vote on the Senate soil soon. If all the Democrats of the Senate vote against his confirmation as secretary of the HHS, he can afford to lose only three republican votes. The former republican chief the senator Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, is a survivor of the polio who He seemed to warn Kennedy of the Polio issue last year: “The polio vaccine saved millions of lives and held the promise to eradicate terrible disease,” he said in a statement.
“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven remedies are not only uninformed – they are dangerous. Anyone who seeks the consent of the Senate to serve in incoming administration would make it possible to even avoid the appearance of an association with such efforts, “said McConnell.
Em Steck and Winter Hawk of CNN contributed to this report.
