On the campaign trail, Donald Trump again vowed to shut down the Education Department and endorsed a Louisiana law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. He has also pledged to cut funding to schools with vaccine requirements. Laura Barrón-López discussed that with Dr. Paul Offitt, a pediatrician and a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Geoff Bennett: On the campaign trail this weekend, Donald Trump again vowed to shut down the Education Department if he's reelected. He also endorsed a recent Louisiana law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. But those are just two of the multiple changes to public education that Mr. Trump is proposing, including when it comes to vaccinations. Laura Barron-Lopez has more — Laura.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Thanks, Geoff. Former President Trump has increasingly employed anti-vaccine rhetoric at his rallies, and this weekend was no different. Here he is at an event organized by the conservative Christian Faith and Freedom Coalition Saturday. Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: And on day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, and I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate. (Cheering and applause)
Laura Barron-Lopez: Medical experts say that implications for schools and for public health across the country could be enormous. For more, we're joined by Dr. Paul Offit. He's a pediatrician and a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Offit, thank you so much for joining the "NewsHour." I want to start. First, Donald Trump's campaign claimed that this was about COVID mandates. Later on, they became a bit vague. They refused to specify to the press, and they pointed to the former president's comments. Trump has made this proposal a regular part of his campaign stump speech, saying any school with a vaccine mandate will not get federal funding. What is the public health impact of rhetoric that attacks childhood vaccinations in this way? Dr. Paul Offit, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: Well, we eliminated measles in this country by the year 2000. The reason was school vaccine mandates and the enforcement of school vaccine mandates. Prior to that, certainly prior to a vaccine, measles would cause 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths a year. But we eliminated measles because of that. Now what's happened, and I think in large part because of the COVID vaccine mandates, there's been enormous pushback against school vaccine mandates, so much so that we have had more than 300 cases of measles in the last few years. And I think, if we continue to do this, continue to try and push back on school vaccine mandates, as former President Trump is doing, you're going to get to the point where we will see 1,000 or 2000 cases of measles a year, at which point children will start once again to die from measles.
Laura Barron-Lopez: If Trump is elected, some of his allies and some of the former officials that served in his administration are advising him to split the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into two agencies. But what could Trump actually do that impacts whether or not children get vaccines, and what tools would he have to implement an anti-vaccine agenda?
Dr. Paul Offit: There's a program which was launched in 1994 called the Vaccine for Children's Program, which pays for all vaccines for children who are either uninsured or underinsured, which can be as many as 50 to 55 percent of children in this country. It's something that would require a congressional act to overturn, so I can't imagine that ever happening. But I think what former President Trump does is, by sort of damning vaccines, by claiming that vaccines are in any way unsafe or harmful, he has a platform, and he misuses that platform, and he scares people unnecessarily, thus putting their children in harm's way.
Laura Barron-Lopez: In terms of a second Trump administration, what about the potential people that he appoints to public health office?
Dr. Paul Offit: Of course. I mean, if you look at the CDC or the FDA, you have an enormous amount of institutional memory. These are our long-term advisers, federal advisers, both in the case of the FDA and the CDC, that have served us well. I worry that those people could lose their jobs and just be replaced by people who simply express their loyalty to Trump, independent of their degree of expertise or experience.
Laura Barron-Lopez: How damaging could it be if an anti-vaxxer is ultimately put in a position of power like that?
Dr. Paul Offit: It would be devastating. I mean, these are agencies that have served us well. I mean, the FDA and the CDC have served us well. Look at how we virtually eliminated many of these diseases because of that. And we're starting to step back. It's very hard to watch.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Vaccine mandates are left up to the states. And, historically, state public school mandates have been the biggest driver of early childhood vaccination. How important are vaccines for diseases like polio and measles? And what are the implications if kids don't get these shots?
Dr. Paul Offit: Before vaccines, diphtheria was the most common killer of teenagers. Before vaccines, pertussis, or whooping cough, killed 8,000 people, mostly children, every year. Polio before vaccines would cause 30,000 people, mostly children, to be paralyzed every year and kill as many as 1,500. Rubella, or German measles, when it infected pregnant women, would cause 20,000 cases of birth defects every year. Is that what we want? Do we want to go back to that time, before vaccines saved our lives and prevented all this suffering and hospitalization and death?
Laura Barron-Lopez: Bottom line, you're concerned that even just the rhetoric could lead to an uptick in deaths amongst children when it comes to measles, correct?
Dr. Paul Offit: Right. I think what happened over the last few years, with the masking mandates and with the vaccine mandates is, we leaned into this libertarian left hook. And now for the last few years, every year, there's been hundreds of pieces of legislation pushing back on mandates. And so we have been pushing and pushing and pushing, to the point that now we're starting to see measles again. And, in 2022, there was a case of polio in Rockland County, New York, in an area where the immunization rates were only 30 percent. This is a man who never left this country. So these are not diseases that you want to see come back.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Given your perspective, Doctor, what do you think is driving this large breakdown of the public's trust in public health officials and health agencies like the CDC and the National Institutes of Health?
Dr. Paul Offit: Right. I think there's a general backlash against all federal agencies, not just the FDA and CDC, but the Department of Justice, the FBI. And so I think there's just a general distrust. And also I think, in terms of the — this being largely a sort of conservative phenomenon, is this notion of individual freedoms, personal freedoms. And so, in this case, it's the freedom to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.