Katty Kay: What are you worried about in terms of tangible health outcomes from this climate of mistrust? What worries you?
Leana Wen: What happens to vaccine-preventable diseases tops that list, because we’re going to see those impacts really quickly. We are already seeing the single largest measles outbreak in the US in the last 30 years. Measles has been eliminated since 2000, but the US could lose its measles elimination status. We are seeing rising cases of things like whooping cough. If vaccination rates for other diseases fall, we could also see a return of rubella and chickenpox and even polio – things that would really have been unthinkable just several years ago.
But if you have such distrust over vaccines, that also means that there’s a distrust of authority, of science, of the scientific method, of what counts as science and how one does research. And that could have negative impacts on many other aspects of health, too.
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