Dr. Adam Ratner
speaker
62 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. Adam Ratner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And they knew that even though most kids do fine with measles and are better after about a week, there are rare cases where children have to go to the hospital, they have pneumonia, and occasionally, unfortunately, they die.
So measles is the most contagious disease that we know of. It is more contagious than flu. It is more contagious than polio. It's more contagious than Ebola. It's more contagious than COVID. So in a susceptible population, measles can infect 90% of the population immediately. Easily.
If someone with measles walks into a room of people who have not been vaccinated and haven't had measles before, 90% of those people will get infected with measles from that one person. And that is much more infectious than most things that we generally deal with. And so it's a...
And so measles is an indicator for whether there is vaccination going on, whether people are protected because it is so very infectious. The thing about measles is that most kids with measles do fine, but there are these rare measles. There are kids who get pneumonia. There are kids who die of measles. One or two in a thousand children who get measles will die.
One or two in a thousand children who get measles will have encephalitis, which is swelling of the brain, and that can lead to deafness or seizures or other bad outcomes. If you're one family, you may not ever have known someone who had one of those bad outcomes. And so usually when kids get sick, they feel sick for a week and then they get better. And so that was most people's experience with it.
If you listen to RFK talk about his experience with the measles, what he says is that, oh, it was my 10 siblings and I all had measles at the same time. It was a week off from school and we got to watch television and eat soup.
So that's fine, but he also comes from the most privileged background imaginable, and that is not everyone's experience of measles.
I have many concerns about that. My greatest concern is that he will harm or disable the vaccine infrastructure, that he will make vaccines unavailable to people who want to get them, and that he will make people who are unsure of whether they should vaccinate their children feel like they should not vaccinate their children. I think he has spent...
a lot of his adult life fighting against vaccines, and I see no reason that that is going to stop.
I think about how hard it has been to get to the point that we're at right now. And I think the most important message that I want to come across from my book is that we live in a time when children, for the most part, grow up happy and healthy, and where infectious diseases that used to kill large numbers of children have been brought under control through vaccines.
And that has been through a tremendous amount of work, and some of that has been scientific work, but some of that has also been policy work in building an infrastructure that can withstand – fluctuations in funding and can provide support for getting vaccines to children whose families may not be able to afford them and all sorts of other things that have been built over time.
The successes that we have And the point that we are at in children's public health is not guaranteed. And I am worried that actions taken in the next year, two years, may have long-lasting effects on the health of children, not just in the United States. I think it'll be in the United States first, but I think worldwide.
As we were talking about with the infrastructure for vaccine delivery, the biomedical research enterprise in the United States is incredible. And there have been advances that have helped All Americans. And we would never have had the COVID-19 vaccines without NIH research. We would never have the chemotherapies that we have or the gene therapies that are emerging to cure diseases.
That is all of those advances are are built on the back of NIH-funded basic research. It is absolutely critical to people's health in both the short and the long term. I think that the executive order capping NIH indirect costs at 15% and making it effective immediately and apply to existing grants is going to be an enormous budgetary strain on universities and other research institutions.
And it has the potential to have people lose their jobs, to drive scientists out of the field, to have universities shut down labs that they can't afford to run because they haven't budgeted for this abrupt change. And I think that the effects of this may be long-lasting.
There were a few things. There was the unmasking of the Tuskegee syphilis study in which government scientists had observed as black men with syphilis had gone through the stages of disease and not provided them with medicine. medication that was available and was known to work.
When that came to light, that generated and still does very reasonably a tremendous amount of mistrust in the government and in scientists. There were other smaller scale incidents that also shook people's trust. There were trials of vaccines and trials of other kinds of medication that were carried out in institutions for children, and those were not carried out
with the ethical standards that we would expect today and in some cases with no informed consent at all. And some of these trials were horrific and should never have been allowed to happen. And I think when those came to light, there was a growth of distrust in medicine as a whole. And I think that that hindered people's trust in vaccines at the time as well.
It's not easy. I think that pediatricians still, even today, I think are in a place of trust for most families. I think that very reasonably, most families think that those of us who have devoted our lives, our careers to taking care of kids and trying to keep them safe, realize that we bring something valuable to the conversation. And so I think it's really important to use that trust wisely.
And I think the other thing that sometimes gets lost is that – and this is a conversation I have with my colleagues a lot – Parents who are hesitant about vaccines and parents who are frankly anti-vaccine, these are people who love their kids. These are not people who want harm to come to their children. It's the opposite. There is nobody who is on team disease.
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