Dr. Jennifer Reich

What we're seeing right now is there's pulling back from that transparency.

So we're losing access to some of those committees.

We're losing access to the ability to watch the hearings and weigh in on them as citizens and as people who consume these products.

And so that's one step is the more transparency, the more individuals can say, I want to understand this.

I want to understand how a vaccine gets to market.

I want to understand the steps of the research.

I want to understand the clinical trials process to see what's happening.

I want to understand why you think this is recommended.

at six months and not five years and tell me why whooping cough is recommended so young in life, even though it's a lifelong threat.

How do I make sense of that?

And people deserve answers.

They have good questions and there should be more opportunities for a kind of dialogue that I think can be a really powerful tool for bringing people along.

We somehow have developed this thing that the public agencies, that the government, that institutions are separate from us.

And that's unfortunate because in fact, the institutions are ours.

They work for us.

As much as the COVID vaccine became politicized, we lost the opportunity to really highlight that we paid for that science, that individuals, taxpayers contributed.

That should feel like the way it did with the polio vaccine, which was also funded by the public, that this is a public resource that we together created with transparency and

and clarity.

And we've lost the ability to have, I think, that conversation about citizen science, about the way we're all part of these institutions and that they should be accountable.

And instead, I think, as we're seeing right now, there's this moment of shrinking government for the sake of shrinking it rather than making it accountable to the people.