How vaccine hesitancy may be driving a spike in pediatric flu deaths

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• John Yang:

  Good evening. I'm John Yang. There were 12 seasonal flu related deaths of children this week, according to the CDC. That brings the total number of pediatric flu deaths this season to 216. That's the most in 15 years. And the flu season isn't even over yet.

  Experts say one reason for this new record could be the plummeting flu vaccination rate for American children. It went from 64 percent five years ago to 49 percent this season. And this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced plans for new safety testing requirements for vaccines that could delay the availability of new vaccines, including a COVID booster for this fall.

  Virologist Dr. Peter Hotez is at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Hotez, there's a lot I want to talk to you about, but let's start with that new record for pediatric flow deaths this season. What do you make of that?

  Dr. Peter Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine: Well, I think it probably is related to the decline in immunization since most pediatric influenza deaths occur among the unvaccinated, like most of the other viral infections that we've been seeing.

  But remember the context of this. This is on top of fourfold rise in measles outbreaks over the last year, even before what was going on with this current major epidemic, a six fold rise in pertussis cases. So the big picture is going in the wrong direction in terms of children not getting the vaccines that they should be getting.

• John Yang:

  Is this a holdover from the vaccination hesitancy that emerged during the COVID pandemic?

• Peter Hotez:

  It very well might be. There's been some Gallup surveys and others that have shown that spillover effect that the same parts of the country where adults were refusing to get COVID vaccines are now spilling over to childhood immunizations.

  So for instance, in West Texas, which had some of the lowest COVID vaccination rates in the country, guess what? That's where we have our ginormous measles epidemic right now in West Texas and the panhandle. And it's going up into the conservative rural areas of the Great Plains where COVID vaccinations were also low.

  So I think the big picture is there is that spillover effect from anti vaccine activism that accelerated during COVID now into childhood immunizations.

• John Yang:

  You know, I know you've developed vaccines yourself. What do you make of what the Secretary Kennedy said that he wants to see new vaccines tested with placebos? What do you think of that?

• Peter Hotez:

  This has been his playbook the last few weeks. Every few days he comes out with a new statement that misrepresents vaccine safety or effectiveness. For instance, you know, he made it almost sound as if we don't routinely test vaccines against placebo control.

  In fact, just about all of the childhood immunizations historically have been tested against placebo controls, typically in randomized studies. So I don't really understand the basis of the new announcement other than the fact that, you know, when we do a randomized placebo controlled trial for something like a COVID vaccine, we do it at the first time around.

  But as we're updating, because you're making minor adjustments in the composition of the vaccine to reflect new variants, we don't typically repeat the entire placebo randomized control trial because they're incredibly expensive and sometimes they're not doable given the size of what they are and the time it would take.

  So I hope he's not suggesting that we have to do an entirely new randomized placebo controlled trial every time we update a vaccine.

• John Yang:

  Is the effect of this to undermine confidence in vaccines, do you think?

• Peter Hotez:

  Well, this is the bigger picture. Remember, you know what RFK Jr. has been saying every few days? First he said the MMR vaccine was leaky, whatever that means. And when he talks about suggesting people get the MMR vaccine, he always pairs it, or often pairs it with a cocktail of useless interventions for preventing measles. Or he says that the measles hospitalizations are due to quarantine and isolation, which is not true. These kids are really, really sick.

  Now is the time the Department of Health and Human Services needs to be doubling down on telling the American people to vaccinate their kids and highlighting the, and emphasizing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, not tearing it down. So I do think it's starting to have a very damaging effect.

• John Yang:

  Dr. Peter Hotez, thanks as always.

• Peter Hotez:

  Thank you, John.