02/14/2025
From a dear friend and college classmate, Steve Cook MD, and with his permission. I couldn’t have said it better! Thank you Steve!! BAM
With the confirmation of RFK Jr, I want to say clearly and unequivocally:
As a doctor, I believe vaccines are one of the greatest things human beings have ever conceived. In the 1850s, no one believed that invisible organisms were the cause if disease. Pasteur disproved this.
To move from not knowing these pathogens even exist, to being able to identify them, to being to train the body to recognize and combat them is nearly impossible to believe. @
In the 1850s life expectancy at birth in England was only 42, in large part because 25 percent of children did not live past age 5. Our maximum age has not significantly changed over time; our average life expectancy has gone up because we do not die young as often.
From Pasteur proving germ theory, in 1861, it was 67 years to the discovery of penicillin in 1928. That is the time it took to learn how to grow bacteria in culure and then find something which could kill the bacteria without harming the person. That slow start led to ever more rapid discoveries which save countless lives.
In 1954 Jonas Salk developed the first killed virus vaccine—nearly a hundred years after Pasteur. Around the same time, DNA was shown to be the basis of genetics, leading to the ability to sequence genomes of pathogens and understand how they cause disease.
That is to say, the dawn of the modern vaccine era nearly coincides with the birth of RFK Jr in January 1954. Is it really surprising that the number of available vaccines has exploded since that beginning? It took less time to go from the Wright Brothers to the moon landing than it did from the polio vaccine to the Covid vaccine.
I cannot adequately express how distressing it is for me to see individual patient’s health and public health take these steps backwards. I can only declare myself to be an unabashed supporter of vaccines personally, professionally and scientifically.
