03/03/2026
Whilst reading this link I could clearly remember the first little patient I lost due to Haemophilus meningitis. It was January 1988 when I worked as a house doctor (now called an intern, “Zuma-year”. It was in the pre-Heamophilus vaccine era. It was the first of many such patients who I saw dying despite our best efforts. And those who survived often had terrible sequelae. (One of whom was my own little 15 month old niece who developed brain absecces and survived, but was left 100% deaf.)
I urge my patients parents to consider the consequences of the disease rather than the small likelihood of developing a minor complications that is vaccine-related.
Herd immunity is shrinking due to the lack of vaccination - and that, sadly, by choice.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HckxCbhMB/
Stanley Plotkin is 93 years old. During his pediatrics internship in 1957, he watched a gravely ill 3-year-old die of Haemophilus influenzae type b — the child's epiglottis swelled until he couldn't breathe. Plotkin then spent much of his career helping build the vaccine era that made tragedies like that rare.
It's easy to forget how recent a lot of this is. Routine infant Hib vaccination didn't begin until 1990. Before that, the U.S. saw roughly 20,000 cases of invasive Hib disease in children every year — thousands of them meningitis, with a meaningful fraction of kids who didn't survive. And rubella isn't ancient history either. During the 1964–65 epidemic alone, an estimated 20,000 babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome, disabilities that vaccines later made vanishingly rare.
What's gutting about this piece isn't just the policy landscape right now, though that's bad enough. It's watching someone who has seen both sides of this (the before and the after) process what's happening.
He knows EXACTLY what the erosion of vaccine confidence leads to, because he lived through a world where these diseases were just... normal. Where parents carried the grief of children lost to things we now prevent with a series of well-child visits.
We're not in that world anymore. But we could get closer to it than most people alive today can imagine. And the people sounding the loudest alarms are often the ones who remember...
https://www.statnews.com/2026/03/02/stanley-plotkin-profile-godfather-of-vaccines-worried/,
