Can you pinpoint the day when your mind became convinced of something? I can think of one. The exact day I became a Vaccine Enthusiast was the morning after a call night during residency. I had stayed at the bedside of a toddler with meningitis due to Hemophilus influenza type B (Hib). I am pretty sure I saved his life multiple times that night. The spinal tap had essentially dripped pus, and it took a lot of effort to keep him from crashing.

By the morning I knew he was going to live. This was in 1986, when the vaccine for Hib could only be given at 18 months (it was ineffective at younger ages), but my patient was just shy of that. That day, I remember the ache I felt at his misery (and hoping his brain wasn’t damaged, though I suspected it was) and intensely wishing a vaccine could have prevented his suffering. And a year later, just such a vaccine was developed, protecting infants.

Since 1985, because of the vaccine, the incidence of Hib has plummeted by 99 percent. It’s a great success story. And that is just in the United States. Worldwide, since 1974, almost three million lives have been saved from this disease.

This is not the only vaccine success story. In fact, it is not the most compelling one. Measles would have claimed more than 93 million lives worldwide without vaccination, which began in 1963.

And so I became a Vaccine Enthusiast in 1986. As a thrifty use of scarce healthcare dollars, vaccines are a bedrock of public health.

What is public health, though? As the name conveys, public health focuses on health, but its emphasis differs from the one-on-one interaction between patient and healthcare practitioner. Instead, it looks to benefit large chunks of populations with interventions such as providing clean water, promoting physical activity or pressing for seatbelt laws. In other words, public health is all about prevention—averting death and avoiding the pain and disability of being unhealthy.

What’s not to love about that? As a physician, I treat disease, but how much better for my patients to not get the disease in the first place!

Getting vaccinated is an individual decision, but there is such value in having an entire population protected from a disease that governments worldwide pour precious resources into supporting vaccines. Dollar for dollar, only clean water outperforms vaccination as a way to keep people healthy.

The United States has been such a blessing to the entire planet in this arena—not only from contributing vaccines (and money to distribute them) to the countries that need them, but also by developing the vaccines in the first place. We should all give God glory for allowing us as a country to serve the world in this way.

The more I know about vaccines, the more I appreciate them and want others to also. In addition to writing about vaccines, I keep up with new vaccines, the recommended schedules for getting them and books telling of their history. Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccinologist, is the author of multiple books I value. I appreciate his weekly newsletter, Beyond the Noise, and I have heard him discuss vaccines on hundreds of podcasts over the years. His is a voice of educated reason.

My appreciation for Dr. Offit grew as I saw him respond to three groups: those who have questions about vaccines, those who are vaccine hesitant and those who are outright hostile to vaccines. He is consistently respectful and calm. He keeps his head and remembers scientific facts even when he is being called names and his character is being called into question. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it.

So when I was offered an opportunity to be a co-interviewer of Dr. Offit, alongside CMDA CEO Dr. Mike Chupp on an episode of CMDA’s Faith in Healthcare: The CMDA Matters Podcast, I jumped at it.

What I hoped most of all was to explore vaccine hesitancy and get his perspective on how best to overcome it. As the co-inventor of the Rotateq vaccine, which is estimated to prevent 165,000 infants worldwide from dying of rotavirus each year (and to keep 70,000 babies out of the hospital in the U.S. yearly), and the current Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Offit is a fellow Vaccine Enthusiast. Early on in the interview he said, “I never imagined there would be such a backlash against vaccines. I think at the heart of it was the COVID pandemic, which unleashed what had been a simmering anti-vaccine sentiment.”

I mentioned how alarmed I was when COVID was new, when no one knew whether the virus was going to wipe out the planet. Those early days, when nobody had immunity, were so lethal. But I held hope—so much hope—for people to finally appreciate the value of a vaccine when we had one, because I knew a vaccine could stop the pandemic without multi-millions more people dying. Somehow that appreciation didn’t happen, at least not fully.

Dr. Offit said he had the exact same thought. “Before COVID, people in the anti-vaccine world would say, ‘Give me a pandemic. None of these things that we are preventing now are all that big of a deal.’ But when the pandemic came along (with seven million killed by the virus worldwide—more than a million in this country), in one year we had a vaccine that dramatically reduced your risk of dying. And very quickly, by July of 2021, 70 percent of the country had been vaccinated. But 30 percent chose not to, which meant (according to the Kaiser Family Foundation) 230,000 Americans basically chose to lose their lives by not getting this vaccine.”

Worldwide, because of COVID-19 vaccines, more than 14 million lives were saved in one year.

The most sober moment of the interview, for me, was when Dr. Offit recounted the time he asked Dr. Maurice Hilleman, not long before he died in 2005, about the growing resistance to vaccines. In numerous ways, Dr. Hilleman is “the father of modern vaccines,” having been involved in the research of nine of the 14 vaccines we currently give to children, saving countless young lives. Even in 2005 there was a fraying of immunization rates—and thus measles had started to come back, though it was declared eliminated from this country in 2000.

Dr. Offit described his question to Dr. Hilleman this way: “Here’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to educate people about this vaccine, to educate them about this disease, so that people don’t have to suffer with it again. Will that work, or do we have to once again have these diseases come back in order for people to realize the importance of the vaccine?”

Dr. Hilleman discussed the question for several minutes, but finally he stopped and turned to Dr. Offit, his face etched with sadness, “Nope, I think the diseases are going to have to come back for people to realize how important these vaccines are.”

This grieves me. Prevention seems so preferable to the misery of an infectious disease. And measles truly is miserable. Without experiencing the diseases first hand, either as patients or a healthcare professionals, people don’t see the urgency. Talking about the recent measles outbreak, Dr. Offit said:

“We eliminated measles in this country by the year 2000. Millions of cases still occur in the world. There are about 150,000 deaths from measles every year in the world, and so in many areas of the world it is not that hard to get people vaccinated…

“It’s not just that we eliminated measles in this country, we eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”

As was said multiple times in our interview, vaccines are a victim of their own success.

Could vaccines have side effects? Yes, of course. Every intervention we do in medicine has a potential side effect. But the key is to compare the “side effect” with the “disease effect,” that is, what happens when a person gets the disease. For instance, myocarditis (inflamed heart muscle) is a rare side effect of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. But after becoming sick with the actual virus, a person has massively higher risk of myocarditis. One review article found myocarditis to happen in fewer than two people vaccinated out of 100,000, but myocarditis occurred in 276 people out of 100,000 after natural infection. And the myocarditis after a vaccine resolved quickly in most people, whereas the COVID-associated myocarditis is much more likely to cause serious long-term consequences.

The benefits of vaccines vastly outweigh their risks. In my 39 years of being a Vaccine Enthusiast, I have seen that proved true over and over. I remember that precious child with the Hib meningitis, but I am 67 years old. Relatively few people alive today have personal experience with a preventable infectious disease. Alas, unless we keep vaccinating people, those personal experiences will multiply, probably exponentially.

A century ago, an infectious disease was the usual way a person died. Children bore the brunt. And a century is not that long ago. Improved hygiene has helped, for sure, but vaccines are the superstars of the “life-expectancy show.” If we stop widespread vaccination, we will re-learn this truth.

Truth has a way of winning out. It’s like a beach ball. You can try to hold a beach ball under the water, but in time you will tire and it will bob to the surface. Our society will, one day, once again recognize the value of vaccines, but how many lives will have been needlessly lost in the meantime?