FDA’s Peter Marks on what RFK Jr. will mean for vaccines

LONDON — The incoming Trump administration and its embrace of anti-vaccine figures will give scientists and public health officials the chance to make the case for the value of immunizations, the top vaccine regulator in the U.S. said Thursday as he made a forceful defense of life-saving vaccines.

But if the public health side fails, the U.S. could face dire consequences, the Food and Drug Administration’s Peter Marks warned.

“If that doesn’t work, and everything runs wild in the opposite direction, just as your kids learn natural consequences — if you put your hand on a hot oven, you will get burned, et cetera, that kind of thing — the American public will learn the natural consequences of what happens if vaccination rates fall too far, because we will start to see measles, polio, things that we should never see in a well-developed country, come back,” said Marks, who was speaking virtually at the Jefferies London Healthcare Conference.