Fewer than half of Americans have at least some confidence in the government to respond to disease outbreaks, act independently, or ensure the safety of drugs and vaccines, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll.
This comes as President Trump works to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization; on his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order to start the process.
“The U.S. has been such an important partner in WHO, and fundamentally, health is the responsibility of every country’s government,” said Dr. Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s director of the Immunization, Vaccine and Biologicals Department. “WHO doesn’t have any authority to go into a country or to make countries do anything in particular. So, it’s really the place for discussions. And what’s really difficult is not to have the U.S. at the table for those discussions.”
5 questions with Dr. Katherine O’Brien
What does the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the WHO mean in terms of the implementation of vaccines down the road?
“I’ll just give you an example. Measles is a really hot topic because it’s surging around the world, including in the U.S., and the U.S. is a country that has eliminated measles.
“And what elimination means is there are no cases of measles in the U.S. unless they’re imported from the outside, because the U.S. has been great at actually deploying vaccines to protect the country from measles. What’s happening now is that, with importations, because the vaccine rate in the country is not sufficient to protect against measles moving from one person to the other, this is why the outbreaks are happening in this country.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of Health and Human Services, has expressed skepticism around vaccines. How are you operating in an environment like this?
“It’s really important where people get their information from, that they’re getting information that is grounded in evidence. We will be in a sicker, more deadly world, unless every country’s government does everything it can to assure that vaccines in general are available to people in every community, everywhere easily, and especially that they are providing information about the nature of the diseases that vaccines prevent and that vaccines have an incredibly high safety standard that must be met in order for them to be deployed.”
How do you make sense of vaccine hesitancy right now?
“So we have this paradox, which is the very success of vaccines means that the diseases for which they are given are not commonly seen. People forget just how sick and how dead these diseases can make you.
“And individuals are making this trade-off for themselves. But the issue with an individual trade-off is that an individual is deciding in the context that these diseases are not very common in a country that has high coverage because everybody has participated in the program. When that stops happening, and that’s what we’re seeing now, we start to see outbreaks of disease. We see kids being hospitalized and, unfortunately, the worst outcome of all is, of course, deaths that were completely preventable.”
It seems like the COVID-19 pandemic altered how the American public responds to vaccines or other health mandates. Are there things you wish could have gone differently?
“I would have to say that there’s probably nobody who was part of the management of the pandemic that didn’t learn something from the experience. Nobody got it perfectly right.
“I think there was a lot of technical information that made it hard for people to understand. I also think it’s very hard for people to accept that recommendations, advice would change over time.
“There’s one anecdote that really stays with me, which is, many people have said that it was their expectation that the vaccines were gonna prevent people from getting infected.
“At WHO, we didn’t say that. There’s something about what people want to hear and what the evidence actually says. And I just think from a communication perspective, we need to all get better at communicating the knowns and the unknowns.”
At this point in 2025, what are you most concerned about?
“I am worried about backsliding. That we’re gonna be in a sicker, more deadly world. That is going to happen because the germs, the pathogens that we vaccinate against, they’re not political. They’re not partisan. They will come back if there is not a maintenance and an improvement in the vaccine coverage. That’s the biggest thing that I worry about.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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