DDecades, vaccination has been one of the major public health pillars in the United States. This is based in particular on the expertise provided by the Advisory Committee on Vaccination Practices (ACIP), created in 1964. Its mission is to provide independent recommendations and based on the best scientific evidence available for the use of vaccines. The Committee has thus contributed to the gradual integration of vaccines available in a harmonized vaccine calendar, updated each year.
Thanks to regular national campaigns, the country has succeeded in eliminating or controlling dreadful diseases – measles, darling, polio, diphtheria -, originally each year of a large number of deaths or disabilities. If we thus counted in 1919 nearly 13 deaths due to measles per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States, this rate had fallen to zero after the establishment of a broad population vaccination.
While scientific evidence has never been so solid to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, some of these diseases reappear. The measles, declared eliminated from the American territory in 2000, circulates again in a worrying manner with more than 1,000 cases identified in 2025, due to a decrease in vaccination coverage.
A study published in April in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) plans that a 10 % drop in measles vaccination coverage could lead to more than 11 million additional cases in the United States over the next twenty-five years. Pek, long under control, has a disturbing resurgence. Other threats exist such as the possible re-emergence of polio, the quasi-dingality of which was considered a major victory for modern medicine.
What we observe today in the United States reflects in an exacerbated manner what is happening in many other countries, including France. The COVVI-19 pandemic stressed the importance of the distrust of many citizens towards health authorities, experts, and more generally with regard to vaccines. The speed of development of Messenger RNA vaccines, the flow of sometimes contradictory information through the speech of experts, as well as the political recovery of certain public health measures have contributed to installing a climate of sustainable suspicion.
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