Lauren Burke-Sarabia ...
Over the past year, the Food and Drug Administration has done important work drawing attention to how food choices affect health. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deserves credit for shining a light on food additives and America’s dependence on processed foods.
I’m a registered nurse and a mother. I applaud that work. But I also need to ask a hard question: Why aren’t childhood vaccines getting the same attention and urgency? *** RFK Jr is right that clean food matters. But so does keeping measles and whooping cough of kids' lungs ...
I’ve spent years in intensive care watching people of all ages fight respiratory illness. Even with experience, it’s brutal to see a patient cling to life through ventilators, intubation, or ECMO machines.
Last year, I watched in horror as a measles outbreak took the lives of two unvaccinated children in Texas. Whooping cough killed two infants in Louisiana.
Closer to home, my own child caught whooping cough. It was frightening and exhausting to see how coughing fits made it almost impossible for him to catch his breath.
He was old enough to have received his vaccines. I believe that reduced the severity of his illness and likely kept him out of the hospital. That experience leaves me with one request to RFK: Give childhood vaccines the same serious focus you’ve given food safety.
Kennedy says he cares about children. I believe him. That’s why I’m urging him to speak clearly about routine childhood immunizations — because I’ve seen what happens when preventable diseases return....