Why do some people think that the Mennonites haven’t vaccinated since 1796? More misinformation from RFK, Jr.

A new tool for comparing the risks of vaccines with the risks of diseases via Unbiased Science Podcast and Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP):
https://lnkd.in/ggcgMnuu

Earlier this week, I saw a little child crying after receiving a vaccine🥺🥺

Like many parents, the mother looked worried😳

But within a few minutes, the tears stopped, and the child was smiling again😇

Watching that moment reminded me that a few seconds of discomfort can provide protection that lasts for years😉

It also brought back memories of my industrial training, where I participated in the National Immunization Plus Days (NIPDs) campaign 😉

During the campaign, we supported efforts to administer the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) to children aged 0–59 months, helping protect them against polio.

That experience taught me that immunization is more than just a vaccine, it is one of the most effective ways to prevent serious childhood diseases and give every child a healthier start in life💪🤗

As parents, keeping children up to date with their immunization schedule is one of the greatest investments you can make in their health and future.

Sometimes, a few seconds of tears can mean a lifetime of protection💙🤍

#ChildHealth
#Immunization
#Nutrition

COVID-19 continues to circulate across Europe and worldwide, making vaccination an important tool to help protect people against the disease.

We have received European Commission marketing authorisation for our protein-based COVID-19 vaccine adapted to XFG.1.1 variant, following the positive opinion from the European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP).

The milestone reflects the dedication of our teams to expanding the range of vaccine options available to support public health authorities and vaccination strategies for the 2026/2027 campaign.

Check the news: https://lnkd.in/eAqQHn2v

#Vaccination #COVID19 #EuropeanCommission 

"I lost my sister to measles."

Charlotte from Missouri shares how her sister was disabled for life.

"My sister had measles encephalitis when she was 6 years old. She slipped into a coma and when she woke up 6 months later she was profoundly brain damaged. She is 66 years old and has been on a feeding tube for decades. She has been in a nursing home her whole life and hasn't known her family since she went into a coma. Vaccines are very important. Our family got the measles before we could be vaccinated. Our mother chose for us to get the polio vaccine first because you couldn't get the vaccines together. We got the measles soon after. My mother never got over the choice she made and it profoundly changed our family."

Can Vaccines Help Reduce Maternal Mortality?

The answer is yes—but only if access meets opportunity.

Too often, conversations about maternal mortality focus on treatment after complications occur.

We should be talking just as much about prevention.

Maternal vaccination is one of healthcare’s highest-impact preventive interventions. It protects mothers from serious infectious diseases while giving newborns a healthier start in life.

Yet millions of women still face barriers to receiving recommended vaccines during pregnancy.

Improving maternal health isn’t solely about developing new technologies. It’s about ensuring proven interventions reach every woman, regardless of geography or income.

The future of maternal health will be shaped not only by innovation, but by implementation.

Saving mothers’ lives is one of the greatest investments we can make in healthier families, stronger communities, and more resilient health systems.

What practical step should health leaders prioritize to increase maternal vaccination coverage?

#Leadership #MaternalHealth #Vaccines #GlobalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #PublicHealth #PreventiveCare #HealthEquity #WomensHealth
#WHO
#GAVI
#CLIPASA

💬 Viewpoint by Kathryn Edwards, MD, and Mobeen Rathore, MD: Surveillance data indicate a resurgence in #Tetanus cases in the US, with increases in pediatric cases and overall incidence reported in 2024 and 2025.

Recent CDC reports highlight the enduring risk to unvaccinated or underimmunized individuals, as Clostridium tetani remains ubiquitous and human-to-human transmission does not occur.

Despite the established safety and effectiveness of tetanus vaccination, declines in immunization rates—particularly among children—and incomplete postexposure prophylaxis have contributed to new cases and hospitalizations.

This evidence supports continued clinician education, vaccine advocacy, and attention to access and hesitancy.

https://ja.ma/4pr2Qi3

#Immunisation has saved more than 150 million lives over the past 50 years.

That’s 6 lives every minute, every day, for more than five decades, not by accident, but because we chose to protect ourselves and those around us.
That trust cannot be taken for granted.

The spread of misinformation is threatening this global progress and eroding the confidence that supports successful immunisation programmes across Europe.

The forthcoming Council Recommendation on immunisation against respiratory infections is an opportunity to invest in immunisation confidence, because the science is only as powerful as the trust behind it.

🔎 Find out more about our priorities: https://lnkd.in/eHCK-Z_5

If you've been scratching your head why so many are drawn to untested, unproven products like peptides on the gray market, here is your answer.

The marketing industry uses these classic rhetorical tricks to distract consumers from lack of safety or efficacy data. Learning to recognize these tricks is a form of prebunking -- knowing the logical errors ahead of time so people can recognize them in the wild.

https://lnkd.in/gzPNJ-46

Chasing down a single case of measles in New Mexico cost the public health response $32,030. That's before anyone's medical bills.

The full accounting, published August 4th in Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the New Mexico Department of Health: $5.4 million for 100 cases, 7 hospitalizations, and 1 death. That's $53,522 a case.

Medical care was 5% of it. The rest was the response and the lost wages. It took 133 people and 22,399 hours. The state bought 21,521 additional MMR doses at emergency speed, at $26.35 a dose on the federal contract.

53% of the cases were adults. New Mexico's registry had a first MMR dose on file for 92% of children and 51% of adults. A missing record isn't the same as a missing dose, but a health department working an outbreak can't tell the difference, so it vaccinates anyway. 17,146 of those doses went to adults.

Two things could change that math. Congress decides how much goes to the vaccine safety net that state and local health departments run on. CDC told Congress in 2023 that a fully funded program needed $1.6 billion. Congress appropriated only $682 million. And states decide whether adult immunization records exist at all.

Watch (CBS): https://lnkd.in/gmWCQdPb

Save and send to other parents before the kids go back to school: https://lnkd.in/gyjhJ7aV

Read & subscribe for free: celinegounder.com

#PublicHealth #Measles #HealthPolicy #Vaccines #Immunization

Could dentists help deliver vaccines?

While vaccinations have traditionally been administered in primary care settings or pharmacies, some states have authorized dentists to administer vaccines. An interdisciplinary team of Penn researchers, including SP2 Associate Professor Dr. Tamara Cadet, validated a survey on attitudes around the role of dental providers in HPV and COVID-19 vaccination.

“Expanding the scope of dentistry to include vaccine education and administration could increase access to care, vaccine uptake, and disease prevention,” says Cadet.

Read the story at https://bit.ly/4hKj3ga

Investment in #immunisation is an investment in Europe's health, productivity, #preparedness, and resilience. 

#AlwaysInnovating 

"Vaccination has eradicated smallpox, nearly eliminated polio, and dramatically reduced deaths from measles, diphtheria, and pertussis. Yet vaccine hesitancy — fuelled by misinformation — is a growing threat in several African communities. Every African parent deserves accurate, complete information about childhood immunisation.

How Vaccines Work

Vaccines train the immune system to recognise and fight specific pathogens without causing the disease itself. They introduce a harmless form of the pathogen — killed or weakened organism, a key surface protein, or mRNA instructions. The immune system produces antibodies and memory cells. If the vaccinated person later encounters the actual pathogen, their immune system responds rapidly and powerfully."
https://lnkd.in/gKH54CR5

"Now, to add to the recent big outbreaks in Texas, we have a report about how much it cost to stop the outbreak in New Mexico.


The New Mexico measles outbreak cost $53,522 per case to stop.
It cost $5.4 million to stop that outbreak.


An outbreak that “resulted in 100 confirmed cases of measles, including seven hospitalizations.”

But that’s not the whole picture, is it?

...

In addition to all of these cases and all of the money spent controlling these cases, we have seen:

* two deaths in unvaccinated children in Texas (2025)
* one death in an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico (2025)
* one SSPE death (2025)
* at least one infant with meningoencephalitis who was born to an unvaccinated mother with measles in Texas (2025)
* at least two unvaccinated child with measles encephalitis in South Carolina (2026)
* at least 404 hospitalizations, the majority of which have been children, with very few of them known to be completely vaccinated with two doses of the MMR vaccine
* a lot of missed school days because kids are sick or in quarantine..."
https://lnkd.in/gBMdttTn

At Innoval(IFT), we believe that protection is the ultimate destination of every vaccination journey.

Every step—from proper vaccine storage and careful preparation to correct vaccine application—plays a critical role in achieving effective immunity.

Under the theme “The Vaccination Journey: From Preparation to Protection,” we are pleased to meet with one of our greatest partners in success to explore the essential practices that ensure vaccines retain their full potential and deliver the highest level of protection in the field.

Because every successful vaccination journey begins with proper preparation and ends with effective protection.

"A national retrospective cohort study of more than 2.5 million children found no association between receiving the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine before age 2 years and having an autism diagnosis.

“These results reinforce existing evidence supporting the safety of MMR vaccination,” wrote the authors, from the University of Washington.

Some people worry that MMR vaccines cause autism, despite a lack of evidence supporting this theory. This paper is the latest to examine the MMR vaccine and autism by looking at the timing of the vaccine.

Using the Cosmos electronic health record database, researchers looked at the records of more than 2.5 million children who had linked parent information from January 2015 through December 2024. The scientists followed the children until age 8 or their last doctor’s appointment before the study end date.

Receiving the first MMR vaccine dose from ages 11.5 to 24 months was not associated with an increased likelihood of having an autism diagnosis."

Also a reminder that Secretary Kennedy's book engaged in extensive HIV denial.

"Mr. Kennedy’s mini book tour came as Republicans accused Dr. Fauci of enriching himself by enlisting staff and colleagues to enter contests with cash awards, including a $1 million prize that government ethics officials allowed him to keep. But Mr. Kennedy; Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chaired the hearing; and even Mr. Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy III have all published critical books about Dr. Fauci whose sales may have gotten a boost from the negative public attention the men have helped generate against him.
...
All three books are published by Skyhorse Publishing, whose founder Tony Lyons is a close adviser to Mr. Kennedy and runs a political action committee and other groups supporting the secretary’s agenda. Mr. Paul’s book was published in 2023 by Regnery Publishing, which was acquired by Skyhorse in December of that year. (Skyhorse also recently published a memoir by the actress Cheryl Hines, Mr. Kennedy’s wife.)
....
Ethics experts say that Mr. Kennedy, his son and Mr. Paul did not cross any legal or ethical lines, but several said the secretary and the senator did cross a threshold for hypocrisy by using their platforms to sell books about Dr. Fauci while accusing the scientist of profiting from his own public service."
https://lnkd.in/g7fPsChf

New in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: misinformation isn't just about false beliefs. Led by @ulliecker.bsky.social & co=authors @emilyspearing.bsky.social & @noupside.bsky.social our piece argues the bigger threat is indirect—the erosion of shared epistemic standards https://lnkd.in/etkYkgt9 🧵
1/10
Direct effects are well documented: misinfo shapes memory, beliefs, and behaviour \(vaccines, climate, deepfakes\). We wrote about this here earlier: https://lnkd.in/eQShxiRJ
But focusing only on debunking discrete claims misses the bigger picture.
2/10
Social media has turned narrative-building into a participatory, algorithm-driven process. Influencers co-create "realities" with followers, and outrage/divisive content gets rewarded by engagement-based ranking.
3/10
Generative AI adds a new layer: models fabricate content confidently, can be fine-tuned to push narratives, and personalize persuasion to individual biases — all while people struggle to resist AI-generated misinformation even when warned, as we showed here: https://lnkd.in/edukkkN3
4/10
The real danger: flooding info ecosystems with half-truths and confusion doesn't just create false beliefs — it teaches people that truth itself is unknowable. That's the "liar's dividend" and truth relativism at work.
5/10
We're also seeing elites shift from evidence-based "fact speaking" to sincerity-based "belief speaking" — a rhetorical move that's spreading and normalizing epistemic relativism in public discourse. For example, here: https://lnkd.in/eCjw3PHW
6/10
This matters because democracy depends on shared ground truths. Abandoning evidence as the basis for debate doesn't just distort individual issues — it corrodes the infrastructure of collective decision-making. And even science is not immune, as we argued here: https://lnkd.in/epzJvEin
7/10
Our fixes span individual tools \(inoculation, AI-assisted debunking, literacy\) to systemic reforms \(algorithmic transparency, monetization reform, platform interoperability\). No single lever works alone — see our table of interventions.

8/10
The recent major report for European Commission expands on the possible solutions: https://sks.to/fractured.
9/10
For details see the paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences here https://lnkd.in/etkYkgt9
10/10 | 33 comments on LinkedIn

💡 How can we improve vaccination promotion across Europe?

Building trust in vaccination requires more than facts. It requires understanding people's concerns, identifying barriers, and sharing what works.
That's exactly what the #co-OPERATOR project is doing.

Funded by the #EU4Health Programme, co-OPERATOR brings together partners from across Europe to develop a Virtual Observatory that collects and shares evidence, best practices, and behavioral insights on vaccination promotion. By combining research, digital innovation, and policy development, the project aims to help healthcare professionals, policymakers, and public health organizations design more effective vaccination strategies.

🔍 The project focuses on:
• Understanding the drivers of vaccination decisions and hesitancy
• Monitoring vaccination uptake, trust, and behavioral determinants
• Sharing evidence-based best practices between countries
• Developing training resources and policy recommendations to strengthen future vaccination campaigns.

Collaboration is essential for tackling public health challenges. By learning from one another and translating research into practical tools, we can build more resilient, evidence-informed vaccination programmes across Europe.

Learn more about the project and follow its progress: https://cooperatorvax.eu/ and follow our LinkedIn page

"Un bruit de fond contre la vaccination" : comment expliquer la flambée de rougeole aux États-Unis, au plus haut depuis 35 ans ?

Pour y voir plus clair, TF1info a sollicité Philippe Sansonetti, chercheur à l'Institut Pasteur et professeur au Collège de France, spécialiste en microbiologie et auteur de "Vaccins" chez Odile Jacob : https://lnkd.in/een_4TJk

📕 "Vaccins" est disponible sur notre site : https://lnkd.in/eZY7rfp5

Healthy populations are the foundation of strong, resilient societies. Adult immunisation programmes can deliver up to 19 times their initial investment, supporting economic productivity and social resilience by reducing infections, limiting complications of chronic diseases, and ultimately keeping people healthier for longer. 

#AlwaysInnovating 

New antivax trope dropped: refusing RhoGAM.

A Facebook group featured a post from an expectant mother with health issues who was nervous about Rhogam -which is very much indicated by her and her husband’s Rh status.

Many of the comments were wrong and unhelpful. One suggested it contained covid spike proteins, which would have required a time machine to introduce them to Rhogam 58 years before covid existed.

None of her medical issues are contraindications to an injection that prevents her immune system from attacking her baby -which can lead to devastating results:

* fetal anemia
* hydrops fetalis
* kernicterus, and
* fetal or neonatal death

Without this shot, the risk of sensitization is about 1 in 6; compliance with the full schedule reduces those odds to 1 in 500-1,000. Not a bad deal.

Rhogam is NOT a vaccine: it is a plasma-derived immunoglobulin: the same class of therapy that antivaxers like PIC *endorse* after exposure to (or sickness from) diseases like varicella, Hep B, measles, etc… to rationalize not vaccinating -even though it doesn’t work as well as being vaccinated. For COVID, it didn’t work at all.

Thus, this is an antivax-approved, passive immunization agent that:
* acts immediately to prevent anti-baby antibodies
* confers no immunologic memory,
* is cleared within weeks, and
* prevents certain horrible pregnancy outcomes.

Source your medical advice carefully.

Sources in comments

1. Measles is not confined to religious communities that don’t vaccinate. 
2. RSV did not come out of gain-of-function research. 
3. The U.S. never had the world’s highest mortality rate of COVID-19. 
4. COVID-19 vaccines did protect children. 
5. Pandemic disruptions are part of the story, but not the main part. 
6. It’s not true that the vaccines given during a baby’s first six months have never been studied for a link to autism.