WASHINGTON—A vaccine policy expert challenged attendees of the World Vaccine Congress Washington to imagine a deadly disease spreading in various places around the country. We have the tools to stop it, but lawmakers were instead debating whether or not to use them.
In fact, that describes what is currently happening across the United States, according to Rehka Lakshmanan, M.H.A.
“Science is not a democracy,” said Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer of the Immunization Partnership, a non-profit that focuses on education and advocacy for immunizations.
Rehka Lakshmanan gives her lecture, “Anti-vaccine rhetoric in legislature,” at the World Vaccine Congress Washington, April 23, 2025. (ErinDrumm/Medill New Service).
And yet, since 2017, state legislatures around the country have been treating the science behind vaccinations as if it were debatable.
Legislation in some state capitols and skepticism towards vaccines by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have contributed to doubts about vaccines in the United States. Kennedy formerly chaired the anti-vaccine non-profit Children’s Health Defense and recently called autism an “epidemic,” claiming environmental factors caused it in a press conference. But at the World Vaccine Congress Washington in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, organizers and experts wrestled with the increasing politicization of vaccines.
Texas, where the Immunization Partnership is based, is the epicenter of the current measles outbreak. According to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, 627 measles cases have been confirmed in Texas since late January.
Kennedy spoke out in favor of the measles vaccines after meeting with two families in Texas who lost children as a result of the measles outbreak.
“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy said in a post on X.
A panel at the World Vaccine Congress, “Are we doing enough with regards to funding safety science to foster trust in vaccines?” discussed political rhetoric surrounding vaccines.
“We need to find some common ground here. And we can try to yell louder, but they have the microphone right now,” said Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It shouldn’t be to fund terrible studies that confirm hypotheses that some people believe. It should be really high-quality, rigorous science, and let the findings be what they must.”
Salmon encouraged finding moments for cooperation even when that’s difficult. Other panelists were skeptical of finding common ground because of Secretary Kennedy’s past claims and his recent hiring of David Geier, who has tied vaccines to autism, as a data analyst at the Department of Health and Human Services.
“This is not the time to be trusting,” said Amy Pisani, chief executive officer of Vaccinate Your Family. “They don’t have any respect for institutions of higher learning or researchers that have credible backgrounds.”
While speakers at the conference differed in their opinions on how to approach the current presidential administration, they agreed that vaccine science should continue improving despite the fraught politics.
“Vaccine legislation introduced in state legislatures is the canary in the coal mine in terms of what we can potentially see in terms of a breakdown of policies in our states and across the country,” Lakshmanan said of the future of vaccines in U.S. politics.
Erin Drumm is a reporter for the Medill News Service covering politics. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2024 with a BA in American Studies and is now a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism specializing in politics, policy and foreign affairs.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.