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.
First image: Moreno and Joe Medina in the mail room. Medina has worked there since 2019 and was a former Keys to Change client. Second image: Medina sorts through envelopes to find mail for the unhoused community the facility serves. Ash Ponders for ProPublica