Vaccines are one of the greatest scientific success stories of our time. Vaccination has saved more than 154 million lives in the last 50 years — more than six lives every minute of every year.

Our technical ability to develop vaccines has outpaced our social, political, and financial systems for ensuring their use. Recent moves to strip funding from vaccine-related research are shortsighted and self-harming. As is the use of precious resources to revisit debunked claims of links to autism.

The best vaccine isn’t useful if it is not distributed, or not socially accepted. Vaccine equity and hesitancy remain great challenges. Globalizing antivaccine activism could become our greatest hurdle.

We should not allow misinformation, disinformation, ignorance and defunding to hinder vaccine development, deployment and use.

It is not time to defund, but rather invest in vaccines.

Read our latest editorial in @PLOSBiology: Vaccines work… and do not cause autism

#vaccines #vaccination #immunization #WorldImmunizationWeek #measles #outbreak #vaccinehesitancy

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003143