2025-07-01
4 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
When it comes to vaccines, President Donald Trump's instincts have sometimes been sound.
In May 2020, he launched Operation Warp Speed,
which came up with inoculations for Covid-19 based on a new mRNA technology at an unprecedented pace and scale.
By one estimate,
Covid vaccines averted 18.5 million hospitalisations and 3.2 million deaths in America in two years.
And Mr Trump wisely got himself jabbed.
So why is he now letting his health secretary,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismantle the country's vaccine-making ecosystem?
Mr. Kennedy is what is known politely as a vaccine skeptic and impolitely as a crank.
He is undermining trust in,
sensible scrutiny of and incentives to invest in one of modern medicine's greatest wonders.
Time and again he casts spurious doubt on the safety of vaccines.
His department has hired a conspiracy theorist to investigate a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.
He warns against the human papillomavirus HPV vaccine,
which is estimated to have reduced American cervical cancer deaths by 62% in the past decade.