Ask the expert: Stay on schedule with vaccinations

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced a $500 million budget cut for the research and production of vaccines based on mRNA technologies. MSU expert Rebecca Schein, a pediatric infectious disease physician, shares her perspective about what people should know and how to prepare for these changes.

Schein sees patients at MSU Health Care and is an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Human Development at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

What are the benefits of vaccinations?

Childhood vaccinations are helping Americans live longer and healthier lives. Health statistics from the past 100 years show a big decline in childhood illness and deaths. This is due to many things, including access to clean water, nutritious food and childhood vaccinations.

Eliminating vaccines now has the potential to take us back to the days when more children died due to conditions like polio and measles that now can be prevented with vaccinations.

How do vaccinations work?

Vaccinations work in the body like antivirus software works on your computer to help identify and quarantine threats. They expose the immune system to a little bit of bacteria or virus and that teaches the immune system how to identify and eliminate the problem.

Vaccines generally fall into two main groups. Live-attenuated or inactivated virus vaccines protect against measles, chicken pox, polio, Hepatitis A and rabies. They contain a form of the virus that helps your body fight off infection without making you ill. These vaccines only work against some viruses.

To fight off bacterial infections and other viruses, we need other types of vaccines.

Inactivated toxin, acellular protein, polysaccharide and complement vaccines use pieces of the virus or bacteria to create an immune response that helps prevent future illness.

These vaccines do not cause diseases, as they only have a small section of the virus or bacteria. This is the technology behind vaccines for pneumonia, meningitis and tetanus.

The mRNA vaccines work in a similar way. These vaccines teach your body to make a protein that is part of the virus or bacteria the vaccine targets. Your body’s immune system then recognizes the protein as foreign and makes antibodies against it. The antibodies stay in your body and can fight off the virus when you are exposed to it. The mRNA vaccine technology is especially important because the design allows for rapid production of new vaccines when new viruses like COVID-19 develop.

What should parents do for their children?

Families should be sure their children are current on their vaccinations. Don’t let them fall behind. Work with your primary care provider to be sure your children are being vaccinated on schedule.

What should adults do for their health?

Adults should maintain a close relationship with their primary care provider to stay on schedule for their recommended vaccinations too.

How could these federal budget cuts affect public health?

There is a pipeline of vaccination technologies currently in various stages of development. This is incredibly important because these advancements made it possible to create the COVID-19 vaccine very quickly when the pandemic hit. Without this work in progress, we won’t have solutions available for the next pandemic.

There is also the possibility that federal funding cuts will decrease the number of companies that create and sell vaccines. Many vaccine manufacturers depend on federal funding to help supplement the costs of vaccine development. With less federal funding, smaller companies will be less competitive and may choose to stop making vaccines, which could drive prices up and lead to shortages.

It’s also important to consider that we never know where science will lead. By cutting funding, we are limiting further exploration of promising technologies to support public health in the U.S. and beyond.