Dr.John Snyder, in Amherst, Mass., has been practicing pediatrics for 30 years.
Whenever he wanted to find the most up-to-date research on treating young patients, he would turn to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.If he wanted to learn more about an outbreak of measles or hantavirus, he would pore over the weekly CDC report that came by email.This story was produced in partnership with KFF Health News.If a patient's family was traveling to Africa or Asia, he would check the latest CDC vaccine recommendations for overseas travel.
And if family members at his practice in Amherst, Mass., expressed worries about potential side effects from a shot, he could always send them to the CDC's website to bolster his argument to get the immunization.Public trust in the CDC has hit bumps in the road during infectious disease outbreaks, but for medical professionals, Snyder said, "the CDC used to be, worldwide, the most trusted source of information pertaining to public health and infectious disease."Yet even doctors began losing trust, Snyder said, after Donald Trump was elected president again.Trump quickly tapped longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.as his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.Within months of his confirmation as secretary, Kennedy had dismissed every member of the CDC's vaccine advisory board and replaced them with new appointees, some of them prominent vaccine skeptics."It turned into a completely unreputable source of information," Snyder said.This rupture of scientific trust in the CDC has put many pediatricians like Snyder in a bind, as they no longer turn to the United States' preeminent public health agency and instead search for ways to fill the information gap.
Some doctors are launching their own vaccine education efforts, sometimes in collaboration with local public health departments.On Jan.5, the CDC removed some vaccines from the recommended vaccine schedule for all c...