Molly O’Shea has been practicing pediatrics for 33 years. “I’ve seen it all,” she says. Her career spans the introduction of numerous vaccines, a decline in infectious diseases — and a troubling rise in vaccine hesitancy.
When, in January, the Trump administration slashed the number of recommended shots in the government’s childhood vaccination schedule, the rotavirus vaccine was among those demoted. O’Shea remembers when a vaccine wasn’t available. During her first month of graduate medical training in 1990, an infant died of diarrheal illness caused by rotavirus. To watch the child “waste away and die despite all our efforts,” she says, “it was so devastating.”