02/08/2026
Another good deep weekend dive about the after effects if some of these diseases. Most are luckily rare but having vaccines to help prevent (and future vaccines too which are now in peril) are so important.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb has a piece in WaPo today that is one of the most important things written about vaccines lately, and it's not even really about vaccines. It's about what viruses do to us long after we think we've recovered. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma at 33. His cancer cells tested positive for Epstein-Barr virus. EBV infects 90% of the world's population, but for some people, that "harmless" infection kicks off a chain that ends in cancer, autoimmune disease, or neurological damage years or decades later.
Vaccines worked so well that people forgot what the diseases actually do. So now the infections sound theoretical and the vaccine risks sound concrete, and the whole calculus gets flipped!
The "natural immunity" narrative? (We prefer the term survivor immunity, because that's what it actually is.) It's definitely not superior to the protection vaccines provide. Survivor immunity means your body fought off a live pathogen with all the collateral damage that comes with it.
EBV potentially seeding lymphoma or MS. Measles wiping your immune memory clean. Enteroviruses triggering autoimmune attacks on your pancreas. The list goes on and on.
Vaccine-induced immunity gives you the protection without the wreckage, and death is not the only outcome vaccines prevent. Disability. Chronic disease. Cancer. Autoimmune conditions that last decades.
It's a real bee in our bonnet when people say "these are just mild childhood illnesses." The acute illness isn't always the problem. It's what happens five, ten, twenty years later that we're still uncovering.
NIH was working on an EBV vaccine. A vaccine that could potentially prevent MS, lupus, and certain lymphomas. That research is now in jeopardy as federal vaccine initiatives get curtailed. Drugmakers are pulling back because the regulatory pathway through FDA and CDC is being actively undermined.
We're closing doors on preventing diseases we're beginning to understand, and the costs won't always be immediate. They'll show up in diagnoses that didn't have to happen, research that never got funded, a generation of kids whose "mild" infections turned out to be anything but...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/06/viruses-vaccines-ebv-lymphoma-measles-fda-commissioner/
