We are doctors who trained continents apart: one of us in Sweden (Peterson) and one in India (Pai). As we worked during the 1980s and ’90s in those disparate countries, neither of us ever saw a case of measles, diphtheria, or whooping cough.
That was not a fluke. It was because the world once chose to fight these deadly childhood infections with miraculous tools called vaccines. These safe, effective, and remarkably affordable vaccines — costing as little as 60 cents per dose through UNICEF — pushed infections like polio, measles, diphtheria, and whooping cough (pertussis) to the brink of elimination in many parts of the world, even in low- and middle-income nations. The measles vaccine alone has saved nearly 94 million lives over the past 50 years.
