Iam a pediatric infectious disease physician and am fortunate to have practiced long enough that I have seen many of the most common infectious diseases in children disappear with the advent of vaccines.

These vaccines have spared countless children from time in intensive care units and their parents from watching their children suffer and even die. Vaccination has resulted in a greater than 99% decrease in deaths due to vaccine-preventable diseases. In the last 30 years alone, the lives of more than 1 million U.S. children have been saved by vaccination.

But who are those children? We don’t know. We can never know. That is both the beauty and the curse of prevention. It is invisible. We don’t see it. We don’t touch it. We don’t experience it. Yet it exists. That fact is undeniable.

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