When the world was running scared about the monkey-pox virus in 2022, I asked the University of Houston college students I was teaching if they had heard of chickenpox.

They stared at me blankly. None of them knew of the highly contagious disease that causes a rash of itchy blisters all over the body, and that was my point.

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The chickenpox vaccine, which was introduced in 1995, has significantly dropped the number of cases in the U.S. And thanks to other vaccines, childhood diseases such as diphtheria, rubella, polio and measles, have been contained for years.

Now, as President-elect Donald Trump takes office with anti-vaccination advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Trump's nominee for the secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, we could see those childhood illnesses make an unfortunate comeback.

The anti-Covid-19 vaccination fervor has helped escalate the issue. Some claimed the Covid-19 vaccine was developed too quickly,........

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