To match Denmark’s public health, we need more than its vaccine model

On Aug. 10, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to follow a significantly reduced childhood vaccine schedule. Trump said the change would “finally align the United States with other advanced and developed nations around the world.”

This move will not only endanger American families but also push the nation’s already poor health outcomes further behind our global peers. There are plenty of lessons the U.S. should take from countries such as Denmark, but vaccine policy is not one of them.

I have spent my career studying healthcare systems, in the U.S. and across the globe. I agree with the premise that America should look abroad for lessons about how to improve our health. Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else in the world, yet we live shorter lives and are less healthy than people in many countries that spend far less.

Denmark, Germany and Japan are excellent places to find a better roadmap. They consistently outperform the U.S. on many measures of health — their residents live longer, have healthier babies and suffer far less from chronic illness. But this is not because they have different vaccine schedules. In fact, the U.S. vaccine schedule is closely aligned with many peer nations. The diseases we target, the vaccines we use and the timing are largely similar. 

Denmark is actually something of an outlier. Its schedule reflects choices made for a relatively small, homogeneous country with universal care and low baseline disease rates — conditions that........

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