The deadliest country in the world for young children is South Sudan — the United Nations estimates that about 1 in 10 children born there won’t make it to their fifth birthday.

But just a hundred years ago, that was true right here in the United States: Every community buried about a tenth of their children before they entered kindergarten. That was itself a huge improvement over 1900, when fully 25 percent of children in America didn’t make it to age 5. Today, even in the poorest parts of the world, every child has a better chance than a child born in the richest parts of the world had a century ago.

How did we do it? Primarily through vaccines, which account for about 40 percent of the global drop in infant mortality over the last 50 years, representing 150 million lives saved. Once babies get extremely sick, it’s incredibly hard to get adequate care for them anywhere in the world, but we’ve largely prevented them from getting sick in the first place. Vaccines eradicated smallpox and dramatically reduced infant deaths from measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, and tetanus. And vaccines not only make babies likelier to survive infancy but also make them healthier for the rest of their lives.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., unfortunately, disagrees. President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services (HHS), a noted vaccine skeptic who reportedly does not really believe the scientific consensus that disease is caused by germs,

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