A team of Stanford University epidemiologists ran 2,000 simulations per disease to calculate what happens when childhood vaccination disappears in America, and the findings are almost too catastrophic to process.
The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on 24 April 2025, was led by Stanford epidemiologist Mathew Kiang and infectious diseases physician-scientist Nathan Lo. Their model, a large-scale microsimulation covering all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, assessed what declining or vanishing childhood vaccination would mean for measles, rubella, polio, and diphtheria over a 25-year period.
