I will never forget when as a young physician doing a volunteer year in Haiti seeing a mother with her 6-month-old baby. The baby’s muscles were totally rigid so that it was impossible for him to lie flat. His jaw was clamped shut and when he attempted to cry, an eerie humming emanated from his clenched lips. It was an obvious case of tetanus.

I placed an intravenous line in the child to hydrate him and a nasogastric tube in his stomach to feed him. I gave him antibiotics, but the tetanus immunoglobulin was not available. The baby died.

Horrors like this were not uncommon in Haiti where there was little vaccination. I saw many patients maimed by polio. Children frequently died from measles.

Any reader interested in what happens when there is a lack of vaccines can read Chapter 9 from my book, The Neglected and Abused: A Physician’s Year in Haiti, by clicking this link. There is no charge.

No one in their right mind wants to see these tragedies reoccur in the United States. But it could happen as many supposed experts in public health have lost their credibility with many citizens. This culminated with the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., firing numerous public health officials.

A major incident causing public distrust occurred in 1980 when the prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, published a study that stated opioids were not addictive. This was pure idiocy. A drug company, Purdue Pharma, used this study to goad public health bureaucrats to ease up on the safeguards governing the prescription of these drugs. They then launched an army of opioid salespeople to seduce a class of greedy doctors to push these drugs on patients. The result, countless deaths and millions of addicts.

Ethically compromised judges looked the other way and allowed the owners of Purdue Pharma to keep much of their ill-gotten gains. This is chronicled in the book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and the Netflix movie, Painkiller, for any reader who desires more information.

But the real damage was done by government policy during the COVID epidemic. While data showed that the vaccines were lifesaving in certain groups such as the elderly, the diabetic, the immunocompromised and the obese, the data supporting the COVID vaccine for children was dubious at best. But the vaccine was pushed on everybody.

Plus, the fact that the CEO of Moderna, the manufacturer of the mRNA COVID vaccine, earned hundreds of millions during the pandemic heightened skepticism that this was just another corporate money grabbing scam.

Meanwhile a host of hurried and inconsistent rulings during the COVID epidemic allowed for contradictory and controversial outcomes, like closing some churches while allowing strip clubs to remain open.

In short, mixed messages from the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others — all widely distributed and the subject of politically charged debate in both social media and mainstream outlets — resulted in mistrust and confusion in the minds of many as to the utility of all vaccines.

But the implications of this are devastating. Now many people who voted for Donald Trump believe that all vaccines are a scam. Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has stated that vaccines in Florida should be voluntary. (Obviously, Ladapo has never been to Haiti.) Technically, this policy does not apply to measles, polio and tetanus vaccines, but it is unlikely that the average voter knows or understands this.

A reasonable compromise would be to review the latter recommendations for childhood vaccination.

But public officials like Kennedy and Ladopa must take care in their actions and words. Vaccines have saved millions upon millions of lives and publicly challenging their efficacy could result in disastrous cases, such as the poor baby I tried to save in Haiti.

 Joseph Bentivegna MD is an ophthalmologist in Rocky Hill.