I was fortunate to have been the chair of the Oak Park Board of Health, the voluntary commission that oversees and advocates for the Oak Park Health Department and advises the village board on public health matters. In this position I had the honor of working with commissioners intensely interested in furthering the health of Oak Park’s citizens, along with two outstanding public health professionals, sanitarian Mike Charley and public health nurse Margaret Provost-Fyfe MSN, both of whom directed the department.
My 50 years as a licensed clinical social worker, as an Army social work officer, VA clinical social worker, and emergency room social worker at Loyola Medical Center, made me keenly interested in the power of public health strategies in the health improvements of the last century.
I am of the age that German and Red measles, chicken pox, and mumps were disruptions in childhood life due to being in isolation. Fear of polio was a constant, and tooth decay a significant problem. Modern public health, with inoculations and fluoride, changed the lives and the health of Americans. And modern vaccine science has protected Americans with highly effective vaccines that prevent or mitigate meningitis, COVID-19, hepatitis B and C, several different kinds of pneumonia, shingles, plague, smallpox, monkey pox, tetanus, whooping cough, diptheria, and influenza. And modern anti-viral drugs have made HIV/AIDS a manageable disease rather than a death sentence.
With all of these public health triumphs, there has been an onslaught of vaccine and fluoride skeptics who have caused some people to not accept inoculations, leading to diseases that also infect health-care professionals.
Vaccine mandates have maintained public health safety, but now a new threat to health, in the person of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS Secretary designee, has emerged. He has made clear that he will greatly decrease access to inoculations to Americans and threaten the herd immunity that has made childhood diseases, polio and small pox, a threat of the past, as well as eliminating fluoride in drinking water that has so greatly improved the oral health of Americans.
Frank Vozak
Oak Park