WASHINGTON, D.C. — The conversation about Americans’ health has been at the forefront of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, driven in large part by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s focus on reversing the nation’s health decline. Families – especially women – are bombarded with conflicting health and wellness information and want more transparency and nuanced information.
To address the information gap about vaccines and the current vaccine schedule, Independent Women published a paper in August by Dr. Monique Yohanan, an Independent Women senior fellow, mom, a physician and public health expert with decades of experience, titled, Rethinking Vaccine Policy: A Case for Humility, Precision, and Parental Partnership. The paper calls for vaccine policy recalibration, making the case for humility, precision, parental partnership, and the elimination of today’s outdated system that dominates today’s public health landscape.
Now, Dr. Yohanan expands on those ideas in a new two-part documentary series from Independent Women’s Features (IW Features), the grassroots storytelling and original journalism arm of Independent Women. The docu-series, titled “A Dose of Humility,” takes a deep dive into the paper’s key arguments and lays out the path forward for a more sound approach to vaccine policy.
Part-one — “A Dose of Humility: The Promise and Purpose of Vaccines” — details the different roles that different vaccines play in protecting communities and individuals.
“I believe strongly in vaccines and I believe that they work, but I don’t think that all vaccines are equally important in terms of either public health or individual health,” Dr. Yohanan told IW Features. “[O]ne of the challenges I look at with current policy is that we think of all vaccines as basically being the same, and vaccines that serve really different goals and really different benefits to the community, to individuals all are the same.”
In the documentary, Dr. Yohanan categorizes vaccines into three distinct categories:
Category 1: True Herd Immunity
Category 2: Community Transmission
Category 3: Individual Protection Only
“Dr. Monique Yohanan sits at the unique intersection of medical expertise and maternal empathy for one of the most divisive topics of our time – and it’s much needed,” said Andrea Mew, IW Features managing editor and documentary producer. “Our goal is for people to think critically about vaccines, not through fear mongering or politics, but through evidence and compassion for parental rights. The bottom line is that acknowledging nuance isn’t anti-science, it’s how we restore trust between parents, doctors, and the public institutions meant to serve them.”
The second episode in the “A Dose of Humility” docu-series will premiere in December.
Direct media inquiries and booking requests to [email protected]
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