G Force
Dr. Jerome O. Klein, a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center and professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, will have an award named after him by the medical center this summer, for his 51 years of dedication.
Q. You’ve recently been studying a 10-year-old pneumonia vaccine, with surprising results. What did you find out?
A. What we found after a couple of years was the disease diminished not only in the immunized but in every other age group including young adults — presumably the parents [of the vaccinated children] — and older adults — presumably the grandparents. If you diminish the [disease] in the protected, you protect the unimmunized.
Q. Like you, most vaccine researchers are strongly supportive of vaccines, but most also stand to benefit financially from vaccine sales. Isn’t there a danger in that?
A. The good news and the bad news of the vaccine industry is that, no profit, no product. If you want to have research and development, then the company has to make a sufficient product to support that.
Q. What do you say to the people who decline vaccines for their children?
A. If you never saw polio, you might say, Why should my kid get a vaccine that has no value? What these parents don’t recognize is the universality of travel. Either their child might want to take a trip to Bangladesh, or a student from one of those countries [that still has polio outbreaks] might come here. Travel makes us all exposed.
Q. Over the last 34 years, you have worked on seven editions of a textbook on infectious diseases in fetuses and newborns. What changes have you seen over that time?
A. New issues arise, old issues diminish. The first edition didn’t have anything about HIV. In subsequent issues, HIV became a very serious problem. During the ’80s, we would have a half-dozen children in the hospital all the time [with AIDS]. Now, we rarely have a child hospitalized. The only thing that’s elusive is a vaccine. That may not be coming for a while.
Q. Could we be over-immunizing children, actually making them more vulnerable to disease?
A. No matter how much an infant would be immunized they would still go out into the air. There’d be antigens and pollens. We’re constantly exposed.
Q. You graduated from medical school one year after Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was first released, and over your career, you watched vaccines end polio, measles, and other devastating diseases of childhood. What do you think will be as inspiring to the newest generation of doctors — global health?
A. It’s very attractive for our young residents to go to Uganda and work in a clinic there, but we have a lot of patients in Roxbury, and this is still our community, and we have a lot of obligations here.
KAREN WEINTRAUB
Interview was condensed and edited.
Karen Weintraub can be reached at karen@karenweintraub.com. 
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