Arguably the most important medical innovation of the 20th century is under attack, in part because it’s been so effective.
We live in an era when diseases such as polio are incredibly rare — because of childhood vaccines. Now, thanks to the antivaxxer-in-chief at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., we may be reentering the era of long-eradicated infectious diseases.
In a contentious Senate hearing in September, RFK tried to have it both ways on vaccines. He asserted that President Donald Trump deserved the Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, which yielded the COVID-19 vaccine in record time in late 2020. But he also claimed the vaccine didn’t work.
“Secretary Kennedy is all over the place,” said Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and a Yale professor of medicine. “He contradicts himself, he says one thing, then he says the exact opposite. And then when he is caught on that, he deflects or goes in yet additional directions.”
The federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has traditionally set nationwide recommendations on vaccines. But ACIP’s new configuration includes members hand-picked by RFK. And soon after the September hearing, the committee released weakened and confusing recommendations on COVID-19 and childhood vaccinations.
“This is no way to approach public health,” says Steinbrook.
For years, antivaxxers have been the bane of science-based medicine. By exploiting legitimate public suspicions of pharmaceutical companies, they have sowed enough doubt among Americans to make RFK appear reasonable in some quarters.
With President Donald Trump echoing RFK’s false information on vaccines and on medication as benign as acetaminophen, the charlatan heading HHS is causing even stalwart Republicans to waver. An unnamed GOP lawmaker told The Hill that their colleagues are “starting to break ranks” over RFK.
Still, how did an antivaxxer make it into one of the most important positions of medical power in the nation? In part, because Republican senators — including those who claim to take science-based medicine seriously — overrode their own concerns to confirm him.
Take Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who at the HHS Secretary’s Senate confirmation hearing last January blamed RFK in part for the growing numbers of parents eschewing vaccines for their children.
Cassidy, a physician and head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, was a key vote for RFK’s confirmation. The senator, who claims he extracted pro-vaccine promises from RFK as justification for his confirmation vote, appears to have sacrificed his own principles for politics.
According to Dr. Steinbrook, “a number of the Republican Senators did push back and voice support for vaccines. Of course, these senators also voted to confirm Secretary Kennedy.”
I’ve diligently vaccinated my own children. The shots ensure their safety in a way that wasn’t widely available to children a hundred years ago. But vaccines aren’t simply about individual choice, as antivaxxers might claim. Their effectiveness is based on herd immunity.
Unvaccinated people are far more likely to succumb to infectious diseases, as many people in low-income nations know first-hand. And the more vaccination rates fall, the more a disease can spread. The more people are exposed, the more likely they are to catch a disease, even if they are vaccinated.
Vaccines work best when almost everyone is vaccinated. It’s an act of collective care that we seem to have taken for granted, perhaps because large numbers of children aren’t dropping dead around us — as they did throughout human history before vaccines.
Now, thanks to RFK and his growing army of antivaxxers, my children’s health and safety is at risk — as are everyone’s.
Thankfully, the American Academy of Pediatrics and state governments are stepping in to reassert the importance of vaccines. But RFK’s leadership has, in Dr. Steinbrook’s words, “put us in very much uncharted territory for the future of public health in this country.”
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
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