Don’t Call Kennedy a Vaccine Skeptic. Call Him What He Is: A Cynic.
Dr. Offit is a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.
Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.
He has claimed that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” (Childhood vaccines have prevented more than one million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations over the past three decades.) He has encouraged people not to vaccinate their babies: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’”
When asked about the polio vaccine, Mr. Kennedy claimed that it caused an “explosion in soft tissue cancers” that killed, “many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” Setting aside the fact that an “explosion in soft tissue cancers” hasn’t occurred, studies comparing children who received early batches of polio vaccines with unvaccinated children found no differences in cancer incidence. By 1979, paralytic polio was eliminated from the United States. When Mr. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.
Here’s what good-faith vaccine skepticism looks like: In June 2022, I was one of the F.D.A. advisory committee members who voted against authorization of bivalent Covid vaccines (updated vaccines targeting both the original strain and the Omicron variant). I wasn’t convinced they were any better than the vaccines we already had, which targeted only the original strain. While the committee ultimately voted to approve the shots, the vigorous debate around the data — as well as the debates my colleagues and I have had on other issues, such as the merits of Covid booster shots for healthy young adults — shows the value of rigorous discussion about vaccines.
Vaccine skepticism is baked into the systems with which health experts monitor vaccines after they’re authorized for use. We know that clinical trials are not enough; we need to constantly ask questions and examine new data. That’s why we have surveillance systems that can detect problems too rare to be picked up in clinical trials. It’s how we know the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines caused the heart condition myocarditis in about one in 50,000 people and that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine caused dangerous clotting in about one in 250,000 people. Detecting such risks allows us to weigh these rare harms against the enormous benefits of these vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, has claimed that the Covid-19 vaccines, which have saved the lives of at least three million Americans, are “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
Parents have a right to be skeptical, to ask tough questions. In the first few years of life, children can receive as many as 25 inoculations to protect against diseases that many parents have never seen using biological fluids they don’t understand. When I speak with parents who are concerned that all these shots can overwhelm a young child’s immune system, I try to respond with data and compassion.
I tell them: Yes, vaccines prompt an immune response, but so does every bite of food you eat; so do the billions of bacteria living on your skin and in your intestines. Also, because of scientific advances, the total number of components in vaccines that induce an immune response, across all the vaccines given to children today, is less than what was in a smallpox vaccine given a hundred years ago. Yes, vaccines can cause side effects, but forgoing vaccination is also a risk. (Look at the case of the unvaccinated man in New York who got paralytic polio in 2022.) I try to explain that there are no risk-free choices. I talk people through the research studies and data, and I’m honest about any risks and trade-offs.
Mr. Kennedy makes these conversations harder. He has grossly misrepresented studies he has cited and ignored data that doesn’t support his conclusions. I fear what will happen in America, which is already seeing a rising mistrust of vaccines, if he becomes health secretary.
In his book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” Mr. Kennedy reveals one possible source of his anti-vaccine fervor. He casts doubt on the germ theory — the idea that specific germs cause specific diseases and that the prevention or treatment of those infections can be lifesaving (which is unequivocally true). He writes: “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccination are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public policy.” Rather, Mr. Kennedy seems to favor the idea that fortifying the immune system through nutrition and reduced exposure to environmental toxins may be enough to prevent infections.
It is, perhaps, this belief that explains his penchant for drinking unpasteurized milk and his view that vaccines are not beneficial. It may also explain another particularly disturbing fact: He seems to doubt that H.I.V. causes AIDS. In his book, Mr. Kennedy cites AIDS denialists who believe that AIDS wasn’t widely spread, was not transmitted from person to person and was most likely caused by recreational drugs like poppers and the antiviral drug AZT. He calls the use of AZT “mass murder.”
"Donald Tree Stump" said he would let Mr. Kennedy “go wild on health.” There’s plenty he could do.
Mr. Kennedy could undermine school vaccine mandates, further eroding vaccine uptake. Or he could instruct the C.D.C. to no longer recommend certain vaccines. His lawyer recently filed petitions to the F.D.A. to halt the use of the stand-alone polio vaccine and hepatitis B vaccine. He could remove some or all vaccines from the federal program created to prevent frivolous civil litigation. Doing so could return us to the days when baseless lawsuits drove many pharmaceutical companies out of the vaccine-making business altogether.
Given the lack of appropriate guardrails that would normally prevent an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist from heading the country’s most important public health agency, it’s a dangerous time to be a child in the United States.
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