Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as America’s new secretary of health and human services has left much of the medical community muttering: “What the heck?”
Kennedy’s stated mission is to “Make America Healthy Again.” Certainly, if one considers the astonishing rates of obesity and chronic illness that bedevil Americans, and the fact that American longevity lags well behind that of other rich countries, it’s a call to action that resonates.
But he’s got some odd ideas, such as that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS and that chemicals in the water are turning kids trans. Most upsetting to doctors, though, is his stubborn adherence to the utterly debunked notion that vaccines are linked to autism.
This claim first appeared in a 1998 paper published in the Lancet, which has since been retracted as it was found to be “fatally flawed.” The author, Andrew Wakefield, later had his licence to practice medicine revoked.
Not that autism rates haven’t increased sharply. Indeed, they have. That is in part due to increased recognition and expanded diagnostic criteria, but also in part for reasons that we don’t yet understand.
It’s also true that the incidence of autism has risen along roughly the same timeline as the expansion of childhood immunization regimens. But we all know — or should know — that correlation doesn’t equal causation: just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean that one of those things caused the other.
Other changes have taken place during that time span, as well. Our microbiomes, under perpetual assault from antibiotics (both prescribed and in our food), are radically different than they used to be. Children are birthed on average by significantly older mothers than they were 30 or 40 years ago.
Microplastics have become so ubiquitous in the environment that we each ingest (and mostly poop out) the equivalent of a credit card every week. Far more children are raised in cities today than in the past. Digital signals now permeate the air all around us.
Could any of these things be contributing to increasing rates of autism? Maybe, maybe not. Again: correlation doesn’t equal causation.
But RFK’s vendetta against vaccines has had tragic consequences. Take what happened in American Samoa in 2018. As respected vaccinologist Paul Offit recounts, two children died after being injected with improperly mixed MMR vaccine (the nurses responsible ultimately went to prison).
Kennedy seized upon the tragedy as proof of the deadliness of the MMR vaccine. After months of promoting that falsehood on social media, he visited the island and influenced the Samoan government to suspend its measles vaccination program. Measles immunization rates plummeted from 74 per cent in 2017 to around 31 per cent in late 2018.
And a massive outbreak of measles followed, in which 83 people died, most of them children under the age of four. Shaken, the Samoan Ministry of Health launched an aggressive measles vaccination campaign in November 2019, and the outbreak soon receded.
None of us want to go back to an era of children paralyzed by polio, kids choking to death on diphtheritic membranes, people wasting away from lockjaw or babies asphyxiating from pertussis. Without vaccines, “Make America Healthy Again” might as well be “Make America Infected Again.” Because that’s where we’re headed, now that vaccine skepticism has taken centre stage.
In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, with trust in the medical establishment shredded, rates of immunization appear to be declining, and herd immunity is in peril. Without a restoration of trust in vaccines, it’s only a matter of time before we get ourselves in trouble.
As far as RFK Jr. is concerned, it’s worth remembering the old biblical text from Galatians: “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.” Yeast doesn’t remain isolated in a single spot within a lump of dough. It spreads and becomes part of the entire loaf — just as dangerous notions and their consequences can metastasize and infect an entire population.
RFK Jr. may have many good ideas, but his anti-science position on vaccines is not one of them.
J. Edward Les is a Calgary pediatrician, a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and co-author of “Teenagers, Children, and Gender Transition Policy: A Comparison of Transgender Medical Policy for Minors in Canada, the United States, and Europe.”
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