Category Archives: Health

Vaccine Skeptic or Anti-vax?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

R.F.K. Jr. has frequently denied that he is anti-vax despite the ample evidence to the contrary.  Dr. Paul A. Offit is another well-respected American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is not a fan of R.F.K. Jr. In an interesting article in the New York Times he explained his view of Kennedy this way,

 

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.

 

Even though childhood vaccines have prevented more than 1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the past 30 years Kennedy says no vaccine is safe and effective.  That sounds pretty good to me.

Kennedy also claims vaccines were not properly studied before use. This also sounds good, but as Dr. Offit said, “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.”

 

As I have said before skepticism is good and important. We need skeptics to constantly keep scientists on their toes and alert to potential problems. Complacency is dangerous. But we need   skepticism based on good science and careful analysis. Not blather like that of so many vaccine skeptics. We must always remain skeptical of the skeptics too. Otherwise, they can do serious harm.

 

Dr. Offit says he is a skeptic. He needs proof that vaccines are safe and effective. He pointed out that he was on the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee which voted in favor of the  authorisation of the bivalent Covid vaccine which targeted both the original strain of the virus and Omicron variant, but he voted against its authorization because he was not convinced that the updated vaccine was better than the original. He said he and his colleagues debated the pros and cons vigorously.  Rigorous debate is essential for good science.

 

As a result he and his colleagues constantly ask question and examine new data and when warranted make changes. Sometimes the public is annoyed at the changes, but that is how science works. Nothing is baked in. Nothing is sacred. Even after the clinical trials are done they continue their surveillance systems because not all problems are picked up in the clinical trials. That was how they discovered the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines caused the heart condition myocarditis in about 1 in 50,000 people. They also discovered that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine caused dangerous blood clotting in about 1 in 250,000. With that data they evaluated these rare harms against the enormous benefits and decided the vaccines should be continued. The benefits out weighed the harms.

 

Despite all this hard and effective scientific work he was annoyed when “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 “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

 

He knows that all vaccines have side-effects. It is impossible to avoid them. But he responded this way: “Yes, vaccines can cause side effects, but forgoing vaccination is also a risk… there are no risk-free choices.”

 

In other words, if you choose not to take the vaccine you are probably taking a much bigger risk.  Skeptics like R.F.K. Jr. make things harder for parents to make the right decision for their children because according to Dr. Offit, he “he has cited and ignored data that doesn’t support his conclusions.”  And that creates mistrust of vaccines and the authorities in charge of them and that can be very dangerous for society.

 

Dr. Offit in his article ended with the expression of an ominous concern: “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.”

 

I would add, that is also true of Canada.

 

And that’s not where we want to be.

Robert Kennedy After the Pandemic

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

After the pandemic, PBS Newshour had this to say about RFK Jr.:

 

“Post-pandemic, Kennedy has continued to criticize the recommended vaccine schedule for children that is put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as adult COVID and flu vaccines.”

 

At the same time he vociferously denied he was anti-vax when he was trying to get approved by the Senate for the position of Secretary of Health, arguably the most important position in government in relation to public health.

 Here is Kennedy’s exact statement which was shown on PBS News Hour:

 

Question:

 

Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee:

 

I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably solve — averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.

Kennedy has claimed he is not anti-vax but that seems about as clearly anti-vax as you can get. And Trump appointed him to be his Secretary of Health, nonetheless.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put it very clearly:

 

“Let’s be really clear about the fact he is an anti-vaccine messenger, and he has continued to be, and we have many, many examples of that.

 

The second thing is, is that, in this country, and, for that matter, throughout the world, when vaccines are licensed and approved, all the safety data that goes into licensing that vaccine is made public, nothing hidden in a vault somewhere that, if it were just opened up, the public would now have sunshine on a vaccine issue they didn’t have before.

 

Dr. Osterholm also warned that by appointing R.F.K. to such a prestigious position, it will inevitably weaken the vaccine policy of the government and limit uptake of vaccines across the country,

“by lending a veneer of legitimacy to his many disproven claims, allowing him to influence the licensing of new vaccines, and by firing many of the public health experts at HHS.”

 

And as we have seen by the Measles outbreaks in the US and Canada, this is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, Dr. Osterholm was proven right. He then ominously concluded,

 

“As we have more and more infections occur as a result of fewer and fewer people being vaccinated, within literally a few years, we could be back into a period not that dissimilar to what we had happening in the early 1900s, before vaccines. That’s hard for people to imagine.”

 

It may be hard to imagine, but that is precisely where we now are. Thanks to Trump and Kennedy and others, we have regressed more than 100 years.

 

Recently, Kennedy fired all 17 physicians on his Vaccine Advisory Panel. He didn’t like the advice he got from any of them!  Some of the physicians he has replaced them with have been far from conventional.  Does Kennedy know what he is doing? There is no evidence that he does.  Frankly, to me, the fact that he was appointed by Trump makes me think he does not. It would be an unusual Trump appointment if he did. I hope I am wrong. These positions are two important to get it wrong.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: the Lawyer who Thinks he is a physician

Conspiracy Theories, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (R.F.K.Jr.) became famous early in life as an environmental lawyer. He was a pretty good one too.

Later he morphed into a conspiracy theorist and a maverick health advocate. How did that happen?  Perhaps it happened because his years of fighting corporations and the government he developed scepticism about everything the authorities told him.  That was likely a rational response to the situations he was in.

Sadly, after that promising start, RFK Jr. started to flounder. In a way he began to think that as a smart lawyer he knew everything and was virtually a physician. He is not a physician. I hate to say it, but lawyers have this uncomfortable tendency.

As a result, the scientific community has been strongly opposed to many of his views, which are in their opinion, not just maverick, but contrary to good science. We need good science, but we also need dissenters.  They keep us on our toes. They can show us how the comfortable majority can be wrong. We must always remember that we can be wrong. However, we must not let our scepticism poison us to good evidence, good science, and good reasoning.

Michael Thomas Osterholm is an American epidemiologist, and Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He is also a vocal opponent of R.F.K. Jr.

This is what he said about R.F.K. Jr. on PBS Newshour: “He is a voice machine that continues to put out dis and mis-information in such a way that it sounds believable to the public.”

Frankly, Kennedy has a history of spreading misinformation. As William Brangham of PBS News Hour reported in December of 2024,

“In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article for “Rolling Stone” magazine and Salon that asserted a connection between autism and a mercury-containing vaccine additive called thimerosal. Thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001 and it was never used in the MMR vaccine. After that piece ran, the two publications discovered multiple errors in his work and they retracted it. A decade later, Kennedy joined a group called the World Mercury Project, which a few years later became the Children’s Health Defense, which is a nonprofit that has been a principal promoter of misinformation about vaccines.”

 

According to Derek Beres, Co-Host of Conspirituality: “That’s when it seems that he really got embedded in the anti-vax world.” Beres, according to PBS Newshour, has long been tracking RFK. Jr. and his influence about the intersection of the wellness industry and online conspiracies.

According to William Brangham from PBS Newshour,

“Months before the COVID pandemic began, Kennedy met with anti-vaccine advocates on the island nation of Samoa, which had seen a huge drop in its vaccine rates after a medical mistake killed two children. In late 2019, there was a Measles outbreak there; 83 people died, many of them young children.”

 

Kennedy later called the outbreak — quote — “mild” and denied playing any role in it. When COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., many Americans became frustrated with the evolving and sometimes conflicting guidance on wearing masks and the protections provided by vaccines, as well as the many stay-at-home orders, which impacted schools, churches, and businesses across the nation. That frustration became highly politicized, and donations surged to Kennedy’s non-profit, which went on to finance the documentary series called “Plandemic,” which alleged that a shadowy group was using the coronavirus and vaccines to get rich and powerful.

 Would you call 83 deaths on a small island a “mild” outbreak?

 That documentary series has had an enormous effect on Americans and Canadians, including the Reeve of the R.M. of Labroquerie Louis Weiss, a few miles from my house,  when he quoted misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic here in Manitoba that got him into trouble and helped to make this area here, for awhile at least, the hotbed of Canadian anti-vax hysteria.

This is what Beres told PBS about that documentary series supported by R.F.K. Jr.:

“I cannot think of anything more consequential for the anti-vax movement than “Plandemic.” It struck an emotional chord at a time when everyone was locked inside and really confused about their own lives and about existence in general. And it’s understandable that you would be confused by what’s happening if you have never experienced it, but that doesn’t give people the right to spread misinformation to the level that “Plandemic” did. And I think we’re going to be feeling the consequences of that propaganda film for generations.”

 

People began to believe that bad actors had planned the pandemic. This led to a spate of wild conspiracy theories. That is the fruit of Kennedy’s work. And now, thanks to Trump, he is the US Secretary of Health.

 

Vaccine Success Story

Critical thinking, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

I first heard about Robert F. Kennedy many years ago when he was a well-respected environmental lawyer. But that was then. This is now.

 

Now many people consider him an extremist on matters of health and the environment. They think he has gone over the top. Yet Donald Trump appointed him as Secretary of Health. Then things got crazy. As Trump himself, “I told him to go wild with health.” He seemed to some to a radical but good choice. Others have gone apoplectic in opposition. Where does the truth lie?

 

This past winter Christiane and I spent 2 months living on Vancouver Island.  My hiking companion, let’s call him Bob, was an enthusiast for health and was an iconoclast who greatly admired Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He was a little younger and a lot more fit than I was. We had a friendly argument on our way home after a marvelous hike in the local rain forest. In the end we agreed to disagree on friendly terms.  But I decided I should do a little more research on my own as my friend Bob had done.  I wanted my research which would be conducted on line to include only reliable sources such as internationally respected infectious disease specialists I knew about from my experiences listening to speakers on TV during the Covid-19 pandemics about whom some of them are.

 

One of those was Dr. Michael Osterholm who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I had heard him many times and he was frequently consulted by many others. I decided I would respect his opinion.  Fortunately, he had recently been interviewed by PBS News Hour, another trusted source in my opinion.

 

On that television show I heard that

 

“More than 75 Nobel laureates [in December of 2024] signed a letter asking the U.S. Senate not to confirm health and human services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing his opposition to vaccines among their concerns.”

 

William Brangham, the PBS interviewer began by citing what I had always believed:

 

Vaccines are easily one of modern medicine’s most successful interventions. Over the past two centuries, they virtually eradicated diseases like smallpox, polio, measles, and many others that once regularly disfigured, disabled, and killed hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of them children.

 

 

Yet millions of Americans and Canadians, including people I know personally, believed that vaccines were dangerous, poorly studied, and promulgated by an anxious  government of whom we should be suspicious.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm made this opening statement:

 

…the bottom line is, for every two days we have lived in the last century, we have gained a day of life expectancy. That’s incredible. And it’s because of these tools, notably vaccines, that that’s happened.

 

Vaccines have truly been a remarkable success. Some have said they might be the greatest medical achievement of the 20th century. We should not reject them out of hand unless we had good reasons for doing so.

As William Brangham, correctly pointed out:

 

That’s not to say there are no risks to them, including occasional allergic reactions, injuries, and, in rare cases, deaths. And public health experts like Osterholm say it is important to examine and continually monitor any adverse effects. But, on balance, those risks are far lower than those of the diseases they’re protecting against.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put this into graphic context so even a simple man like I could understand it:

 

If, today, I were in an automobile accident and I had my seat belt on, but somehow the seat belt jammed and I was unfortunately trapped in the car and the car caught on fire, this would be a horrible tragedy. Would anybody say, we’ve got to eliminate seat belts now? No, because, in fact, there have been many, many, many more lives saved because of seat belts as opposed to not.

 

Yet, we face a small but growing and very vocal minority of Americans and Canadians who have been rebelling against the scientific and medical orthodoxy.  These people, such as Bob and the real estate agent I met in Tempe Arizona, at the conference I mentioned in a previous post, as well as Christiane’s cousin have been refusing to accept the majority opinion about all kinds of vaccines. Over the past couple of decades, there has been a small, but growing vocal minority pushing back against vaccines because of what they have perceived to be substantial harms, including the widely debunked claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. That was based on an article in a widely respected medical journal “The Lancet” published in England in the 1990s by a doctor Andrew Wakefield. I also learned that he had lost his medical license as a result of that scientific paper which the Lancet subsequently withdrew.

 

Since then, Robert F. Kennedy who was trained as an environmental lawyer became an important player in the anti-vax movement that followed the publication of the original paper, now withdrawn.

 

So where does the truth lie? I think it likely lies with science. We must look at science with a critical eye, but there really is no better source for good health information. Not even lawyers. Not Robert F. Kennedy. And not me either.

Why are Governments not Trusted?

Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Neo-liberalism, Oligarchy, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

 

As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of hesitance to trust vaccines is a result of distrust of government. This is a shame, because particularly in troubling times such as pandemics, it is essential that people trust their government about the information they give about vaccines or other health measures.  Distrust in government is not a laughing matter.  Distrust in government is a very costly matter.

 

Figuring out why governments are not trusted is a tricky thing.  Nesrine Malik said this about citizens of her country of Sudan who believed the government could not be trusted in giving them good vaccines for free:

 

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

 

We tend to learn from experience. Our own experience. In Sudan the consistent experience of people with the government is that it will try to screw the citizens in favor of their cronies. They are naturally reluctant to believe that free vaccines are given to them for the welfare of the people. After all, their government has rarely considered the welfare of the people. This is called crony capitalism, or in extreme cases, oligarchy. Oligarchs won’t hesitate to use their power to screw us. That is what they do all around the world. And in Canada and the US the trajectory is in the direction of oligarchy.

 

In the US they are increasingly nearing oligarchy, if they are not there already. The rich in the US who have the ear of the government use that power to ensure that money is not “wasted” on public health. Many of the health insurance companies do all they can to maximize their profits even at the expense of their customers. Christiane and I have recently experienced a most bizarre version of this that I must blog about some day.

 

As Nesrine Malik said in her Guardian article: “Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust.” Americans know that pharmaceutical companies earn enormous profits. You might even say, as Malik did, “outrageous profits.”  In the UK during the Covid-19  pandemic people were reluctant to trust the government because journalists revealed how their government kept changing the rules while leaders refused to obey the rules themselves. We had that in Canada too. We have no vaccine against corruption. Or ignorance for that matter.  As Malik said, “State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance.”

 

This is what Nesrine Malik said,

 “Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinising the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.”

 

I think Malik makes a lot of sense. It is not a simple answer to a complex problem. It is a complex answer, as it should be. 

In the west, since the time of extreme neo-liberalism of Saint Ronny Reagan, the Iron Lady, Maggie Thatcher, and to a lesser extent their dedicated follower Brian Mulroney anti-government propaganda has flourished since the 1980s as Americans and Canadians have been fed a steady diet of dubious claims that the state is unreliable and predatory.  As Saint Ronald Reagan said, “the most scary 11 words in the English language are, ‘I am from the government and I have come to help.’ For decades, conservative political leaders have repeated over and over and over again that the government cannot be trusted.

As a result many of us believe this. And that is a costly mistake. This is all part of neo-liberal dogma/propaganda that the government can’t be trusted only the private sector is worth our trust.

Of course, this ideology has for decades served the interests of the wealthy who care most about minimizing their personal or corporate taxes. This ideology is now so prevalent that even people whose best interests would be served by government are reluctant to accept its help. Governments provide many things of enormous value including hospitals, roads, libraries, universities, parks, environmental regulations, health and safety standards to name only a few. Governments are important!  And vaccines are a very important part of this. For decades we have been taught, and many of us believed, that governments are bad and private enterprise is good. Now we are paying a heavy price for blindly following that ideology.

The Miracle of Vaccines?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

Few things have surprised me as much as vaccine hesitancy.  The first time I remember coming across this phenomenon was at a conference at Arizona State University which Christiane and I attended.  It was a conference organized by SCETL, their School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. It was our first of many annual conferences we attended there. Attending their annual spring conference was a highlight of our trip down south each year. And they also served us lunch. That year they even gave us wine. All of this for free. They had professors from universities around the country and even Europe and Canada speaking. It was fantastic. And they opened it for members of the public. Christiane and I were a bit nervous the first time we attended, thinking, naturally we did not belong. These were top academics and journalists and thinkers from around the world. But we enjoyed it immensely.

 

For lunch that first year we sat at a round table and were joined by a real estate salesperson. She was also an ordinary citizen like us but enjoyed exploring new ideas, like us.  But she shocked me. She countered a statement that one of the professors had made about autism not being caused by vaccines. She said she had done a lot of research and it was now very clear that vaccines were dangerous and did actually cause autism. “We should never take them,” she said. We should never allow our family members to take them either.

 

I had never heard of this idea before. It surprised me because I had always been a staunch advocate of vaccines since as a young lad terrified of polio during the polio pandemic of the 1950s.  I remember hearing that some people who had polio would have to live most of their entire lives inside an iron lung. Even children my age could be subjected to that. How awful was that? We had a polio victim down the street from us. He was not in an iron lung but I feared for him. Even more I feared for me. It was very scary. The disease affected many young children like me and they were kept alive by these iron lungs.

 

Then like a miracle from God a polio vaccine was discovered.  It could protect us from such a fate. Later I realized this was not a miracle from God, it was a miracle of science. Scientists were so smart they figured out how to save us from these dreadful iron lungs.

 

Then years later as a pretty old man in Arizona State University, I was told that  these vaccines were not safe. How could that be? This was before Covid-19 when I learned many people distrusted the Covid-19 vaccines. I, again, was overjoyed when these vaccines were made available.  Who was I to believe? The real estate agent or scientists I heard on TV or read about in respected journals?  I did a little research too. And it indicated there was a crazy conspiracy theory going around that vaccines caused autism.

 

To me the issue was clear. I would not believe the real estate agent even though she had seemed intelligent and sincere. She knew a lot about vaccines. At least compared to me.  I doubted that she learned more on the Internet than these respected scientists. It just seemed highly unlikely. But I was determined to learn more.

 

Dying of Stubbornness and Ignorance

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trump, Trust and Distrust

 

North Americans are repeating what they did during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are not heeding good science in favour of more attractive positions self-learned on the Internet.  Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times this during the Covid pandemic and it sounds ominously familiar:

“So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.”

 

We must remember how during the Covid pandemic people in hospitals diagnosed with Covid-19 refused to believe their physicians even as they lay dying.  We see something similar now with regard to measles. Physicians have made it clear how important the measles vaccine has been in safely reducing the consequences of measles and saving thousands of lives and yet many continue to disbelieve the scientific evidence or the advice of medical advisors in favor of Internet quacks. As Blow said this about those times:

“All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.”

 

 

Blow called this “anti-vax insanity.” That is what it was during Covid. And that is what it is again in the case of Measles. The Covid-19 vaccines were incredibly safe and so are the measles vaccines, yet too many people refuse to take them.

 

Blow said this about the reaction of conservatives to scientific evidence relating to Covid-19:

“Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.”

 

Once again conservative leaders are leading their faithful adherents to their doom. Blow also said during the Covid-19 pandemic  “They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.” Again, the vaccine deniers are showing their over commitment to “lies and conspiracies” about the measles vaccines.

 

Note as well the words, “too devoted to rebellion.” I will come back to that in a future post.

 

Mennonites Lead the Charge Against Health Protections

Death of Truth, Health, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Vaccines

 

I used to joke that Mennonites are taking over the world. It’s actually true. And its not a good thing. It’s actually very dangerous. But it is preventable by vaccines. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. And we have not been taking it seriously, because we have been so effective at combating it. And that is all thanks to vaccines for measles.

 

The United States has just experienced a measles outbreak in the American southwest, particularly in Texas. On February 26, 2025 for the first time in 20 years a child died of Measles in Texas. It was also the first time in nearly a decade in the US. Texas confirmed it had 124 cases mostly in Gaines County and 9 cases in Lea County New Mexico.

 

Here’s the shocking part:

“Most of the cases are occurring in a Mennonite community that largely homeschools, so there would not be school vaccine mandates,” explains Bill Moss, MD, MPH, a professor in Epidemiology and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center.”

 

You see most schools in the US mandate that children enrolled in the school must be vaccinated against measles. Mennonites in these communities mainly homeschool. And these homes don’t get their children vaccinated.  As Mennonites sometimes say, “We trust in God. We don’t need vaccines.” They think God is stronger than any disease and all they need to do is appeal to God. Sadly, that’s not working so well.

 

As Aliza Rosen of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said,

 

“At a time of rampant mis- and disinformation about vaccines, public health experts worry outbreaks like this may only become more common in a time of rampant mis- and disinformation about vaccines, public health experts worry outbreaks like this may only become more common.”

 

As Dr. Ron Cook, of Texas Tech University said on PBS News Hour,

 

“If you walk into a room and you have measles, 80 to 90 percent of those individuals within a week will come down with measles. All you have to do is go in that room, breathe, cough a couple of times, but 80 to 90 percent of those individuals in that room will become infected with measles if they’re not vaccinated.”

 

Even though the vast majority of Americans and Canadians believe in the safety and effectiveness and safety of vaccines, there are growing numbers of people who are skeptical about vaccines, unvaccinated people account for the almost all the new cases of measles. And sadly, those numbers include children.

 

As Caitlan Rivers, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, pointed out,

“In fact, 93 percent of people are vaccinated against measles. That is an enormous congruency in a population that otherwise can’t agree on a whole lot.”

 

Rivers also said she was troubled by misinformation coming from the newly Trump appointed secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has made it clear that he questions vaccines.  All of us should question vaccines, but when we get clear answers from a wide majority of scientists and researchers, we should believe them until we learn for some reason they can’t be trusted. Unfortunately, many Mennonites in some communities don’t trust in the science. They do their own research on line or have faith.

 

Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on vaccines and one of the  committee advisers and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said,

 

“I just fear that we are slowly sort of tearing apart the public health process that has basically served us well. I mean, we live 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago, primarily because of vaccines. And I just think vaccines have become, I think, following this pandemic, to some, a dirty word.”

 

Dr. Offit, like Caitlan Rivers lays a lot of blame at the feet of people like Robert F. Kennedy for spreading misinformation about vaccines that has influenced people like the home-schooling Mennonites. This is what he said:

 

“So, if you look at that Mennonite community, about 80 percent of those children were vaccinated. That’s not enough. It has to be in the mid-95 percent range to protect against this disease, measles, which is the most contagious infectious disease, more contagious than any other infectious disease.”

 

And so it will find those people who are unvaccinated and cause an infection. I think this was a line that was crossed. This is the first measles death in a child in almost 20 years. That’s a tragedy because, one, any death in the child is a tragedy.

 

This was a preventable death. We basically eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000. It’s come back largely because people have chosen not to vaccinate their children, in part because they’re scared of the vaccine, scared that it has safety issues like autism, something that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been promoting loudly and to many people for the last 20 years. And I think this is the result of that.

 

As a result Mennonites are bringing death to their communities—particularly children—because they are listening to misinformation rather than scientists. As a result children are at risk or even dying from a preventable disease. That’s bad.

 

Insecure People are a template for disaster

Decline of the west, Health

As Astra Taylor says in her 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, this is the age of insecurity.

Charles E. Moore a physician and the Chief of Service Otolaryngology at the Grady Health System points out that for African Americans who have always had a lower life expectancy than comparable whites, it is significant that they have always had chronic stress. The life expectancies of African-Americans have been rising slightly while that of white working-class people has been declining.  He suggests that this might be because whites experiencing stress is something new.

Yet African-American life expectancies are still 3 &1/2 years less than whites. But the gap is closing. Dr. Moore also operates a clinic in Atlanta.  He says you can expect a 12-year difference in life expectancy between the African-Americans he largely treats and the whites that live north of Atlanta. All you have to do is look at their zip codes and you know the story. It is that simple.

Many of his patients have to choose between medication and food, or medication and gas. Those are some tough choices they have to make. That generates a lot of stress.

People who have been laid off from their jobs often blame greed. Often, they believe compassion is lost from society. It is all just about money. The pain they feel can easily turn to despair. Many of the people thought they had job security and then they got laid off. Many times they had committed to buying houses they thought they could afford because they had job security. Then they found out the hard way that they had no security. Those people have suffered. It is even worse when they continually hear that the economy is improving. Laid off people don’t see that. Insecure people don’t see that. Many people don’t see that.

Many of such people find the stress intolerable and turn to suicide. As Dr. Gupta said, “In the United States more people die by suicide with a hand gun than die by homicide with a hand gun. It’s gone up 30% in the last 17 years.”

Dr. Gupta believes that the problem is ultimately expectations. Many people in the United States and Canada for that matter believe that if you just work hard enough everything will work out fine. “Those dashed expectations end up being a unique and toxic feature here. The headline is that stress kills.”

As Dr. Rajita Sinha, a Clinical Neuroscientist and Director of the Yale Stress Center said, “Stress is everywhere. We are drinking more. We were smoking more before we had social interventions; we have a massive obesity epidemic, and we have economic and economic stress. So we have the stage for uncontrollable chronic stress.” That is a template for disaster.

It is also a template for a declining society. That is really the point I am trying to make.

The Meaning of Life under Stress

Decline of the west, Health

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told Dr. Sanjaya Gupta. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and Anne Case coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

In the end of the second decade of the 21st century everyone seems to think the economy is improving, but all these working class people see are plants closing and jobs disappearing. The economy may be booming but they don’t see that for themselves. Everyone else seems to be doing well. The economy may be booming now but so many people are still left behind. These people feel deep resentment. These people feel betrayed. They don’t think America is great. They want it to be great again like it was. And resentment is a powerful and explosive force!

What do you do when the plant you have worked at for decades shuts down? It is tough. It is also tough on those who work in other plants. They can see that this might happen to them too.  That makes people feel uneasy. They are insecure and stressed. And this has happened over and over again in many sectors. Economic insecurity has become rampant.

The key is the lack of control that leads to stress. How much does your job or your status affect your health? There was a famous study out of England called the Whitehall Study that was one of the first that tried to dig into this issue.

Sir Michael Marmot an epidemiologist from University College in England was involved in that study. He said when his study started everybody “knew” that stress caused heart disease. And everybody “knew” that high status people had more stress. It was obvious to everyone. I knew as a lawyer in what I always thought was a high stress profession that I had much more stress than most other people. Then one day I read a report in a newspaper about stress. It might have been a report about the Whitehall Study in fact. It said legal secretaries had more stress than lawyers. How could that be? Yet the study revealed that among civil servants at least the lower your status the shorter your life expectancy. Lack of control at work increases heart disease, mental illness and muscularly skeletal disorders. That is what chronic stress is all about.

As Professor Marmot said, “So close the link between social circumstances and mental health gives us a measure of how well we are doing as a society.”

Insecurity leads to stress which leads to poor health. This is a dangerous path that so many of us are walking and it can transform our lives sometimes in very unpleasant ways.