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.