For Kennedy, public health is not a goal. It’s an obstacle

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There are a few things I would like normal people to bear in mind tomorrow after they follow news coverage of congressional testimony by US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr.

First, there's no such thing as a “vaccine skeptic.” That is the preferred term of art being used by some political reporters to describe what Kennedy has done at the Centers for Disease Control. We’re told he pushed out scientists and hired “vaccine skeptics” to replace them.

Fact is, all scientists are skeptics, as they are skeptical of any claim that is not proven to be valid and true by way of the scientific method. They are skeptical because scientists are thoughtful and care about truth, because if they don’t, they don’t deserve their reputations as scientists.

That is not who Kennedy is hiring. He’s hiring scammers, liars and hacks, just like himself. They will believe anything if there’s money in it, and they are not skeptical of anything, except of people who actually know their stuff and, because of that, stand in the way of their grifting.

That’s what happened last week. Real scientists with real knowledge of honest-to-God reality refused to go along with Kennedy’s scheme to blame vaccines for “the autism epidemic.” He seems hell-bent on phasing out not only the covid vaccine but all vaccines in some mistaken belief that a little mass death makes a country healthier. CDC leaders were not going to be party to that. So altogether, they quit.

“Vaccine skeptics” are not skeptics of vaccines or anything at all, because knowledge isn’t the point. Deceit is. They’re liars. They’re cheats. And anyone who’s using the phrase “vaccine skeptics” is asking you to ignore that while advancing the lies and undermining the truth.

The second thing, building on the first, is that there are not two sides. Vaccines worked then. They work now. They will work in the future. There is no debate. There is no argument. There is no controversy. The fact that we are all standing here, and not six feet under after going through the worst plague in 100 years, is all the proof you should need.

The only way the covid vaccine can be seen as controversial is if one side of “the story” speaks truthfully while the other side speaks falsely, forcing “neutral observers” to look for some kind of middle ground, between fact and fiction, out of some misbegotten sense of fairness, thus giving cover to lies while casting the truth in the shadow of doubt.

That the press corps takes seriously the lies told by Kennedy and other “vaccine skeptics” is itself evidence that vaccines work. If we were still living in 1800, before there was a widely available shot for measles, mumps and other communicable diseases, half of all children would be dead. In 1900, one in five kids died before the age of 5. Every mom and dad used to live in fear of burying their children. The evidence of that terror can be found in the old graveyards. They’re full of dead kids.

“This concern, this hesitancy, these questions about vaccines are a consequence of the great success of the vaccines – because they eliminated the diseases,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University’ Medical Center, told the Associated Press back in June. “If you’re not familiar with the disease, you don’t respect or even fear it. And therefore you don’t value the vaccine.”

If we still lived in fear, I can’t imagine anyone indulging in “vaccine controversies,” not when there’s a miracle cure that can stop disease from killing a quarter of kindergartners. But we don’t, so we do. We have taken for granted the freedom created by medical science. We have become resentful of rules intended to perpetuate that freedom.

“Vaccine skeptics” are making it seem like scientists are trying to take away your liberty, not maximizing it. That, too, is another consequence of no one being afraid. In the absence of such fear, Florida has decided against requiring schoolkids to get shots. It is the first state to do so, but surely not the last. And it’s doing it in the name of individual rights.

In making the announcement, Florida’s top public health official said this afternoon that “people have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions” and that doctors and scientists “don’t have the right to tell you what to put in your body. Take it away from them.”

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, as the covid pandemic was still raging, the Washington press corps basically stopped taking seriously the lies that were coming out of the first Trump administration. Instead, it did what it’s supposed to: privilege facts above propaganda.

Trump’s attempts to smear then-presidential candidate Joe Biden did not have the impact he had been expecting then, because fear was going around as fast as the coronavirus. Tens of thousands of people were dead or dying, and journalists decided, unconsciously or not, that there was no time for playing around. Matters were just too serious.

But once the danger was over, which is to say, once Biden achieved the greatest public health recovery in American history, fear of death by diseased had faded enough for the media to get back to normal, that is, to finding that phony middle ground between truth and falsehood, obscuring the former, spreading the latter, and in time, making Florida seem like a bastion of liberty, rather than ignorance and superstition.

There is, of course, a remedy.

Death and the fear of it, like it used to be in the old days. Or as podcast host Edwin Eisendrath put it recently: "American parents are going to watch their children die because they didn't get them vaccinated."

That’s the final thing I want normal people to bear in mind after they finish following news coverage of Kennedy’s congressional testimony.

He is not intent on controlling and preventing disease. He’s intent on letting it run wild. That’s how he’s going to “make America healthy again.” Whatever doesn’t kill us will make us stronger. Public health is, therefore, not a goal. It’s an obstacle to overcome. Doing that first requires making us accept the idea that “vaccine skepticism” is real.