Editor’s note: Today’s edition is going out to everyone, as it always does. A couple of reminders: if you want to get in touch with me, all you need to do is reply to this message. Every reply goes straight to me. I interact with readers frequently that way. Also: I’m very active on Bluesky. I’m still on Twitter, but not as much, as it’s truly vile these days. If you want to comment on my essays in real-time, go to Bluesky. Thanks! –JS

I’m writing in advance today, but I think it’s likely that US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr will defend his “vaccine skepticism” in testimony before a Senate committee. He’ll say something about how vaccines should be the choice of the individual and how the government shouldn’t force individuals into getting them. 

Kennedy might even hint, as he has before, that vaccine requirements are a form of political oppression and that “cleaning house” at the Centers for Disease Control was his way of “restoring public trust.”

This “individualist” way of thinking about vaccines is common and widespread. It’s informing choices made by top public health officials. Florida’s surgeon general said Wednesday the state will not mandate vaccines for schoolkids. “People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions,” he said. Public health authorities like himself “don’t have the right to tell you what to put in your body.”

Don’t let them fool you. 

Vaccines are an individual choice the way drunk driving is an individual choice. You can choose to endanger everyone — you can make choices that create conditions for negligent homicide — but that doesn’t mean your reasons are good, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should get away with such a crime. But that’s what you’re doing when you “liberate” the “drunk drivers” who make up the antivax movement.

You’re making drunk driving seem noble.

Our government was constituted to secure the life and liberties of the people, and every president in my lifetime (including Donald Trump, during his first term) has overseen a national public health apparatus that behaved honorably in trying to meet that constitutional standard, by controlling and preventing the spread of deadly, infectious disease.

What Kennedy is doing, and what Florida is doing, is pushing the awesome responsibility of the government onto the shoulders of individuals who cannot do for themselves what they may wish to do. But they are doing something else we should never tolerate from government officials: compromising peace by rationalizing disorder.

This is public health we’re talking about. It’s not choosing tea or coffee at Starbucks. Your decisions do not begin and end with you. If you decide against vaccinating your school-age child against measles and mumps, say, you put every student in your child’s school at risk of infection, injury or death, though they themselves may be vaccinated.

Because these individual choices have collective consequences, the public should not accept as worthy of debate any argument that says vaccines should be the sole choice of the individual. Public health policy without the democratic input of the public is a recipe for anarchy and chaos. And because vaccines should never be a solely individual choice, the public should examine the true intentions of anyone who says otherwise, with extreme prejudice, while demanding that the government protect the public from these thieves and liars.  

Antivaxers claim that public trust can be restored by gutting rules (vaccine mandates) that, they say, violate individual liberty. But the problem isn’t the rules. It’s a lack of enforcement – of making the rules apply equally to everyone, no matter who they are. The government cannot restore public trust by encouraging lawlessness and disorder. The government can restore public trust by enforcing law and order. 

That’s how we should understand this – as a conflict between those who want the government to protect everyone’s freedom (in this case, from sickness, fear and death by preventable disease) and those who want the government to empower vigilantes to steal others’ freedom, including from those who seek “liberation.” (Such vigilantes include the terrorist Vance Boelter, who assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker under the delusion that he was freeing the American people from tyranny.)

Antivaxers want us to believe the debate is between individuals and the government. There is no debate, however, as the true poles in this conflict are between anarchy and peace, between disorder and the law. And when that’s clear, it’s also clear there is no battle at all. After all, who in his right mind wants to stand on the side of lawlessness? 

Well, Robert F Kennedy Jr does.

But he’s not in his right mind. 

We must change the way we view the frame to see what can and must be done to counteract the antivax lies and propaganda currently coming straight from the top. Yesterday, California, Oregon and Washington announced a joint effort in which they would make their own vaccine guidelines and make sure residents have access to them. Officials said the states are creating their own regional CDC, because the existing one under Robert F Kennedy Jr can no longer be trusted. 

In other words, they’re restoring trust by restoring order.

Other states are likely to follow suit, just as others still are likely to follow Florida, but I hope the Democrats take note. Before last week, when the White House fired the head of the CDC (for refusing to lie about vaccines), the Democratic position was that Kennedy should not have been confirmed. (All Senate Democrats voted against him.) Now, after last week’s purge, some Democrats are calling for his resignation. 

On MSNBC, Jon Ossoff said as much, adding that Kennedy is uniquely unqualified and that he’s “embraced just about every piece of quackery and pseudo-science that he’s come across. He needs to step down.”

But while it’s true, as Ossoff said, that what Kennedy is doing “is gross mismanagement that’s putting this nation at risk,” that’s still going easy on him, as it treats his intentions as off-limits. They shouldn’t be. As I said yesterday, public health isn’t a goal. It’s an obstacle. It stands in the way. To “make America healthy again,” he must allow preventable diseases to run wild and kill off the old, the weak and the sick. Kennedy isn’t just demolishing the CDC, as Jon Ossoff said. He’s corrupting it.

That’s why I think the Democrats should take the next step. If Kennedy does not resign, and if the president does not fire him, they should threaten to impeach him, thus seeking retribution for his high crimes and misdemeanors. Even if nothing comes of it now (and it won’t; they are out of power), the Democrats should still present a case to the public that such grotesque corruption cannot stand – that those who deliberately harm the republic cannot be allowed to get away with it, and that by bringing them to justice, peace and order can be restored.

In the off-chance the Democrats succeeded, antivaxers would, of course, say that Robert F Kennedy Jr was the victim of tyranny. 

But criminals who get caught think they’re victims, too.