On Tuesday, President-elect Trump tapped vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to lead a new federal commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity. Kennedy, who describes himself as “pro-vaccine,” has a long and consistent track record of promoting scientifically unsound and thoroughly debunked claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Kennedy has lobbied hard against efforts to eliminate nonmedical exemptions for vaccines required for school entry. He also called childhood immunizations “a Holocaust.”
As pediatricians, one the mother of three fully-immunized young children, we know that Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism is bad news for the health of the nation’s children. Worse, it could represent the death knell of public health in the United States.
The anti-vaccine movement started as a small niche, spearheaded primarily by affluent, highly-educated white parents, but its popularity and reach has risen exponentially in recent years.
Hardly a day goes by in which we don’t encounter families in clinical settings who refuse some or all recommended vaccines for their children. There are frequent, high-profile examples of individuals in positions of authority who spread unsound claims about vaccine safety and necessity, including Trump, a self-proclaimed “slow-vaxxer,” and a Cleveland Clinic doctor who recently wrote a floridly anti-vaccine news article for a local newspaper, using his professional affiliation and the Cleveland Clinic logo.
The demographics have started to shift, with the anti-vaccination ideology now appealing to a wide and formidable bloc of Americans drawn to anti-science, anti-establishment, pseudo-populist sentiment. The appeal wraps all the way from the far-left (primarily skeptical of vaccines as “unnatural”) to the far- and center-right, attracted to conspiracy theories about massive government and corporate cover-ups and profits, and fighting to protect individual liberty at the expense of the greater good.
Many point to the staggering success of vaccines as a fundamental component of the ongoing success of the anti-vaccination movement. Few Americans alive today recall what life was like in the era prior to the safe, effective vaccines we now have access to: the days in which diseases like rubella led to tens of thousands of infants who died or were born with severe, lifelong congenital defects, and in which common diseases like diphtheria killed up to half of people who were infected.
Few Americans know that worldwide, 16 children die every minute from measles. Fewer still have watched a previously healthy infant suffocate to death from whooping cough in a pediatric intensive care unit, with modern medicine having nothing left to offer.
Many credible physicians, public-health advocates and medical societies have made meaningful contributions to the national vaccine debate. Unfortunately, it has done little to stem the tide of the anti-vaccine movement.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (which we are both members of) has continued to issue factually correct, yet clearly futile statements in support of vaccines. The medical establishment has clung largely to the view that if pediatricians continue to engage in one-on-one counseling with families, eventually rational thought must win out and vaccines will come to be accepted.
Unfortunately, not only is there a preponderance of evidence that our current strategies are not effective, there is evidence these strategies may even be counterproductive, leading parents to become even more firmly entrenched in vaccine refusal.
On the other hand, there is clear evidence demonstrating the efficacy of strong multi-level policy on improved vaccine uptake, as we have seen in states like California and Michigan.
We need a new approach. The childhood immunization program has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of childhood illness and death. Child health and public health are in clear and immediate danger. Diseases once well on their way to eradication are back, and we are at risk of larger, more serious outbreaks that have the potential to cause significant morbidity and mortality, particularly among pregnant women, infants, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems.
The creation of a sham committee on “vaccine safety” in the absence of any valid outstanding questions about vaccine safety must be opposed clearly and unequivocally. The same goes for the selection of an outspoken vaccine skeptic who has worked tirelessly to undermine the immunization of American children, and who has demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of basic concepts in immunology, pharmacology, epidemiology, and statistics.
It is time to reject the false equivalency between science and pseudoscience, and to stand up against the tolerance of anti-vaccination as a matter of “personal belief.” No less than the public health of this nation is at stake.
Phoebe Danziger and Rebekah Diamond are pediatricians and members of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
