Do we have to recover from anti-vaccine misinformation the hard way, with suffering and death?

Do we have to recover from anti-vaccine misinformation the hard way with suffering and death?

By: James Alwine, PhD

I vividly remember that day in April 1955 when my second-grade class was guided to the school nurse’s office.  There, our local doctor would give us our first Salk polio vaccination. I had had vaccinations before - I particularly remember smallpox.  But this vaccination seemed so very important, so urgent.  The polio epidemic was causing so much fear, made so personal by the increasing cases in our community.  Children and adults suffering paralysis or were put in iron lungs. One child died in our small rural community.  To parents, this day in April could be a liberation day, when worrying about polio might become a thing of the past. And that happened-- the vaccine worked.  People rejoiced.

Today we should be rejoicing even more about the golden age of health we have lived in, largely due to vaccines.  But no. Instead we are being dragged into dark times by conspiracy theorists, pseudoscientists and outright liars. It has been well reported how biomedical research and public health have been dismantled, possible irreparably, by Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  Kennedy’s policies and directions for HHS and NIH are a prime example of the dangers of blatant ignorance, and it threatens the health and lives of all Americans. 

But among all of Kennedy’s harmful acts the most unforgivably cruel is his campaign to systematically remove the availability of vaccines in the US.  He has stated falsely that vaccines kill, cause cancer and cause autism; this has all been debunked by real science. Yet the rampant misinformation spread by Kennedy, his followers and his pseudoscience influencers is too often mistaken as expertise and knowledge because of Kennedy’s undeserved position as Secretary of HHS.  Let’s remember that he has no medical or scientific training.  He has no ability to evaluate scientific literature, and those around him who can are anti-vaccine cronies who distort and misrepresent the true science…they all lie.  

Alarmingly, the amount of Kennedy’s online misinformation is overwhelming.  As a result, vaccine hesitancy is growing, and fewer children are being vaccinated.  With the present unstable state of the US, it is highly predictable that we will see years of widespread increases in vaccine-preventable diseases, resulting in a disastrous situation in which many children, and adults, will be permanently damaged or killed.  

Remembering my vaccination day in April 1955, it was a day when a vaccine allowed people to shed their fear of a terrible infectious disease.  Are we now destined to have to experience the return of terrible infectious diseases in order for people to shed their fear of vaccines…to stop believing Kennedy’s lies?  I and others can write about this at length, but Kennedy and his followers have convinced many to not trust experts, instead to “do their own research", knowing that for most people that means watching videos from whatever social media influencers the algorithm serves up, many of whom are spreading Kennedy’s anti-vax misinformation. 

Americans need to be reeducated about the horrors of vaccine-preventable diseases before there were vaccines. Unfortunately, this reeducation may occur the hard way, by witnessing the terrible suffering of unvaccinated children: a child suffering and dying from measles encephalitis; an infant coughing until they turn blue from whooping cough; strangling from diphtheria; paralyzed by polio; dead from the flu; the pain and death from tetanus. This terrible list goes on, but will the shock of seeing a great rise in the number of children who never see their fifth birthday wake us up? 

America, we don’t have to do this the hard way. We need to realize that we are being cruelly misled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Believing what he says about vaccines endangers all of us. Deaths from his vaccine misinformation are well established from his influence on the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, where 83 needlessly died. 

Remember what Kennedy said at a congressional hearing, “I don’t think people should be taking advice — medical advice — from me…”… take that to heart, reject his lies, reject him, work to remove him from office.

James Alwine is a virologist, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, a fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the coordinating committee for Defend Public Health.