Vaccinations: Truth, misinformation, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Some of the greatest and most transformative scientific achievements in history have been the discovery of ways to virtually eliminate many of the world’s most feared diseases.
The first such breakthrough was the eradication of smallpox. That happened so long ago that most of us do not know the story. With today’s anti-vaxer movement in a growth mode – 8 percent of people in the U.S. without a college degree and 4 percent of those with a college degree now oppose vaccination – it is a story worth telling.
Estimates of when smallpox came into existence range from as long as 12,000 years ago to as recently as 3,000 years ago. Whichever, there was no successful treatment for smallpox for several thousand years.
The first experiments with an idea that turned into a preventative began in the 1700s. The idea was bold. The finished product was beyond anything anyone could have imagined. The progression from idea to finished product, however, would take a couple of hundred years. As late as the early 1900s, smallpox was still a feared infectious disease; somewhere between 300 million and 500 million people worldwide died from smallpox during the 19th century
The idea was to introduce a small amount of the disease into the human body and then to hope the transferee would develop an immunity to the disease. It was an idea first discussed, and perhaps tried, almost 200 years before Christ.
Then, in the early 1700s, a small number of people got serious about trying to find a way to transfer a small bit of fluid from a smallpox victim to a healthy person. The hollow hypodermic syringe was not invented until around 1850. The way only to accomplish the transfer was to use knives to puncture a smallpox blister on a person who had smallpox, then use the knife to transfer the pus into someone who did not have the disease.
The process was known as variolation. It usually worked, but sometimes, it didn’t. the challenge was injecting the exact right amount of pus — not too little, not too much. But precision instruments did not yet exist. It was hard to get that exact right amount every time. Further, there was little understanding at this time of the need for good hygiene in making such transfers of pus. People died.
The gamechanger came in 1796, in England, when Edward Jenner, a physician, noticed that milkmaids who got cowpox, a disease related to smallpox but milder and affecting mostly bovines, would develop an immunity to smallpox. When his own milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, got cowpox, he decided to use variolation to test his theory that cowpox fluid could be used to create immunity to smallpox. He chose to test his theory on James Phipps, the 9-year-old son of his gardener. Based on the required testing of new preventative treatments today, it seems almost incomprehensible, not to mention frightening on many levels. Young James not only would have to receive the cowpox via variolation, he then, after waiting a couple of months, would have to receive smallpox fluid by variolation several times to make sure that he was immune. Amazingly, Jenner’s idea worked. James was immune.
The practice, however, did not become widely used until early in the 20th century, after hypodermic needles became widely available. Then, it took another 50 years, until after refrigeration was invented, to be able to transport the vaccine far enough and quickly enough to essentially vaccinate enough people, meaning almost everyone, to destroy the existence of smallpox.
Did people who received the vaccine die? Yes; occasionally. The death rate has been estimated at one or two deaths for every 1 million people vaccinated. At the time the vaccine was being introduced, however, smallpox was fatal at least 20 percent of the time, sometimes by as much as 45 percent of the time.
The world had to decide. Would a death rate of one in a million be an acceptable trade-off for a disease that was killing tens of thousands of people every year? The world made its decision without much debate. One death per million seemed a good trade-off for the 200,000 deaths per million from smallpox. In some locations around the world, that death rate could be up to 450,000 per million.
The smallpox vaccine was the first of many. Diphtheria came next in the 1890s, and the world sighed a breath of relief when the polio vaccine arrived in the 1960s.
And yet, in today’s world, more and more people have become what are now called anti-vaxers – they oppose vaccinations because, contrary to what medical science has shown, they believe the vaccinations are either unnecessary or are likely to harm them in some way.
It is one thing to make an anti-vax decision for yourself. It is quite another, however, to attempt to make a career out of advocating against the use of vaccines in general. And it is despicable to use misinformation in an effort to either encourage others not to get a vaccine or to work to prevent them from getting it.
Have I mentioned the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., yet? Forgive me. He is running for president of the United States. He also is one of the nation’s most prominent and loudest ant-vaxers. His candidacy has, if nothing else, raised the profile of and garnered attention for the anti-vax movement. And, God bless the news media — they are using the opportunity to question him about his beliefs in interviews, thus giving him a platform to spread his misinformation more widely.
The information regarding Kennedy’s anti-vax statements in the remainder of this column comes from a lengthy article by Jessica McDonald from August 2023 on the website FactCheck.org.
Kennedy has been at this for a long time.
In 2005, he said in articles in Rolling Stone and Salon that certain ingredients in vaccines cause autism. The article contained so many errors that the publications retracted it or withdrew it.
Basically, that has been his game plan for years. He uses erroneous information – some might think of this as a nice way to say “lies” – to try to convince others that particular vaccinations are unsafe or unneeded.
One of his tactics is trying to set himself up as a higher authority than scientists in being able to know whether a vaccine is safe and necessary. “I don’t necessarily believe all the scientists because I can read science myself. . . That’s what I do for a living,” he said in an article last year in The New Yorker about misrepresenting the science of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Here is a closer look at some of his specific attacks on vaccines and on how they are regulated.
Diphtheria, pertussis, and measles
Kennedy has worked to discourage people from getting their children vaccinated against diphtheria, pertussis, and measles.
One of his arguments is that the huge decline in diseases for which there are preventative vaccinations would have occurred anyway, even without the vaccines. “There was this huge decline in infection, in mortalities from infectious diseases that took place in the twentieth century, an 80 percent drop in deaths from infectious disease. And what caused that wasn’t vaccines,” Kennedy has said.
“The real drop happened because of really, engineering solutions: refrigerators, you could store food . . . better housing, sanitation, the invention of chlorine, sewage treatment. But mainly nutrition. Nutrition is absolutely crucial to building immune systems. And so what was really killing these children was malnutrition,” he has said.
Wrong – at least in the critical statement that the drop in death rates was not caused by vaccines.
During the first decade of the 1900s, before the diphtheria vaccine became widely used in America, 13,000 to 15,000 children died from the disease every year. The vaccine eventually reduced the number to zero. Diphtheria, by the way, was one of the most horrible diseases. Medical science had NO cure for it. It caused a thick, white coating to grow in the throats of its victims, often choking them to death. It also disproportionately attacked children. They called it “the strangling angel of children.” For good reason. It was the world’s leading killer of children aged 9 and under.
Before pertussis vaccines became widely available in the 1940s, 200,000 children a year contracted whooping cough in the U.S. and about 9,000 of them died. Every year.
In the early 1920s, about 500,000 people a year got measles. Basically, every child got the disease at some point. Of these cases, about 3,500 to 5,500 children died of respiratory or neurological complications from measles. In addition, a rare disease known as SSPE would attack a few people who had survived measles seven to 10 years later. The numbers were small, no more than about 100 cases among the 500,000 measles victimes. But the disease was always fatal.
Hepatitis B
Kennedy: People get hepatitis B from sharing needles, “going to a really seasoned prostitute,” or participating in “sort of compulsive homosexual behavior.” He acknowledged that babies can get hepatitis B from their mothers, but said that every pregnant woman is tested for it, “so the baby doesn’t need this.” The vaccine’s only function is to boost profits for vaccine makers.
The truth: U.S. policy is for babies to be vaccinated within 24 hours of birth with the first of a series of three shots against hepatitis B because:
1. Babies and children also can get hepatitis B from caregivers, and from such things as washcloths, a toothbrush that is shared or that belongs to someone else and is accidentally used by a child, or from nail clippers.
2. Even though mothers are tested for hepatitis B in the hospital before delivery, results sometimes become known too late if the baby comes more quickly than expected, or if the results are somehow delayed. Since the disease is transmitted by blood, the infection can pass quickly from mother to child during birth.
3. Babies who do get hepatitis B are in serious trouble; much more so than an adult getting hepatitis B. For babies with hepatitis B, there is a 90 percent chance that their infection will be chronic and possibly lead to liver damage or premature death.
4. There are no adverse effects from the vaccination, so there is no safety reason to delay it.
Vaccine safety in general
Kennedy: One of his most common claims about vaccines is that they are not tested for safety in clinical trials. “Vaccines are the only medical product that is not safety-tested prior to licensure,” he has said in another attempt to lure more people to avoid vaccinations. He has further argued that “vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing placebo-controlled trials” and that all vaccines should be tested in this way.
The truth: No and no.
All vaccines in the U.S. go through clinical testing for both safety and efficacy before they are licensed by the Federal Drug Administration.
Many vaccines are tested in randomized, placebo-controlled trials. But there are certain situations in which other kinds of safety testing are better. For example, when a new version of an existing vaccine is developed, it is more meaningful to test it against the previous version of the vaccine than against a saline placebo. This situation applies to vaccines for such things as pneumonia, diphtheria, and tetanus.
Regarding Kennedy’s accusation that therapeutic drugs are tested more thoroughly than vaccines, the Center for Disease Control said the opposite is, in fact, the case. “A higher standard of safety is generally expected of vaccines than of other medical interventions,” the CDC says.
So think about it. Would you like to have an anti-vaxer in charge when the next pandemic arrives? Remember, it was the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020 that began to bring the COVID-19 death rate into a steep decline in the U.S., thus enabling most of us to a return to a more normal life.
Of course, Kennedy cannot be elected president, anyway, so he will not be the person in charge. But even considering his inability to win the election, his presence on the ballot still carries a huge risk for all of us. The more votes he gets, the better his position will be to build and advance his anti-vaxer base and harmful anti-vax theories.
Excellent column. Thank you for all these facts. Mr. K Jr has been a crackpot and charlatan so long that he’s fooling many people. Like the Republican candidate for President.
An important cautionary tale.