Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy Theories Kill People

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist, as he took over the Department of Health and Human Services, cases of once defeated childhood diseases like measles and mumps are spreading again throughout the nation. Virtually all those infected were not previously vaccinated.

Though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has voiced some good ideas regarding children’s health issues, for example, eliminating processed foods from their diets and attempting to reduce childhood obesity, his insistence on spreading false and dangerous health conspiracy theories and his lack of background in the field of public health should have automatically disqualified him from stepping into his critical role in the Trump administration.

He has been on the forefront of the anti-vaccine movement and is a popular speaker to audiences of parents who are fighting their school districts to lift the vaccine requirements for admission to most public schools.

Without any valid and reliable scientific evidence, he has falsely asserted that vaccines in children can cause autism. A wide consensus of several expert health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization found no credible link between vaccines and autism.

He said that HIV does not cause AIDS, that wireless 5G cellular network technology can cause cancer and other ailments, that prescription antidepressant drugs cause mass shootings in the U.S., and that unapproved and potentially lethal use of treatments like ivermectin can cure COVID-19.

I wish these life-saving vaccines that RFK Jr. and the anti-vax movement warn us against had been available much earlier.

A Personal Reflection

My aunt Bea and her husband lived on an army base in the mid to late 1940s where my uncle was stationed. During Bea’s pregnancy, she developed a rash over her body. Her physician diagnosed her symptoms as an allergic reaction to having eaten strawberries.

Within the next six months, several other people on the base developed similar symptoms, most of whom had not consumed strawberries, or for that matter, any type of berries. The consensus from the medical staff at the base was that the outbreak was rubella, a form of measles.

Bea’s child, my cousin Barbara, was born deaf and blind with serious intellectual impairments. Bea’s husband sued for divorce shortly following the birth, and Bea and Barbara lived the remainder of their lives with Bea’s parents, my grandparents Abraham and Dorothy.

Bea refused to permit her daughter to attend a residential or day school for children with severe disabilities. Barbara subsequently never learned methods of communication and skills for daily life, and she remained dependent on others after my aunt and grandparents died.

In those mid-century years, no safe and reliable vaccines were yet available to prevent the many childhood diseases. My sister and I suffered from mumps in 1952, measles in 1954, and later chickenpox (which I thought one contracted by playing around a box filled with chicken parts and feathers).

I was thankful to have never contracted whooping cough, which on top of my asthma would have been devastating.

The pain, the fevers, and for the mumps, the swelling was almost unbearable. Some of my peers have experienced lifelong negative side effects from these childhood diseases.

In my 70s, due to having been exposed earlier to the chickenpox virus, I developed a serious and extended case of shingles. I wish I had known beforehand that a preventative vaccine was available.

My parents grew up in the 1920s through the 1940s also suffering from all these childhood diseases, from which my father lost all hearing in his left ear. In addition, my mother agonized with a severe case of diphtheria, from which she almost did not recover.

When a letter from my elementary school principal arrived at our home in 1955 asking if they would allow me to take part in the first mass inoculations of the newly approved Salk Polio vaccine, they literally jumped with joy at the chance.

They had seen their friends contracting Polio, some losing their ability to breathe on their own, some losing movement in their legs or arms, some succumbing. They had seen their hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, suffering the effects of this terrible virus. Anything they could do to prevent me and my younger sister from this, they were willing to do.

I wish the array of vaccines available today had been around when I was a young child. If they had been, I would not have been at risk for the pain, the loss of schooling and socialization with my peers, and most importantly, the reduction in my chances for a higher quality of life that others were denied due to disabling conditions.

I have often imagined what my cousin Barbara’s life could have been like if she had not been exposed to rubella in utero, as well as the numerous students under my care when I served as a teacher in the 1970s and early 1980s at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.

How might their lives have been positively different if these vaccines had been available earlier?

Science now can eliminate most of the major viral infections that have plagued humanity for millennia. Unfortunately, fear, misinformation, and the vast array of conspiracy theories have stood in the way of reaching this objective.

I will not debunk the myths that are circulating about vaccines, for members of scientific public health communities do this so much better.

I ask, though, that everyone who is eligible, please accept the science and take the vaccine. By doing so, you will be supporting yourself, your children, your communities, and your world.

And let us take politics out of the injections.