Public health experts are stunned but unsurprised by the Senate confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary. Kennedy, they contend, oversimplifies and distorts complex public health subjects including chronic disease and vaccine safety. His stance on vaccines in particular threatens to cause a major infectious disease conflagration, such as the measles outbreak currently occurring in Texas.
ELIZABETH JACOBS; 1elizabethtjacobs1@gmail.com
Jacobs is a cancer and nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Arizona.
Jacobs told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “I accepted that the confirmation was going to happen after [Senator] Bill Cassidy [R-La.] caved to RFK Jr. He said he believed that because RFK said he wouldn’t touch vaccines, that that’s in fact what was going to happen. But I don’t believe that’s sincere.
“Kennedy wants to oversimplify extremely complex relationships. He wants to tie vaccines to chronic disease. Or food additives to chronic disease. In reality this isn’t how research works. We know that chronic disease is very complicated. It’s multifactorial. A lot of the root causes that RFK claims he wants to investigate are things that the Republican Party is not going to be interested in pursuing: the social determinants of health, like poverty, housing, education, and access to healthcare. These are all major drivers of chronic disease. While Kennedy claims he wants to study root causes, the Republican Party is simultaneously shutting down those avenues of research. We have already identified many of the root causes of chronic disease; I did it myself for 25 years. It’s difficult and complicated and can’t be simplified into a bumper sticker type of conclusion. These simplified explanations grab the public’s attention but are ultimately useless.”
When it comes to vaccines, Jacobs added, “RFK Jr. does damage not simply through his overt statements but also by sowing distrust in the public. He says ‘I just want to study vaccine safety, and the government hasn’t studied it.’ But that is absolutely ludicrous. He doesn’t have the capability to interpret scientific data correctly. Numerous people have tried to explain to RFK how surveillance of adverse events from vaccines work, yet he’s completely unmoved. That’s concerning, because we know that once people have entrenched themselves in a position not based on factual information, psychologically it’s really hard to get them out. RFK Jr. is now going to be getting his hands on data that, as an epidemiologist, I do not trust him to analyze using the scientific method.
“What we’re seeing [in Texas with the measles outbreak] is going to be happening all over. It’s not just going to be measles; it will be other infectious diseases. I believe that, unfortunately, the next four years will usher in outbreaks of infectious disease that we haven’t seen in decades.”
What is to be done? “States set the law on childhood vaccine requirements,” Jacobs said, and she hopes that they will “stand firm in their requirements. The only thing that will keep our herd immunity up is continuing to require vaccines for school entry. In some states that’s already failing. After studying vaccine refusal for so many years, it’s clear that requiring vaccines for school entry is critical to our entire public health infrastructure. If that is lost, it’s a disaster. When the Trump administration is saying things like that they are going to cut off federal funding to schools that require vaccines, that is going to start an infectious disease conflagration. It doesn’t take much.
“It doesn’t take much undervaccination [to cause a conflagration]. In Texas, 82 percent of kindergarteners were vaccinated. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not a high percentage for vaccines. This is a completely predictable outcome for undervaccination. As of Feb. 14, 48 cases of measles have been identified in the region and 13 people have been hospitalized. Any parent who has had a child hospitalized can tell you: you never forget it. It causes trauma for the child, trauma for the parent, and a financial cost. To people who cavalierly say that kids won’t die from measles, I say that hospitalization is certainly bad enough. A measles course can also create immune amnesia, leaving people open to other infections. Death is not the only outcome of interest. That is something we do in the U.S.: death is not the only end point that matters.”