Vaccines are a modern miracle, saving an estimated 154 million lives in the last half-century. Vaccine skepticism is a fast-spreading virus against which America’s inoculation is flagging. So count it as a very small victory that Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vax skeptic named Dave Weldon, couldn’t get through a U.S. Senate where even a couple of Republicans can see basic scientific truth.
Weldon, a former congressman and former practicing physician, has shamefully promoted the utterly discredited but still deeply corrosive claim that vaccines cause autism.
We don’t know what causes the set of conditions on that spectrum, which now affect some 1 in 36 children according to the best stats we have, provided by the same CDC. There are thousands of smart people doing research to try to crack the mystery all the time in labs and through carefully constructed, ethically sound clinical trials, hungry to find evidence that’s significant and replicable.
The hypothesis that vaccines cause autism never held up to scrutiny — but it’s the one that seems to best fit the conspiracy-theory-infected worldview of the likes of Weldon and Kennedy and Trump, so it lives and lives and lives.
It has casualties, and growing ones. As more and more families reject shots for their kids, diseases we had permanently purged from America find their way back inside our bodies. (Talk about a foreign invasion.)
Measles, once eradicated, is again spreading in New Mexico and West Texas and even in our own area, where vaccine skepticism has long had a foothold in some parts of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. In nearby Rockland County, a 2018-19 outbreak led to more than 300 verified cases, numbers that could pale in comparison to what might happen now that anti-vax people are at or clutching for the levers of power in Washington. Today in Rockland, just 62% of children countywide have had a measles shot by the age of 2. In Monsey, where there’s a large ultra-Orthodox community, the numbers are as low as 41%. Medical history’s many Jewish vaccine pioneers would shudder.
This is not to say that every vaccine makes sense at all times for all people. They’re medicine, like anything. People should consult their doctors and get the shots that work for them. Off the top of our head we can rattle off the flu shot and the COVID shot. There’s the shingles and RSV vaccines. And the tetanus and hepatitis A shots. Listen to your doctor, not kooks like Bobby Kennedy and Dave Weldon.
Medical professionals need to make wise recommendations to their patients, who should listen with open minds. Those recommendations are rooted in research that often gets funded if not conducted by, then synthesized by, good people in the federal government, chiefly the CDC.
It all breaks down if the Senate assents to letting an ideological, evidence-denying vaccine skeptic like Weldon take charge of the apparatus.
Good for Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Bill Cassidy (a medical doctor himself) for bucking their party and siding with Democrats against Weldon, Kennedy and Trump. It’s a small step but a real one.