What RFK Jr Gets Right About Vaccines
(tl;dr - vaccines are incredibly safe and unbelievably effective, but we have to listen to people’s worries.)
The Health Secretary is dangerously wrong about a lot. He seems wilfully blind to the kind of basic high-school science people should know for their own health - nevermind for looking after 250 million others.
But he understands something that too many science advocates under-value: the importance of empathy. And that’s what makes him so persuasive to so many.
RFK’s vaccine skepticism, for instance, taps into something important about modern medicine - it’s often wildly counterintuitive.
Despite being arguably the most effective public health intervention in human history, childhood vaccines can sometimes sound weird.
Imagine you hadn’t learned to take them for granted, hadn’t been shown how they work, and here’s what you heard when someone explained them to you:
“We’re going to take your healthy toddler and protect them from a disease - one that they’ve actually never had - by sticking this metal needle in their arm and injecting them with some mysterious fluid.”
“Yeah, I know it might hurt and scare them, but don’t worry - we made the liquid out of a fragment of a bug that can kill you, and maybe some eggs. Okay that sounds strange, but I promise it’ll be fine. After they get a bit ill first.”
“What’s that - you want to know what happens if the vaccine works? Well here’s the thing, this is more about *stopping* something from happening, and in science we don’t prove negatives, obviously…”
Decades of modern science have shown that, despite their weirdness, vaccines are astonishingly safe and effective. They save around 4 million lives a year - that’s almost eight every minute. But if you didn’t know that, or didn’t have the time or privilege to engage with it, your common sense might tell you that vaccines just feel like a bad idea.
They would feel like an even worse idea if the messenger was a health system that’s repeatedly failed your community.
Or a government you don’t trust.
Or an ‘expert’ who calls you dumb.
To be clear, many scientists and public health workers are already working hard to build trust. But as a culture, we still often lead with authority, instead of care. Too often, mainstream science responds to fear with facts, and to mistrust with moral superiority.
We’ve ended up in a place where expressing concern about your kids’ health can get you lumped in with the tin-foil hat brigade. And when that happens, Health Secretary RFK Jr doesn’t even need to understand high-school science, let alone vaccines (lucky for him…).
He just needs to understand that people are worried - and to show he cares about those worries more than science does. And guess who wins in a political fight between condescending expertise and (what looks like) empathic ignorance?
We should keep educating people about vaccines, modern medicine, and the strange grandeur of science. We should keep countering misinformation, and calling out deliberate lies.
But if we want to counter RFK’s agenda, wringing our hands isn’t enough. We also need to remember what so many brilliant vaccine researchers, health workers, and science communicators know:
Anxieties aren’t irrational, or post-truth, or anti-science. They’re human.