Ignore the cranks and crackpots: check with your health-care provider

by Tom Maertens

If Donald Trump has his way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, the umbrella organization for health care agencies such as the CDC, FDA, NIH, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and others.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, a pro-Trump paper, editorialized that “The overriding rule of medicine is: First, do no harm,” adding that “We’re certain installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services breaks this rule.”

Kennedy has a long history of vaccine denial and outspoken ignorance. Among other things, he has asserted that COVID-19 was created to target Caucasian and Black people.

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British physician, fabricated research that purported to show that the preservative in the mumps/measles/rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism.

He succeeded in getting the fake study published, with 12 collaborators, in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal.

Investigations by the Sunday Times and the British Medical Journal found that Wakefield committed deliberate fraud for financial gain; he had created a competing vaccine.

The British General Medical Council, which registers doctors in the UK, found that Wakefield had acted “dishonestly, irresponsibly, unethically, and callously.” The Lancet retracted the paper as “utterly false” and Wakefield was struck off the British Medical Registry.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and many subsequent studies have found no link between vaccines and autism; they show that the benefits of vaccinations outweigh any risk.

Small groups of “anti-vaxxers” have nonetheless made large groups of people sick. Recent outbreaks of measles and other preventable diseases in the U.S. have started among clusters of vaccine refusers.

The measles vaccine alone has saved an estimated 120 million lives worldwide. There were an estimated 10.3 million cases of measles in 2023, a 20% increase from 2022, according to new estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The WHO said anti-vaccine sentiment is a major cause of the increase, and is responsible for 108,000 deaths.

No vaccine has been more consequential than the smallpox vaccine. Hundreds of millions of people died from smallpox throughout history, more than in all world wars combined. Smallpox destroyed many American Indian tribes and killed more Aztecs and Incas than Spanish conquistadores did.

Even the Black Death (bubonic plague) did not kill as many people. The plague still kills about 600 people per year, but there is a vaccine, and it is treatable with antibiotics.

Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence (Wikipedia).

In 1967, the World Health Organization announced a global campaign to eliminate smallpox. At that time, there were still 10-15 million active cases worldwide, resulting in two million deaths per year and hundreds of thousands blinded or disfigured.

I worked for WHO’s Smallpox Eradication program in Africa, in one of the last countries in the world with endemic smallpox, vaccinating rural tribesmen.

Even there, we encountered vaccine resistance and received occasional threats because of lies spread by anti-vaxxers.

Some 465 million people in 27 countries were vaccinated by the program As a result, naturally occurring smallpox was eliminated by October 1977, at an estimated cost of $100 million.

The current Global Polio Eradication Initiative is one of the largest international public health efforts in history. Polio cases have decreased by over 99 percent since 1988, from an estimated 350,000 cases in 125 countries to 22 reported cases in 2017.

According to the CDC, the chickenpox vaccine prevents more than 3.5 million cases of varicella, 9,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths every year.

CDC estimates that since 2010, flu-related deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 to 51,000. The flu virus can change its genetic make-up rapidly, even during the course of a single season. Experts believe this was the cause for the high death rate; the vaccine is formulated months ahead of the flu season. Past versions, such the “Spanish Flu” (H1N1) of 1918/19 may have killed 50 million people worldwide, more than died in World War I.

Vaccines are modern miracles and one of the reasons why life expectancy is increasing. Maurice Hilleman developed 40 vaccines during his lifetime. Eight of them are believed to have saved 129 million lives; he is credited with saving more lives than anyone in history.

The New York Post concluded about its interview with RFK Jr.: “We came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.”

Ignore the cranks and crackpots: check with your health-care provider.

Tom Maertens held several science and technology positions in the U.S. government, including minister-counselor for environment, science, and technology at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where he had oversight responsibility for a $300 million per year science program with the Russian government.