Cod Oil Salesman

 Now that the measles outbreak in Texas has turned into a public health crisis, Americans may be starting to second-guess whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is really the best person to be running our Health and Human Services Department right now. Perhaps, that is to say—in the face of a genuine public health threat—it was not the best idea to install, as the head of our public health agencies, someone who is mostly known for opposing all scientifically-tested public health interventions. 

This, of course, is a pattern with the Trump administration. Trump's cabinet picks are mostly people known for trying to destroy the very agencies they are now overseeing. His choice to run the FBI has written multiple children's books depicting DOJ as a fire-breathing dragon, because it dared to investigate Trump's malfeasance; Trump's pick to run the U.S. intelligence community is mostly known for denouncing the latter (once again, for showing insufficient personal loyalty to Trump), etc. 

And so, it stands to reason that Trump's pick to run our nation's public health infrastructure would be a person who has mostly been known in recent years for his high-profile opposition to public health science—including to some of the most well-tested and proven public health interventions of them all, such as the MMR vaccine. We therefore shouldn't be surprised by Kennedy's lackadaisical response to the first major outbreak of measles on his watch; although it's still frightening to behold the results. 

When the news of the outbreak in Texas first made headlines, Kennedy's response was notably cold and insouciant. He suggested, in essence, that there was nothing to be alarmed about here. "We have measles outbreaks every year" he said—which, as the New York Times notes—may be true; but what we don't have every year is an outbreak of this size that has already claimed the lives of multiple children. 

But Kennedy has a long history of sowing misinformation about vaccines and trying to deter their use. He has even specifically targeted the MMR vaccine before—including in one notorious case from 2019, in which his comments about the vaccine may have contributed to a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa that claimed the lives of 83 people (most of them young children). 

Instead of promoting efficacious methods with a long track record of preventing infection, like the MMR vaccine, Kennedy has floated a variety of untested alternative treatments for the disease. He has implied, for instance, that it may be linked to lifestyle issues like poor nutrition or a lack of exercise. He has also reportedly hawked unproven remedies for measles that do not enjoy scientific or medical support—such as cod liver oil. One is put in mind of the quack physician of yesteryear selling mercury pills. 

I thought back a scene concerning quack doctors from George Crabbe's narrative poem, The Village. Crabbe was himself a surgeon, before he was a poet. He no doubt saw first-hand the worst of the medical profession of his time (the eighteenth century). And in one of the most indelible passages in the poem—which is a masterpiece of social criticism on multiple counts—he depicts the casual cruelty of the sorts of bogus doctors who were available to the poor and aged in the rural workhouses of the time: 

A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
Whose murd'rous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
And whose most tender mercy is neglect.

He could well have been writing of Kennedy. Our new head of HHS is indeed a "potent quack" who has made a specialty of promoting human ills. He insults the very patients whom his own lies and medical misinformation are killing. After all, to the unusually-healthy Mennonite communities who are suffering most from this outbreak, he has responded by blaming the victim. He implied that contracting measles is a matter of personal responsibility, and they would have been spared if they had exercised more. 

Indeed, the "most tender mercy" Kennedy has shown on public health is the rare occasion when he has neglected the whole subject. But, unfortunately, those moments are going to become very rare—now that he is charged with overseeing the nation's entire public health infrastructure. 

Of course, no vaccine is entirely free of occasional side-effects. To receive one, therefore, is to take on a certain amount of risk. I can therefore understand and sympathize with parents who have qualms about giving one to their children. And this explains why "potent quacks" like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are able to exploit these fears, which will inevitably prey on the mind of any loving parent. 

But, in response to these fears, the founding father Benjamin Franklin said it best. Writing of the inoculation treatments of his time—which were far more dangerous than today's vaccines—he urged parents to receive the treatment even while knowing its risks, after he lost his own child to small pox. 

I leave us with Franklin's sound common sense on this subject—born of personal tragedy. I still think this passage from Franklin's Autobiography represents the best possible advice on inoculation or vaccination—namely, that one should receive the shot, because the risks of not doing so are just patently higher than the risks of any side-effects. Franklin's argument is simple and short, but remains unanswerable—all the more so now that vaccines are so much safer in the modern era: 

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.