Kennedy Part One: The Vaccine Binary

Sadly, over the past few years, healthcare has become politicized, creating dangerous and misleading binaries pitting one side against the other.  As Osler says, medicine is not dogmatic; what is good for one patient may be bad for another.  Don’t tell that to doctors, who are trained and assessed by believing in one right answer multiple choice thinking, which is how med students and doctors are assessed, and which fails to appreciate the nuance and uncertainty inherent to all medical decisions. To doctors, there are two choices: the right one and the wrong one.

Discussing vaccines—arguably the most controversial medical issue—spells out the danger of this binary.  People are put into two camps: The Kennedy-inspired vaccine skeptics who believe that all vaccines are bad and dangerous, and the medical mainstream (including most doctors) who believe that all vaccines are inherently good.  To simply question a vaccine puts a person in the first camp and often triggers reprisals from anyone who lives in the second camp.  The politicization of vaccine science has caused people to take extreme positions bereft of scientific validity.  As with everything in medicine, the truth lies in the middle, and that’s never an option on our multiple-choice tests!

Two recent articles explain why things are not so simple.  One explores COVID vaccine efficacy.  Although WHO states (without any confirmatory evidence) that the vaccine saved 1.4 million lives, we know based on WHO data that COVID deaths increased after the vaccine, and most of the increased deaths occurred in areas of the world with the highest vaccine penetration.  We know too, and have known, that the vaccine does not prevent transmission, and that the boosters have not prevented people from getting COVID or from incurring complications from COVID.  These are all facts.  And yet, to state these facts places people in the Kennedy camp, preventing us from understanding the data and mapping a sensible course forward.

The second article describes COVID vaccine induced heart disease.  The data is observational and not totally reliable, but it shows something paradoxical and difficult to explain: getting two shots leads to increased risk of heart death and stroke incidence, but a third shot lowers these risks.  Again, very nuanced!  A liberal website I accessed only discussed the benefit derived from the third vaccine, not mentioning the first two.  A conservative site only talked about the first two vaccines, totally ignoring the third.  This is binary thinking.  It puts people into political camps rather than letting us discuss and explore the data.  We certainly know that (Based on the government’s VAERS database) the vaccine can harm kids, with a new study showing that it leads to mild myocarditis and permanent heart scaring, and it also can trigger auto-immune disease and even death.  We also know from VAERS that this vaccine caused more serious reactions than all vaccines combined over the past 30 years.  But again, looking on different internet sites provides binary perceptions of this, with one group exaggerating the risk and the other group erasing it. 

When the CDC suggested that it was safe for elders to get multiple vaccines at once I contacted them.  For decades we have known that older immune systems can’t make antibodies to more than one virus at a time; that’s why we don’t get flu shots when we’re sick.  So now we can get three shots at once?  I asked the CDC for data, and the person who wrote back said there was no data, but rather expert consensus recommends this, a consensus that did not take age into consideration.  Similarly, when kids died of flu in 2017 at a rate 10 times higher than they died of COVID in 2020, the CDC did not suggest vaccinating kids against flu.  But now, they suggest doing it, even though kids are not dying in those numbers.  Again, how much of this is from our political binary and how much is science?  Clearly, it’s not the latter!

Kennedy has clearly made some controversial statements.  Linking vaccines to autism certainly has no scientific basis, even if the rise in autism correlates to the rise of kids getting dozens of vaccines before they turn 18.  Many other factors can explain the autism increase, from increased awareness to contaminated food (heavy metals, pesticides, ect), to overall poor diets.  But too, based on his recent statements, he seeks more studies of vaccines.  We in the medical community are expected to simply say yes to all vaccines, and to all combinations of vaccines, and to never question their utility and lack of adverse effects.  But do we know that is they are safe, especially when so many are put into our  bodies?  As he has stated, few if any studies have looked at vaccines given in large numbers, and he suggests doing that research.  Since when do people who claim to adhere to scientific precepts say no to research?  He also wants the research done by the NIH and not the drug companies that make the vaccines.  Again, why is this troubling to people who purport to believe in unbiased science?

The media is constantly harping on the measles epidemic sweeping the country.  But of the 300+ million people in our nation, about 2000 have come down with measles, and all of them are unvaccinated.  They or their parents made that choice, and Kennedy is all about medical choice. When does the measles vaccine become a public health issue?  It does when vaccinated people are put at risk from nonvaccinated people.  That has not happened, but if it does, that would change the discussion.  Far more kids get sick from their parents smoking or giving them poor diets.  Again, we can as a nation state that we will chastise and even arrest any parent who does not raise their kids as we believe to be proper, or we can only do that when the neglect reaches level of true abuse, or when the neglect impacts the health of everyone else.  We have always favored the latter, but now the media seeks to invade parents houses and impact their choices only with measles.  Measles remains a minor blip and has not spread to the vaccinated public, and yet if you listen to the media it’s the next apocalypse and it’s all Kennedy’s fault.  Again, this is a dangerous binary.  If you ask Kennedy (or me), we’d be speaking less about measles and more about ways to enhance the nutrition of all kids and remove pesticides and metals from their food, especially in impoverished communities with food deserts.  We’d be talking about depression and poverty, housing, schooling.  The huge focus on measles is a political distraction, a means of exaggerating one issue to take down someone that the media disdains.  That is not science, that is not medicine, that is not helpful.

Any binary in healthcare invites extremist views that only obfuscate a meaningful understanding of the risks and benefits of medical interventions, as well as clouding perceptions of public policy by placing a microscope on anything politically charged while ignoring things we can do to improve the health of all Americans.  We must be nuanced, apolitical, non-binary, and willing to acknowledge uncertainty when it exists.  We need more research, not more name calling, and we have to give people choices to make their own health decisions as long as those decisions don’t significantly impact the health of others.  When we don’t know if a vaccine is safe or effective, and we don’t know if multiple vaccines at once are safe or effective, why are we telling people they must go down that road before studying the issue?  That’s the danger of politically inspired binary medical thinking.  It is one of the reasons we spend $4 trillion dollars a year to become one of the least healthy nations on the planet. Maybe it's time to listen and discuss rather than to simply condemn.