Whatever RFK Jr. Does, Darwinism Will Undo
It’s all disinformation and games until someone ends up in a coma — which Trump might not go along with
Last February, I drafted an article with the headline: “I’m Waiting for One Photogenic Child to Die of Measles.”
I wrote it because a measles outbreak had just spread to 15 states, and the Centers for Disease Control reported that 3 percent of children entering kindergarten had vaccine exemptions — the highest rate ever.
In a cheap tug at the heartstrings, I started by describing Gerald and Sara Murphy, who lived such an idyllic life in southern France that F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled his perfect “Tender Is the Night” expatriate couple on them. In real life, the Murphys were devastated when their strapping 15-year-old son died of a routine case of measles that reached his brain. He was at boarding school and succumbed so quickly that they couldn’t reach him in time to say goodbye.
All it takes to change minds is one photogenic dead child. In 2016, no one cared about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean until Alan Kurdi was photographed face-down on a Turkish beach. Pictures of dead children in Gaza have greatly damaged the image of Israel in the eyes of the world.
I never published that article. (Today, just for the record, I did. You can read it here.)
Why not?
I first submitted it to the New York Times op-ed page, which — surprise — rejected it. Then, before I could submit it elsewhere or self-publish it here, new cases began dropping rapidly. They had zoomed from five a week across the nation to 38 a week. Then, instead of shooting to 1,000, which would typically cause about 200 hospitalizations and about three deaths, they fell back to about eight a week.
That happened, according to local news reports, because vaccination teams were sent to the epicenters, and parents brought their children in. That’s consistent with my experience covering vaccine skepticism everywhere from Minneapolis to Nigeria to Pakistan: When hesitant parents see a real risk that their children will suffer, most re-evaluate their positions. An outbreak can usually be stopped if 95 percent of children are vaccinated. I find it hard to believe that there is any county in this country where 5 percent of mothers are so indifferent to vaccine facts that they would leave their own kids in harm’s way once an outbreak begins. It’s not an efficient way to forestall epidemics, but it works.
Since the 1990’s, vaccine skepticism has been more generalized in Britain than it is here. (In this country until recently, it was highest among tiny liberal elites in places like Berkeley, Seattle and Brooklyn.) Britain has had regular outbreaks, and every year a child or two there dies needlessly. But those have not expanded into runaway surges with hundreds of dead and thousands blind, deaf or brain-damaged — which is what we endured every year before measles vaccine was invented in 1963.
Almost no young American mom has seen her newborn die of tetanus, which can cause muscle spasms so bad that they snap the baby’s spine. Almost no young American mom has seen her child die of diphtheria, strangling on a clot of dead tissue and grey mucus in the windpipe. Almost no young American mom has seen a child with pox so bad that their skin sloughs off in sheets.
If morbid curiosity makes you want to see such stuff, there are illustrated medical articles available, such as this one about diphtheria; medical museum films like this one; and old British immunization films, such as this one also about diphtheria and this one about rabies. And in recent years, Oxford University filmed two young women with adult brain damage from childhood bouts with measles and PBS filmed children in Yemen dying of diphtheria. I think they ought to be required viewing for new parents, but that’s just me. I like mandates that prevent children’s deaths.
Donald Trump has said he’ll let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health care in this country. I’d actually welcome someone going wild on parts of it. American snack and soda companies encourage obesity and diabetes. Tobacco and vaping companies cause cancer and heart disease. Drug companies push immune suppressants on TV with happy jingles while rushing through their lethal side effects. Private equity firms buy up hospitals and medical practices to squeeze profits out of them. Health insurers resist paying for preventive care. I’m on Medicare, but if I want a routine physical, I have to pay $400 for it, and I don’t get vision or dental care. How did any of that become normal? If you can’t see and you can’t chew, you’re pretty damned helpless. Why are those not part of American health care?
But, back to vaccines. I trust RFK Jr. not at all. His disinformation played a role in the 2019 measles epidemic in Samoa that killed 55 islanders — mostly children. Other people who have been mentioned as possible Trump administration health officials would be terrible choices. Dr. Simone Gold of America’s Frontline Doctors opposed Covid vaccines, backed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and did time in jail for her role in the January 6 coup attempt. Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, has made public health malpractice into official policy by disparaging vaccines and saying that children who might get measles or spread it can keep going to school during outbreaks if their parents feel like it.
But even if they get into office, I hope they won’t be able to cause widespread, permanent damage. Some dumb libertarian ideas, like ending water fluoridation, are easy to fix. Fluoride pills and rinses are so cheap that even poor parents can afford them; and once parents see the dental bills like the ones my parents’ generation had to pay for us, they’ll realize their mistake. Another dumb idea — letting raw milk be sold in supermarkets — will quickly produce enough dead children to make parents see why pasteurization was once hailed as a medical miracle and paid for by philanthropists.
The greatest risk would be from ending school vaccine mandates. Diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria and whooping cough can spread incredibly quickly through kindergartens. The famous chart known as The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City is testament to that. It tracks epidemics from 1800 to the present. Before the era of public-health mandates and vaccines, New Yorkers died at 10 to 15 times the rate they do now, often from vaccine-preventable diseases and usually as children.
I suspect any really crazy decision by any Trump health appointee will be reversed fairly quickly.
First: Donald Trump isn’t at all an anti-vaxxer. He didn’t admit it for two months, but when Covid vaccines were invented, he and Melania got them as soon as they could, in January 2021. When he later confirmed that he’d gotten a booster and was booed by some of his fans, he told them to pipe down. I’ve never heard a single suggestion from him that his children or grandchildren aren’t vaccinated.
He flirts with anti-vaxxers for the same reason he flirts with Holocaust deniers, evangelicals and right-to-lifers. They adore him and vote for him even when he sneers at them. I doubt he questions the Holocaust; Jared and his father, who flies the Israeli flag at his properties, would object. I doubt he believes in God: in Chapter 6 of his biography Disloyal, Michael Cohen describes how in 2012, after the televangelist Paula White led a prayer circle of preachers laying hands on him, Trump later laughed and said “Can you believe people believe that bullshit?” I’m sure that, in his youth, Trump would have happily paid for a dozen abortions rather than marry any of his one-night-stands. But, like Kennedy Jr. and Musk (and Bannon and Stone and Bolton and Christie and Pence and Pompeo and Roy Cohn) anti-vaxxers have been briefly useful to him, so he pretends to like them back.
Second: School vaccine mandates are state laws, not Federal ones. The CDC recommends which vaccines children should get, but the states decide whether to follow it for school entry. The Federal government does pay for many children’s vaccines, but the states could do that too.
Third: While some outbreaks (including mpox and early Covid) are seeded by jet-setting Americans, some are seeded by undocumented immigrants. (February’s biggest was in a Chicago migrant shelter.) Once Trump’s base makes that connection, many may choose to vaccinate out of xenophobic self-defense.
And Fourth: You can’t fight Darwin. We evolved our big inventive brains to kill predators because we can’t outrun or outclimb them. Viruses and bacteria are predators, and when they’re seen to be killing our kids, even the most skeptical among us will concede that vaccines — some of the brainiest things we’ve ever invented — actually work. If they don’t — well, some of their bloodlines will disappear from the gene pool, and the problem will solve itself.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. shared the Grand Prize in Journalism at the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards, which honor RFK Jr.’s father. He won for covering diseases on the brink of elimination. Most were succumbing to vaccines.
Mr. McNeil’s partially autobiographical book, The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons From 25 Years of Covering Pandemics, will be available in paperback in January.
