America is sinking further into a crisis of trust. It doesn’t trust elected officials or the institutions on which they serve. It doesn’t trust the courts or the news media. It doesn’t trust science.
In all of these areas, President Donald Trump and his administration have made the crisis of trust worse.
Nowhere is that more apparent – or more dangerous – than in the distrust toward vaccines being fueled within the administration by Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy’s appointment had nothing to do with qualifications for the job, for which he had little, and everything to do with repaying a political favor, when Kennedy dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and threw his support to Trump.
The medical mischief that Kennedy’s critics predicted would happen should the vaccine skeptic be put in charge of the federal agency that sets America’s public health policy has come to pass.
The latest example occurred last week, when Kennedy’s handpicked members of an important vaccine advisory panel reversed a longstanding recommendation that all healthy newborns be vaccinated within 12 hours of birth against hepatitis B, a serious, incurable viral infection that can lead to liver failure and cancer. The new recommendation calls for vaccinating only those babies whose mothers have tested positive for the virus and thus are at high risk of transmitting the virus to their child.
Although the revision might sound sensible on the surface, it presumes a lot: namely, that the mother won’t contract the hepatitis B virus between when she is tested for it (usually in the first trimester) and when she gives birth, or that the hospital where the child is born is equipped to do speedy, in-house testing.
Neither of these assumptions is guaranteed. Nor can the possibility be ruled out that a newborn might contract the virus from other caregivers, who may not know they’re infected since hepatitis B can incubate in a person’s body for up to six months before symptoms appear.
For these reasons, the overwhelming majority of the medical community, including well-respected associations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, has warned against heeding the government panel’s scaled-back recommendation. The health practitioners say they plan to continue to immunize babies at birth unless the families opt out. The insurance companies also have said that they will continue to cover the vaccine.
All of this, though, could change, not based on science but based on anti-science, an attitude fostered by Kennedy and enabled by Trump that highly trained scientists are not to be trusted with the public’s health, that conjecture and speculation are just as reliable as rigorous laboratory testing and decades of medical experience to determine whether a vaccine is safe and effective.
The administration has stoked this distrust of science by putting most vaccines – despite the countless lives they have saved or spared from suffering – in its crosshairs. The government-endorsed skepticism has left the public confused as to what it should do.
This confusion is certain to produce less immunization and more avoidable disease, the beginnings of which the U.S. is already seeing in higher rates of measles and whooping cough. It could also slow down new vaccine research – such as that which allowed for the record-fast development of the COVID-19 vaccine – by demanding an exorbitant amount of testing and trials before a vaccine is approved.
All the vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before it became infiltrated by politics carry a small amount of risk. The benefits these vaccines have produced for nearly all of the inoculated, though, far outweigh the harms experienced by the few with adverse side effects.
In any rational cost-benefit analysis, vaccination comes out way ahead. Those who suggest otherwise are the ones not to be trusted.
