Bishops' Blog

(After the writing of this editorial, the head of the CDC has been fired)

Full disclosure: I am a registered Democrat with plenty to criticize about the President. But, out of fairness, we do well honestly to acknowledge when the leader of the opposing party has accomplished something important. In this spirit we should recognize that President Trump’s vaccine initiative early in the COVID crisis in 2020, Operation Warp Speed, was a game-changer in several ways. Never has a vaccine been developed in under a year, thanks to mRNA technology. By all accounts many millions of lives were saved in the United States and throughout the world, and the crisis was brought to a swifter end. Staff who recommended that he claim more credit as he exited office were surely right.

Now, in Trump Admin 2.0, his own Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy has cancelled the development of important mRNA vaccines, and so, by implication, denigrated his boss’ accomplishment. The President may say ‘that was a long time ago, and we’re on to other things,’ but the critiqued technology is the same, and history’s judgment cannot be shrugged off unilaterally.

Kennedy’s reasons for the cancellation are specious (which should be no surprise since he brings no expertise whatsoever to his job).

• His suggestion that the technology offers no help to upper respiratory illness is, by our own public and recent experience, nonsense.

• While effectiveness in preventing COVID infection has waned, the vaccine’s record of preventing serious illness and death has remained strong. Not dying is a good testament to a treatment’s value!

• Adverse reactions to the vaccine are as rare as with other vaccines.

• Kennedy’s alternative, old-fashioned whole cell vaccines, have (according to scientific op ed in the Washington Post on August 6,) and a news item in the New much worse side-effects.

• Kennedy’s cancellation imperils other breakthrough treatments for a list of other serious maladies: HIV, malaria (the world’s greatest killer, H5N1 (which is a mutation of itself, becoming a pandemic).

• His antipathy to this technology also puts in doubt progress toward new cancer treatments.

• Senator (and Dr.) Cassidy said that the cancellation wasted funding already invested and ceded a rising realm of medical technology to China.

• The mRNA platform provides the speediest means of response to the ominous possibility of a bio-weapon, so we are made less safe by the cancellation in this way too.

• The connection between vaccines and autism, repeated by the Secretary, has been repeatedly refuted over a number of years.

I wish this were the worst of it, but Kennedy’s similar undermining of confidence in childhood vaccinations will lead to very bad results for the most vulnerable Americans. We have already seen measles in west Texas, and wonder if iron lungs to treat polio will make a comeback too. This sounds alarmist, but is that wrong when the direction of policy is alarming? What other word for this warning from a doctor/ bureaucrat: ‘there’s going to be bodies in the streets before it’s over’ (so Janet Woodcock, former head of the FDA, in the New York Times of August 8).

Of course Kennedy’s real constituency is the anti-vax movement, much of it online, the true swamp of which politicians. There people with anxieties about their own or their children’s health are preyed upon. And of course in America 2025 the currency is angry vengeance, in this case about COVID mandates in the rearview mirror. But letting this passion drive present health care policy is needlessly self-destructive. In the case of emergent illness their political support will be far outweighed by the public’s negative reaction, in the short and long term.

You may ask: what does a cleric particularly bring to an issue such as this? Vaccine denial is an epiphenomenon of social media, where trauma and disinformation mingle and cause their own mutations. We in America also have a history of anti-science, born of various strains of fundamentalism. Scientific claims always need to be tested, as any scientist would tell you. But giving heed to scientific input honors the gift of reason, by which we better appreciate the creation, from the hand of God, in all its contingency.

To be sure, there are other precedents for Robert Kennedy in our history. His is its own brand of Know-Nothing-ism. Perhaps a yet closer analogy is the pedlar who might have appeared in a market in my native Massachusetts with his bottles of dubious wares. Citizens need to step forward in opposition and require bona-fide medicine.