Do we have to ‘distrust the science’ to Make America Healthy Again?

• Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is right that America suffers from a chronic disease epidemic. The question is whether he has the prescription for what ails us.

Last week, enigmatic Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stirred controversy as he took to Capitol Hill to defend upheaval at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and moves viewed as being calculated to restrict access to certain vaccines, including vaccines created under President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” to combat COVID-19.

While much of the firepower trained on Kennedy came from the administration’s partisan opponents on the Democratic side of the aisle (Kennedy, himself, was a Democrat for most of his life), some Republicans in the three-hour long Senate Finance Committee joined the fray expressing concern.

Kennedy, who has long been perceived as a vaccine skeptic, narrowly achieved confirmation to Health Secretary — winning over physician Republicans like Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy — by promising he would do nothing “that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines.” Since confirmation, he’s deconstructed the CDC’s vaccine recommendation panel, canceled vaccine research, and made moves to limit access to COVID-19 vaccines.

As questions rolled in Thursday, he wasted no time returning fire with fire, denying that he is restricting vaccine access and offering a blistering indictment of past CDC regimes and public health. On the heels of the hearing, Florida announced a plan to drop vaccine mandates for children in the Sunshine State.

Peculiarly, both Kennedy’s positioning and that of Florida officials may put them at odds with the titular head of the Republican Party, itself — President Donald J. Trump. In recent days, Trump has lauded himself for the work of Operation Warp Speed and expressed concerns about eliminating mandates.

“Look, you have vaccines that work.  They pure and simple work,” said Trump. “They are not controversial at all. And I think those vaccines should be used, otherwise some people are going to catch it and they are going to endanger other people.”

Of Two Minds

I’m of two minds. Part of me is sympathetic to Robert F. Kennedy’s indictment on the scientific community. Americans (including myself) have become progressively less healthy in recent decades.

Science and medicine aren’t beyond being corruptible. They represent big money. One way to keep the dollars rolling is to treat symptoms instead of addressing causes.

COVID certainly did the scientific community no favors. Where some humility in not knowing would have gone a long way, scientific leaders expressed opinions, which turned out to be wrong, with absolute acuity. They undermined themselves in the process.

Scientists also struggle with something all humans do — the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is essentially an economics concept that says once you invest in something, whether financially or reputationally, it becomes difficult to admit you were wrong and cut bait.

On the other hand, I have a hard time laying bulk of America’s health problems at the feet of the scientific or healthcare industry.

This may be somewhat hyperbolic, but 95 percent of our health decline is caused by abundance at our fingertips. We eat too much of the wrong stuff and move too little. Many of the chronic and terminal diseases we deal with are just a byproduct of obesity.

Medicine is trying to keep up with our horrible lifestyle choices, and on net, the American scientific community has been developing diagnostic tools and treatment at the speed of light. It’s actually impressive how much innovation we’ve seen. It’s also hard to calculate how much worse off we’d be without those innovations.

Caution Conflating Chronic Diseases with Vaccine Access

Kennedy’s criticism of America’s problems with chronic disease, largely attributable to obesity, may be on target, but that does not mean he is right about vaccines. The two trains of thought are not connected, unless someone can scientifically establish that vaccines are linked to chronic disease. No one has been able to do that.

Eradicating polio and smallpox was a good thing. So too was getting rid of measles, mumps and rubella, though we’re seeing some of those diseases spring back to life in unvaccinated communities. It’s easy to say we don’t need vaccines when we’ve never seen a polio outbreak (thanks to vaccines).

I’m all for refocusing our energies into teaching the next generation the importance of diet and exercise and not relying on science as a crutch. That doesn’t diminish good science. I’m also all for questioning stringently conventional wisdom, but it should be done in earnest, scientifically. There’s a balance to be found if we really want to Make America Healthy Again.