A POX ON FOOLS

A full-throated attack on “Make America Healthy Again” and Robert Kennedy Jr.

“Vaccines are a secular miracle,” proclaims MIT science writer and filmmaker Levenson. Indeed, administer a vaccine, and the recipient usually won’t die of, say, polio or many another disease that would have been lethal without it. The path to sussing out pathogens was an arduous one, but the results are inarguable to anyone with a clear mind: Where the average life expectancy in the U.S. in 1900 was about 47 years, by 2025, we had added 30-plus years—to say nothing, Levenson adds, of the role of vaccines in saving 154 million lives in the last half-century, “10.2 billion years of healthy life gained.” Who would dispute these wins? Well, the current secretary of Health and Human Services, to name one, who, by Levenson’s lively description, is a leading proponent of the “Making Microbes Great Again” movement. Moreover, the author says, Kennedy’s “scientistic gobbledygook” is a throwback to the know-nothingism that opposed the very first vaccines, based on a religious view that saw “vaccination as a violation not just of God’s law, but of nature’s divinity as well.” By that logic, therefore, “if vaccines are wrong at the root, any (apparent) benefit from them is an illusion.” Levenson allows that the “Make America Healthy Again” emphasis on clean foods and a healthful environment isn’t entirely misplaced, but its antivaxx stance is—though, he alleges, it’s yielded a “comfortably rich” life for Kennedy, who “has received compensation topping seven figures from the antivaccination organization he founded.” One might think such a thing would be a disqualification, but Levenson writes, “One definition of freedom, for the moment, seems to have won. It is no longer the one that…there is a line beyond which personal rights must surrender to social obligations.…It is instead an absolute demand that rejects any constraint whatsoever.”

An impassioned but reasoned look at the culture and commerce of vaccine denial.