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Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy has for years been one of the most prominent vaccination skeptics in the United States. As Jerome Groopman documents in the Review’s May 15 issue, he has campaigned against mandates—calling the effects of vaccines on children a “holocaust”—and once said “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” And now, during a measles outbreak that has spread to nine states and infected more than eight hundred people, three of whom have died, rather than advocating empirically effective epidemiological measures, Kennedy has recommended “the use of cod-liver oil…and steroids, although there’s no scientific proof that either is an effective treatment” and, moreover, “proposed prescribing clarithromycin, an antibiotic, as a treatment for measles, although antibiotics have no effect on viruses.”

“In the midst of an outbreak of a contagious disease,” writes Groopman,

it is seductive to believe we can control it with something simple and easily available that the medical establishment has neglected or dismissed. Ivermectin, an antiparasite drug that has demonstrated no benefit against Covid, is still touted by right-wing influencers as an alternative treatment offering miraculous cures. HIV was falsely alleged to be not the primary cause of AIDS but an innocuous fellow traveler as the immune system is degraded by sex and poppers (amyl nitrate). Cod-liver oil is promoted as a prophylactic against measles despite the proven efficacy of vaccination. We are moving into a parallel universe where those who oversee public health want to take us back to a time before…the development of antibiotics that combat microbes and vaccines that prevent infection.

Below, alongside Groopman’s essay, are five articles from our archives about public health.

Jerome Groopman
Measles Gone Wild

During a burgeoning measles outbreak, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to make contradictory remarks, publicly endorsing the measles vaccine while raising doubts about its safety.

Mark Honigsbaum
The Deep Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy

Understanding the battle over immunization—from the pre-Victorian era onward—between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.

—December 14, 2021

Daniel Smith
Trump’s Threat to Public Health

What caused the sudden burst of outbreaks of the measles in the US? Vaccine refusal. And now we have a president who is not only the most prominent and media-savvy fear-monger in the English-speaking world but also a dedicated, unabashed, very loud purveyor of myths about the dangers of vaccines.

—February 15, 2017

Annie Sparrow
The Awful Diseases on the Way

Much of human history can be seen as a struggle for survival between humans and microbes. Pandemics are microbe offensives; public health measures are human defenses. Water purification, sanitation, and vaccination are crucial to our living longer, better, even taller lives. But these measures of mass salvation are not sexy. While we know prevention is better and considerably cheaper than cure, there is little financial reward or glory in it.

—June 9, 2016

Helen Epstein
The Strange Politics of Saving the Children

“A small number of simple medical supplies, including vaccines for measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio as well as oral rehydration solution—a salt and sugar mixture that protects children with diarrhea from dehydration—could prevent about half of child deaths in the developing world, if only the international community would pay for them.”

—November 5, 2015

M. F. Perutz
Department of Defense

New ways of killing people have always been adopted with alacrity, but ways of preventing illness have sometimes taken centuries to be implemented….

By 1990 most children in the United States should be vaccinated against mumps, measles, and rubella, and measles might soon be eradicated worldwide, just like smallpox.

—October 8, 1987

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