Since anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the reigns over the Department of Health and Human Services, cases of once defeated childhood illnesses like measles and mumps have begun spreading again throughout the nation. Virtually all those infected were not vaccinated.

Though Kennedy Jr. has voiced some good ideas regarding children’s health issues, like eliminating processed foods from their diets and attempting to reduce childhood obesity, his insistence on spreading false and dangerous health conspiracy theories and his lack of background in the field of public health should have automatically disqualified him from stepping into his critical role in the administration.

Instead, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is a man who has been at the forefront of the anti-vaccine movement and is a popular speaker to audiences of parents who are fighting their districts to lift the vaccine requirements for admission to most public schools.

Without any valid and reliable scientific evidence, he has falsely asserted that vaccines in children can cause autism. A wide consensus of expert health organizations, including the U.S. Departmentr of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization have found no credible link between vaccines and autism.

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He said that HIV does not cause AIDS, that wireless 5G cellular network technology can cause cancer and other ailments, that prescription antidepressant drugs cause mass shootings in the U.S., and that unapproved and potentially lethal use of treatments like ivermectin can cure COVID-19.

I, on the other hand, wish these life-saving vaccines had been available much earlier.

Childhood interrupted

In the mid to late 1940s, my aunt Bea lived with my uncle on the army base where he was stationed. During Bea’s pregnancy, she developed a rash on her body. Her physician diagnosed her with an allergic reaction to strawberries.

Within the next six months, several other people on the base developed similar symptoms, most of whom had not consumed strawberries, or for that matter, any type of berries. The consensus from the medical staff at the base was that it was rubella, a form of measles.

Bea’s child, my cousin Barbara, was born deaf and blind with serious intellectual impairments. Bea’s husband left her shortly following the birth, and Bea and Barbara lived the remainder of their lives with Bea’s parents, my grandparents Abraham and Dorothy.

Bea refused to permit her daughter to attend a residential or day school for children with severe disabilities. Barbara subsequently never learned methods of communication and skills for daily life, and she remained dependent on others after my aunt and grandparents died.  

In those mid-century years, no safe and reliable vaccines were yet available to prevent childhood illnesses. My sister and I suffered from mumps in 1952, measles in 1954, and later chickenpox (which I thought one contracted by playing around with a box filled with chicken parts and feathers).

I was thankful to have never contracted pertussis, which, on top of my asthma, would have been devastating.

The pain, the fevers, and, when it came to the mumps, the swelling was almost unbearable. Some of my peers have experienced lifelong negative side effects from these childhood illnesses.

In my 70s, due to having been exposed earlier to the chickenpox virus, I developed a serious and extended case of shingles. I wish I had known beforehand that a preventative vaccine was available.

My parents grew up in the 1920s through the 1940s and also suffered from these childhood illnesses, from which my father lost all hearing in his left ear. In addition, my mother agonized with a severe case of diphtheria, from which she almost did not recover.

When a letter from my elementary school principal arrived at our home in 1955 asking if they would allow me to take part in the first mass inoculations of the newly approved Salk Polio vaccine, they literally jumped with joy at the chance.

They had seen their friends contracting Polio, some losing their ability to breathe on their own, some losing movement in their legs or arms, some succumbing. They had seen their hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, suffering the effects of this terrible virus. They were willing to do anything to protect me and my younger sister from this pain.

I wish the array of vaccines available today had been around when I was young. If they had been, I would not have been at risk for the pain or loss of schooling and socialization. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have been at risk for a significantly lower quality life.

I have often imagined what my cousin Barbara’s life could have been like if she had not been exposed to rubella in utero, as well as the numerous students under my care when I served as a teacher in the 1970s and early 1980s at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.

How might their lives have been different if these vaccines had been available earlier?

Science can now eliminate most of the major viral infections that have plagued humanity for millennia. Unfortunately, fear, misinformation, and the vast array of conspiracy theories have stood in the way.

I will not debunk the myths that are circulating about vaccines, for members of scientific public health communities do this so much better.

I ask, though, that everyone who is eligible, please accept the science and take the vaccine. By doing so, you will be supporting yourself, your children, your communities, and your world.

And let us take politics out of the injections.

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