RFK Jr.’s anti-vax conspiricism may actually be good for public health

I know this sounds crazy, but they said Crippen was crazy didn’t they?

Dr. Rachel Bedard everybody:

Restoring people’s willingness to take vaccines is urgent, and Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism on this topic may counterintuitively be an advantage. His statements on vaccinations are more complex than they’re often caricatured to be. He’s said he is not categorically opposed to them or, as an official in the new Trump administration, planning to pull them from the market: “I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines, I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” he said recently in an interview with NBC News. But he consistently raises largely unsupported safety concerns and positions vaccine refusal as a matter of personal freedom.

Still, Mr. Kennedy is right that vaccine mandates are a place where community safety and individual liberties collide, and that official communication about vaccine safety can be more alienating to skeptics than reassuring. His approach, he said in the same interview, will be respectful, rather than scolding: “I’m going to make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there, and people can make individual assessments.”

The trick with vaccination, of course, is that it works reliably only if most people get the jab. To encourage vaccine uptake, experts need to communicate with the public about vaccination differently, which is why Mr. Kennedy should create a nonpartisan and independent vaccine commission. A commission made up of good-faith scientists, clinicians, patients, regulators and civil rights advocates with divergent viewpoints could examine available data and reach conclusions on which circumstances justify vaccine mandates, how to prioritize who is vaccinated first in a crisis, how vaccine refusals should be handled and how to address people’s concerns.

Treating Mr. Kennedy’s supporters as fools has not brought them into the pro-vaccine tent, and the country risks outbreaks of dangerous diseases such as measles if vaccination refusals continue to rise. If Mr. Kennedy approaches his role with the same us-versus-them spirit that powered his failed independent campaign for the presidency, he will sow division and put lives at risk. But if he de-escalates conspiracist rhetoric and leads a sincere national conversation about vaccination, he just might save them.

If I were 30 years younger, eight inches taller, could throw a football through a tire swing from 50 yards away, had a preternatural ability to read NFL defenses with an edge rusher about to tear my head off, and was generally a completely different person in every possible respect than I actually I am, I might just lead the NFL in passing efficiency.

I mean how do you even parody this stuff? And how did we ever get along without the term “sanewashing?”

. . . also too, the “seeds of truth” dodge (“There are seeds of truth to some of what Mr. Kennedy says”)– where somebody constructs a destructive lie out of various claims, a few of which are actually or partially true — is a particularly dishonest rhetorical device. OF COURSE any really pernicious lie is based on “seeds of truth,” because a lie that’s absolutely unconnected to reality is going to take in only the most hopelessly ignorant and gullible people. So 35% of the population, tops.