Maybe Robert Kennedy is right, maybe vaccines are really dangerous!

But studies say...

There is no litmus test in modern American politics as overwrought as the vaccine question. It can make or break anyone. The term “anti-vax” is itself both an effective slur and also a syntactic device: It’s meant to imply a whole lot of other things about you, like that you are probably “anti-mask” as well, and you don’t like public school, and you’re weird, and you probably “do your own research” on topics of major public import, like vaccines. (“Doing your own research” has itself become another shorthand for being an ignorant conspiracy theorist, bringing to pass de Tocqueville’s prediction that men “may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger.”)

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has become the standard-bearer for this unique political subset: He is a fierce critic of vaccines, and so that is what he is known for above all else. He could honestly be a Nazi serial-killing necrophiliac and people would still be more angry about his opinions on vaccines. He was on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week and he went to town on vaccines, as is his wont, and so there have been a series of anguished Internet headlines bemoaning the “misinformation” he has been permitted to spread. But of course nobody really knows if he’s spreading misinformation. The debate here is reflexive, essentially instinctive: Robert Kennedy said something critical about vaccines so it must be bad, and untrue, and dangerous, or whatever. Hokay.

But maybe he’s right about them. I don’t know for sure. You almost certainly don’t know either. Have you ever noticed that the arguments against vaccine skepticism—the arguments coming from people who are vociferously pro-vaccine—are always underinformed and verging on completely ignorant? Most people will simply claim that “experts” have “proven” that vaccines are safe at population scale. What experts, and how did they prove it? Most people can’t say off the top of their head. Maybe they’ll say “the U.N.” That sounds sufficiently expert. These are the people who as we saw earlier this year are trying to make it easier for adults to rape children, so I’m sure they’ve got everyone’s best interests at heart and you don’t have to look any further. Or maybe they’ll say, “the CDC,” that great august body of regulators that a few years ago told you a saliva-soaked strip of cotton on your face was a sufficient barrier against an infectious disease.

Sometimes your people will send you a study that purports to demonstrate the safety of vaccines. One of the most grating components of the modern Internet era is what I like to call “Study Culture:” the tendency of people to Google something very quickly, find some kind of “study” that even vaguely bolsters their hypothesis, and send it to you as if that ends the argument. Did they read the study? Did they even read the abstract? Did they review the methodology? Did they scrutinize the length of the followup intervals? Did they examine the funding of the study, and/or the funding of the peer-reviewed body that approved it? Did they review peer responses to the study, either in the former of editorial letters or countervailing studies? How often do you think anyone goes to these lengths before emailing you a link and saying, “See, that proves it?”

I suppose you could argue that this level of thoroughness is impossible, at least if one wants to have a normal life. We rely on intermediaries all the time to help us get the things we’re after, and we almost never check their work to see if they measure up. You want to hedge your bets where it counts. I get that. Of course then the question becomes: What are you hedging, and what are your bets? What are you giving up in exchange? Who are you relying on to tell you what’s right? In the case of vaccines, I mean, the CDC suggests your children should get three hepatitis B shots by the time they’re six months old. The first one, they say, should come within hours of their being born. The CDC readily admits that, in the U.S., hepatitis B is overwhelmingly transmitted via sexual contact and drug usage. Is your baby having sex and taking drugs? Think carefully about your response here. The number of babies who contract the disease from birth is on the order of about 0.02% of live births per year. Of course the number of babies who contract the disease when their mothers don’t have it is, you know, zero percent. Do you want to hedge your bets on a pharmaceutical you know absolutely nothing about to prevent a virus your baby has at most a two-one-hundredths-of-one-percent chance of contracting? These days they also think your baby should receive his first COVID “vaccine” in a three-dose series starting as early as six months old. The number of infants who have died from COVID-19 is a rounding error. It vanishes into the statistics. What’s in that vaccine? Do you know? Does it matter at all? What about chickenpox? The number of chickenpox deaths in the U.S. in the years leading up to the vaccine regularly numbered in the dozens. Those are exceptionally low odds. Are you sure that shot’s been vetted thoroughly enough to make those odds seem daunting by comparison? What vetting have you done? None? Why not? What else did you have to do that was so important?

Similar to Study Culture, there’s a pretty standard impulse to push back against this kind of inquiry by positing that, whatever the merits of reflexive skepticism, there’s simply no way that experts and regulators could get it all so wrong. I mean, sure, they screw things up sometimes, but would they really let millions and millions of children be injected with unsafe pharmaceuticals every year? Do we really think they would drop the ball so profoundly like that?

Which, I mean, you tell me. Do you think they might? Are experts ever wrong? Are they right 100% of the time? Have they ever got something really wrong, sometimes profoundly wrong? Is your answer “No way, they’ve never done that?” Ha ha. What’s stopping them from doing so this time? Do you have some special knowledge to that effect? Be honest: Do you have any other reason to trust the vaccines other than, “I’m scared to not get them?” (And maybe, “I’d be really embarrassed if people found out I was skeptical of vaccines?”)

Maybe Robert Kennedy is right! You never know. He could be wrong, too. But let’s at least be honest about the standards by which we’re judging this question. Unthinking, uncritical acceptance of vaccines is currently seen as a sort of litmus test of polite society. Good, normal people simply do not have any skepticism over vaccines, at all, in any way. The only ones who do are weird, abnormal, scary people, the kind of people who should be shamed and slurred for their bizarre insistence on learning more about the medicines they’re taking or giving their children. The vaccine debate is essentially all politics now, no science—indeed, it’s widely believed that the less scientific inquiry the better, and that’s by the admission of hardcore vaccine proponents themselves. We’d do much better off to just admit that the debate, at least from those committed to comprehensive vaccination, is being guided by a whole slate of values of which actual science is an afterthought at most.