Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Questions Vaccines’ Role in Declining Infectious Disease Deaths

Hi, I'm Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., your HHS Secretary.

At my recent Finance Committee hearing,

Senator Cantwell showed

us this chart to illustrate the

decline in infectious disease

during the twentieth century. The vaccine industry has long

used this kind of chart as

proof of the common claim that

vaccines had saved hundreds

of millions of American lives.

The momentous seventy percent

decline in mortalities in the United

States and Western Europe from contagious diseases since nineteen

hundred

marks one of the most

monumental public health advances in all

of human history.

Uh, was this really an achievement of mass

vaccination programs, as

many people, including Senator Cantwell, claim?

The most comprehensive evidence-based

study that rigorously examines

this issue is a CDC-funded study that was published

in two thousand, performed by a team of researchers from

CDC

and Johns Hopkins University and led by Dr.

Bernard Geyer. The scientists meticulously examined a

hundred

years of government infectious

disease mortality data, and they

concluded that nearly all the mortality reductions occurred

before the introduction of vaccines, a-and that vaccinations could

therefore claim little of the credit.

For example, you can see from this graph

that in nineteen hundred, some

thirteen thousand Americans a year were dying of measles.

By nineteen sixty, however, this number had dropped to a few hundred.

But the measles vaccine was not introduced until three years

later.

Therefore, almost all the measles mortality had

disappeared before

the vaccine. So the measles

vaccine can't really claim

the credit

for saving all those lives. Let's look at pertussis, also

known as whooping cough. Again, we see the biggest drop in

pertussis deaths occurred before the introduction of the pertussis

vaccine. The same is true for influenza.

Massive flu mortalities had already disappeared by the nineteen

sixties, but the vaccine was not widely disseminated

until the nineteen eighties. So once again,

the vaccine cannot claim the

credit. And look how tuberculosis deaths nearly

disappeared along the exact

same timeline as all those other

infectious diseases. Even though there was no mass vaccination for

TB in the United States, the mortalities disappeared without any

help

from a vaccine. Likewise, there was never a scurvy vaccine, but

scurvy deaths also

disappeared along the exact same

timeline. The same is true for scarlet fever,

which I had as a boy.

Deaths from scarlet fever disappeared in lockstep alongside the

drops in deaths from all those other contagions.

So what actually did cause the

decline in infectious disease mortality?

A landmark nineteen seventy-seven study by McKinley and

McKinley was required reading

in most American medical schools

during the nineteen

seventies and early nineteen eighties.

That study attributed the decline not to medical advances or

innovations, but almost exclusively to agricultural and

engineering innovations that improved nutrition.

These included better roads,

air transport, and refrigeration, and

superior sanitation.

This was the same period that flush

toilets and water chlorination became widespread.

The McKinleys credited less than three point five percent of the

mortality declines to all

medical measures put together,

including antibiotics, surgeries, a-and

vaccines. A-And here, for example, you see the introduction of

chlorination correlates pretty

perfectly with the decline in infectious

disease mortality. In nineteen seventy, Harvard Medical School

professor Edward Kass was arguably the world's

preeminent infectious disease authority.

He was both the founder and longtime editor of the Journal of

Infectious

Diseases

and president and founding member of the Infectious Diseases Society of

America. In his address that year to a joint meeting of the

Infectious

Disease Society of America and the tenth Interscience

Conference on Antimicrobial

Agents and Chemotherapy, Dr.

Kass issued a prescient public warning that actors

within the medical industry would try to take credit for the

momentous reduction in disease

fatalities in order to advance their

profits, their prestige, and their influence.

Dr. Kass challenged the emerging claim

that vaccines have saved hundreds

of millions of lives. Dr. Kass observed that the decline of

mass deaths from these dreaded killers

occurred prior to the widespread proliferation of vaccines.

And he warned against what he called the half-truths, and

medical research had stamped out

the great killers of the past: tuberculosis, diphtheria,

pneumonia,

puerperal sepsis, et cetera. He cautioned against the claim

that medical research and our

superior system of medical care

were major

factors in extending life expectancy.

The deceptive graph that Senator Cantwell showed the nation is

precisely the kind of scientifically baseless propaganda

device against which Professor Kass warned us.

And yet it is a common trope promoted by

the pharmaceutical industry and allied

medical associations, and their highly paid

politicians, to evangelize us into believing that

vaccines alone saved all those lives.

Senator Cantwell has taken some four hundred and fifty-six thousand

dollars from pharmaceutical companies.

The mantric pronouncement that vaccines have saved hundreds of

millions of lives

i-is so embedded in conventional

wisdom that it rarely receives the kind

of skepticism

and the rigorous scientific examination that public health agencies should

apply to all dogmas.

Vaccines are a critical part of public health.

They can prevent infections like measles altogether and the

serious injuries that sometimes accompany measles,

and they can

prevent you from spreading measles to others.

But blind faith in vaccination alone as our only

recourse against death by infection has inclined our

medical system to discount the role of therapeutic drugs and

vitamins and diet, exercise, and other lifestyle

changes that might fortify human immune systems against

all kinds of sickness. The idea that good health comes only in a

syringe can distort public health priorities and lead

to misallocations of public health resources.

During the Biden administration,

the US government's unbalanced response to

the COVID pandemic

e-exemplified this peril. American citizens paid a

steep price. The United States had more COVID deaths

than any other

nation. Under President Trump's leadership, we

are going to

ensure that America has the best childhood vaccine schedule.

We're gonna address vaccine injuries.

We're gonna modernize American

vaccines with transparent gold

standard science. We're going to eliminate

and correct conflicts of

interest and misaligned incentives, and we're gonna ensure

scientific and medical freedom.

Produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.