Ari Weitzman (20:28)
All right, that's it for what the left, right and medical experts are saying. Which leads me to my take. If you've listened to the opinions that John read earlier, and I hope you did, you would have heard a lot of consensus about the effectiveness of the MMR vaccine to prevent measles. However, you probably didn't hear a lot of engagement with the points made by those who are skeptical or or outright oppose the vaccines. So in my take today, I'd like to jump straight to addressing those concerns. First, I want to acknowledge the mindset that leads people to the reasonable position of being skeptical about vaccines. Imagine that you have a friend who lost a child under the age of one to an unknown cause. Imagine the pain and confusion that comes with such a tragedy and the desperate desire for answers that follows. That process of looking for answers will probably look different for everyone. But for a person scouring their own choices for blame, looking into vaccines, often the most obvious medical intervention a child receives after birth, is a natural starting point for many people who are in that situation. Page after page of Google searches telling them they're misguided for being skeptical won't settle their concerns. Instead, comfort comes from the first believable person who says, you're not crazy, vaccines are dangerous, and I can prove it. Today, the most prominent person delivering that message is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Despite rejecting the label of anti vaxxer, the Health Secretary has consistently defended the opinion to opt out of the MRR vaccine for years. Now he offers that opinion with the government authority for vaccine skeptics to justify their decision. Instead of dismissing Kennedy's argument out of hand, I want to address it directly. Using a 2019 article authored by Kennedy in Children's Health Defense, written before his run for President and still representative of his views today, A response was individual points in his own words. Now, to quote Kennedy, CDC's mortality and morbidity data suggest that measles fatalities in the pre vaccine era were 1 out of every 500,000 people population wide and 1 out of every 10,000 infected individuals. End quote. I have found plenty of sources to corroborate this claim. Before vaccines were made available to the public, measles killed 0.2 of every 100,000 people, or as Kennedy put it, 1 out of every 500,000. That's according to the 1962 paper that was cited by the source Kennedy used in his argument, but Kennedy does some sleight of hand there, discussing the pre vaccine mortality rates among infected people and among the general population, while omitting the current rates. The median general mortality rate of measles for each year this century is zero, meaning that in most years since 2000, nobody in the entire country died of measles. The maximum general mortality rate in that same time span, which was set last year in 2025, is one for every 170 million. That's only a 340 fold improvement on the pre vaccine benchmark that Kennedy is touting. When you look at infected people, the mortality rate has been, as Kennedy claimed, about 1 in 10,000 people in the US since 1962, and the mortality rate is roughly 1 out of every 1,000 infected children under 10. Again, that data is according to Kennedy's own source, which is Physicians for Informed Consent. Physicians for Informed Consent is a group that has clearly designed some visuals that are intended to help you feel comfortable with this one out of every 1,000 infected children mortality rate and simultaneously nervous about the MMR vaccine. They note in a graph that we share in the newsletter and that we'll link in the show notes that that mortality rate of 0.1% really pales in comparison to other mortality rates. In that context, compared to cancer's 2% mortality, 0.1% looks really small. But the difference of course, is that you can't get inoculated at birth for cancer. And if you could, would you say, yeah, but I'm four times likelier to die in a car accident, so what's the point? No, obviously not, because the point is that fewer kids die. To quote Alexander Langmuir, the author of the aforementioned 1962 paper that Kennedy is basing his claims on, measles is a disease whose importance is not to be measured by total days, disability or number of deaths, but rather by human values and by the fact that tools are becoming available which promise effective control and early eradication. Here's Kennedy's next point, and again in his words, I no one can say scientifically that any one of the 70 vaccine doses currently recommended for American children saves more lives than it costs. That question can only be answered by studies that compare long term health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations. When Kennedy says no one can say scientifically that a vaccine saves more lives than it costs, he really means to say that no one can say it definitively with certitude. But we can't say a lot of things with certitude for instance, I haven't walked on the moon, so I couldn't say definitively that I would feel lighter on its surface. However, a lot of findings scientifically support the belief that I would feel lighter on the moon. Similarly, many studies scientifically support the belief that the MMR vaccine prevents far more harm than it causes. In his demand for proof, Kennedy seems reasonable, but really, he is asking for the moon. Or to quote the National Academies, such a large study would be prohibitively time consuming and difficult. Here's Kennedy's next Studies support an unconscionably high injury rate from MMR. Merck's own MMR pre licensure studies found that 40% of children receiving the MMR vaccine suffered gastrointestinal illnesses within 42 days of the injection and 55% suffered respiratory illnesses, symptoms that might persuade rational consumers to choose the infections over the vaccine. End quote. Here Kennedy conflates injury with the symptoms outlined by the 1978 Merck study, which found that upper respiratory and gastrointestinal infections were reported in about 55% and 40% of vaccinees in two reviewed groups, respectively. It also found a faint measles like rash in nine subjects and mild transient arthalgia in one. While these symptoms sound scary, these are common side effects of a live vaccination, though today they are much less common. They're also not long term conditions that we might think of when we hear the term vaccine injury. Here's Kennedy's next point. 26% of post pubertal females might develop arthritis and arthralgia from the MMR vaccine. This is more conflation. According to a Johns Hopkins epidemiological review, adult women who took the MMR vaccine developed temporary arthritic and arthralgic symptoms they did not actually develop arthritis. Here's a way to think about that. If my hands ache for a few days after getting the flu, the flu did not give me arthritis. I just had symptoms of arthritis. I just had arthritic symptoms that eventually went away. Next, From Kennedy, a 2004 JAMA study found that an additional 1 in 640 children had seizures after MMR. Compared to unvaccinated children, about 5% of these will progress to epilepsy. Again, temporary symptoms here. Febrile seizures, which are not uncommon in infants already, are not the same as contracting a condition here, epilepsy. Kennedy supports his claim with a 2004 JAMA study. This is how that study concludes MMR vaccination was associated with a transient increased rate of febrile seizures, but the risk difference was small, even in high risk children. The long term rate of epilepsy was not increased in children who had febrile seizures following vaccination compared with children who had febrile seizures of a different etiology. Kennedy's next claim is HHH's voluntary post marketing surveillance program on vaccines. VAERS or Vaers reports over 89,000 adverse reactions to MMR through March 31, 2018, including 445 deaths. However, Vaers is a voluntary and notoriously ineffective system. VAERS captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries, according to a 2010 HHS funded study performed by another federal agency, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. If you multiply the known adverse events from the MMR by 100, you get 44,500 deaths and 8.9 million injuries, making the measles vaccine far worse than measles. Two things here. First, Kennedy gravely misinterprets the VAERS data. Volunteers reported deaths or injuries after vaccination. They didn't, and they really can't report causation. They also can't be closely vetted. In a classic example, Dr. James R. Laidler said he filed a VAERS report that an influenza vaccine had turned him into the Hulk. The report remained in the database until VAERS, after a discussion with Dr. Laidler, asked if it could be deleted. So Kennedy's initial number of 450 is invalid. Second, VAERS captures about 1% of non serious events, not serious ones. To the contrary, roughly 25% of adverse reactions like anaphylaxis and Guillain Barre syndrome are reported to VAERS. So Kennedy's multiplication by 100 is also invalid, making his claim of 44,500 vaccine related deaths in 2018 just a pure fiction. Lastly, Kennedy says most anti vaxxers are individuals who believe in the traditional liberal axiom that Americans should have sovereignty over their own bodies and that the government has no right to coerce healthy Americans to submit to a risky medical procedure. Here's my last point. Of course everybody has a right to ask questions and make their own choices, and being nervous about vaccines is reasonable. But having bodily autonomy means having the choice to cooperate for a higher common good or let your selfish fears persuade you. Kennedy is advocating for your fears, and he's using the language of patriotic idealism to do that. I can find an opposing and equally patriotic story to counter that with. Let's go back to the very founding of our country. After an audacious victory In Trenton in 1776, General George Washington's ragged Continental army had to endure a brutal winter in Valley Forge, locked in a battle against an enemy Washington called 10 times more dangerous than Britons, Canadians and Indians. Together, that enemy was smallpox, and the weapon Washington chose to fight it was equally inoculation. Between 1777 and 1778, the forward thinking Washington ordered a mass inoculation of Continental soldiers. As a result, the Continental army won its battle against smallpox and eventually the war. In 1777, urgency pushed Washington to supersede bodily autonomy for the sake of a common good and ultimately achieve the very birth of our nation. Today, in 2025, armed with access to a vaccine and information about its benefits, our nation's choice is not an authoritarian leader's decision to make between mass bodily autonomy on one hand and the common good on another. Instead, it is an individual choice between that higher good and each of our own fear. You have bodily autonomy. We all do. The achievements of our predecessors granted us that right now we must exercise it wisely.
