We Don’t Seem to Be Making America Healthy Again, New York Times, Dec. 28, 2025, by Benjamin Mazer
As a physician and medical journalist, I have spent years watching, with both fascination and concern, as anti-vaccine groups honed their persuasive techniques. …
As secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr has spent the last year not only remaking federal immunization policy but shifting the national dialogue about this essential public health tool.
I never predicted that a fringe conspiracy theorist like Mr. Kennedy would one day become leader of the health care system, but it doesn’t surprise me. Anti-vaccine groups have developed into a potent force. They have learned to stoke suspicion of authority with masterful precision, they have become adept at applying a veneer of scientific legitimacy to their ideas, and they’ve prepared a superficially compelling response to seemingly every argument that doctors make to encourage immunization. These rhetorical tactics were first worked out at dinky conferences and obscure media outlets, but now the government itself has become a propaganda organ for the movement. This makes confronting vaccine skepticism much more challenging — and, amid growing measles outbreaks nationwide, far more urgent. …
Take the false idea that vaccines cause autism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once plainly declared that they didn’t. Mr. Kennedy instructed the agency to take a different position: “The rise in autism prevalence since the 1980s correlates with the rise in the number of vaccines given to infants,” the C.D.C.’s website has been updated to read.
Most parents, for the time being, seem to trust their doctor’s advice. Childhood immunization rates remain relatively high in the United States. But it has taken only a slight decline in vaccine confidence to set off the disease outbreaks we are seeing. It is easier for anti-vaccine groups to chip away at public trust than it is for the medical community to rebuild it. …
Vaccines may be safe and effective, but just saying so is no longer enough. We’re only one year in, and how physicians and public health experts respond will shape what happens next.
Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D. and Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
Jim: Dr. Mazer is absolutely correct to challenge the anti-scientific drift of US vaccine policy. Abuse of scientific methods in this realm is inexcusable, indeed deadly. But as Don highlighted with his online comment (below) and its highly enthusiastic reader response, the even bigger problem is the failure of our disjointed, heavily privatized and profit-ized health insurance. Each year, it wastes hundreds of billions of dollars and causes tens of thousands of excess deaths.
Don: My response to this NYT op-ed on vaccine denialism received the highest number of reader recommendations – 882 as of January 5th. This reflects the increasing popularity of Medicare for All.
Don McCanne
San Juan Capistrano, CA
Dec 28, 2025
As an 88 year old physician, I’ve had some exposure to our health care system. Watching some of our more serious diseases conquered by immunizations has been rewarding. On the other hand, watching our health care system evolve into one of the poorest performing systems of the industrialized world, while being the most expensive, has not been a matter of questionable judgement of the care we provide, rather it has been a matter of distributing our health care dollars to the very wealthy middlemen (insurers, private equity, etc.) when we really need to offer health care to everyone and pay for it through an equitable tax system based on ability to pay. Health care reform advocates will recognize that as a well-designed single payer system, or an improved Medicare for All. Let’s redirect our attention to where the real problem is.
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