Not long ago, restaurants carved out entire sections for smoking, a practice founded on an illusion that smoke could be contained to a single corner of a shared room. Eventually, research revealed that the nearby patrons were being exposed to secondhand smoke, now known to damage the lungs and pose long-term health risks. Vaccine denialism rests on the same individualist illusion — that private choices bear no public consequences and that in a shared space the impacts of personal decisions can be isolated.
Public health, unlike clinical care, is not an individual sport. A cancer patient can refuse chemotherapy and affect only their own health. Vaccines are different — a person’s choice to skip one is someone else’s exposure.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a long record of promoting vaccine-skeptical rhetoric, particularly around the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. He has argued that the conclusion that no causal link exists between vaccines and autism is “a lie,” despite leading health authorities and decades of rigorous research refuting his claim. In January, under Kennedy’s authority and without input from vaccine makers or outside advisors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 to 11 recommended vaccines.
Kennedy claimed in 2025 that the measles vaccine “wanes very quickly” — a position contradicted by the scientific consensus that two MMR doses provide lifelong immunity for most people, with a 97 percent effectiveness rate.
Now, Kennedy appears to be shifting. At an April hearing, he stated that his department “promotes the measles vaccine” — while maintaining that the federal government shouldn’t mandate it. Whether this is a genuine reversal or political cover remains an open question.
What isn’t open to debate is the result. The U.S. is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades, with 96 percent of cases from the first 16 weeks of 2025 occurring in people who were unvaccinated or of unknown vaccination status. During the 2024-25 school year, 138,000 kindergarteners were exempted from one or more vaccines — nearly all for nonmedical reasons — and approximately 286,000 had no documentation of ever receiving the MMR vaccine.
What’s driving this? The problem is, in part, social media platforms that reward the performance of critical thinking. Users chasing a “red pill” moment are easily pulled into echo chambers and manipulated by digital algorithms that elevate misinformation and are optimized for profit. When news breaks that a young person has died unexpectedly, comment sections on X quickly fill with speculation blaming “the jab.” Vaccines have become a convenient scapegoat for the tragic and inexplicable.
The medical community is pushing back. In 2025, the American Academy of Pediatrics, among other health groups, filed a lawsuit against Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services, alleging unscientific and unilateral changes to vaccine recommendations. Many pediatric practices are declining to treat families who refuse vaccination — and their policies now explicitly address prevailing misinformation, including autism-vaccine claims. Meanwhile, at the CDC and Food and Drug Administration, firings and resignations remain rampant since the start of the new administration.
The problem isn’t misinformation alone. It’s that scientists and physicians aren’t trained to fight it, and it was never their job to. The people best equipped to convey the truth aren’t in the spaces where the lies are spreading, namely social media feeds. Countering the vaccine denialist campaign will require the same psychological sophistication and interdisciplinary tactics that its propagators use — meeting people where they are, not just where the data is.
This moment calls for not just more humility but more trust in the minds responsible for our health and safety. This means recognition that years of research and schooling are not interchangeable with a Google search or a month spent in a Facebook group.
“You would need a really big conspiracy to have a whole group of physicians and scientists band together to say that something is safe when it isn’t, when we’re all looking at the same data,” said a senior FDA official who requested to remain anonymous to avoid professional repercussions. “You would also have to assume that we, throughout all of our training and research, were just out to kill people… There would always be a whistleblower.”
We have great public health institutions, or at least we did. The choice to dismantle our nation’s most fundamental structures as we continue to grapple with economic inequalities, a crushing cost of living and inhumane healthcare disparities, is not just shortsighted. It is a betrayal of our collective obligation to protect each other — especially the littlest among us.
Copy edited by Daryl R. Thomas Jr.