On January 22, Kirk Milhoan, chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices–installed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had previously purged the committee’s entire prior membership–made some truly bizarre statements that got largely buried in that week’s blizzard of insane news. In any normal week (one where, say, the president of the United States wasn’t threatening to seize Greenland and ICE wasn’t murdering people on the streets of Minneapolis), it would have made national headlines, but instead it just got just spotty national coverage.
In a podcast appearance, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who has minimal professional credentials or experience related to vaccines or immunity, started off by saying, “I don’t like established science,” adding “science is what I observe.” Uh, no. That’s like an airline pilot dismissing warnings from air traffic control about other planes on a potential collision course by saying, “Nah, air traffic is what I observe.” Unlike whatever it is Milhoan thinks he does, real science is a systematic approach to uncovering facts by proposing a hypothesis and testing it through carefully defined procedures, using methods designed to eliminate as much bias and as many potentially confounding factors as possible. It’s not the random observations of one guy, even if that guy was way smarter than Milhoan.
That was just the warm-up. As gobsmacked writer Beth Mole observed in Ars Technica, he then “falsely linked vaccines to allergies, asthma, and eczema and repeated a claim, without evidence, that COVID-19 vaccines killed children. When pressed by the podcast hosts, he revealed that he put the risk of vaccine side effects on the same footing as the risks from the diseases the shots prevent—despite the fact that disease risks are often orders of magnitude larger than the tiny risks from vaccines.”
He went on to suggest that maybe we don’t need to vaccinate kids for polio anymore, since, after all, conditions are different today than when the vaccine was first developed (and when polio disabled thousands of Americans every year, and even more around the world). In fact, he argued that all childhood vaccines, including shots for polio and measles, should be optional and not required for school entry.
Essentially, our government’s top vaccine advisor wants to conduct a giant experiment on the whole country to see what happens if we let these previously controlled and easily preventable viruses run rampant, even though they can disable and kill you.
Why, a sane person might ask, would anyone want such a thing? Milhoan explained, “It’s been very important to us, the members of the committee, that what we were doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order— not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order.”
Ah yes, freedom! Let’s unpack that a little bit. I don’t know how Milhoan identifies politically, but this is a classic libertarian version of freedom: I get to make whatever choices I want, without regard to the damage they might do to anyone else, and if that harms you, tough.
This was brought home to me some years ago, when I worked for a while at an organization with a bunch of ardent libertarians on staff. It quickly became apparent that many were simply sociopaths disgusted at having to follow any societal rules or norms that require even a modicum of decency toward or consideration for others; they had simply learned to dress this selfishness up as a political philosophy. Laws like the Civil Rights Act, some of them told me, were a gross imposition on freedom.
But Milhoan isn’t even talking about an individual’s right to be vaccinated or not. Most vaccinations are given in infancy or early childhood, long before anyone would think of allowing children to make medical decisions for themselves. He’s talking about a supposed right of parents to expose their children to diseases that might hospitalize, disable, or kill them, years before they’re old enough to even understand that such a choice was being made on their behalf.
And he wants to let parents make that choice not just for their own kids, but for everyone that child comes in contact with: friends, classmates, teachers, neighbors. Got a classmate with a weakened immune system because they’re recovering from the cancer chemotherapy they needed to stay alive? Tough luck, kid: My freedom to expose my child to deadly and disabling diseases overrides your right to live.
With RFK Jr. as captain of the ship, that’s the attitude now shaping much of US health policy. Until he and his entire crew are gone—and for some time after, because it will take years to rebuild what they’ve destroyed—you’re on your own.
Bruce Mirken is a longtime health journalist and communications co-chair of Defend Public Health.
