America's anti-vaccine killers
9 January 2025
I am an active member of The Committee to Protect Health Care, which is collecting signatures of physicians for its letter demanding that the U.S. Senate reject Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS.) If you are a physician and have not yet signed, please join over 17,000 others and SIGN TODAY! If you know physicians who may be interested, please forward to them.
ACTION! ››› If you live in Alaska, Louisiana, Maine, North Carolina or South Dakota and support these efforts, please email campaigns@committeetoprotect.org.
Vaccines save lives, which means that those with influence who disparage vaccines cause people to die or, to put it plainly, are killers. A Harvard / Emory study estimated that there were 232,000 preventable deaths among unvaccinated adults from 30May21 to 3Sep22. As noted previously, I hold Donald J. Trump responsible for many of these avoidable deaths based on his COVID-19 lies, indifference and inaction, making him one of America’s greatest mass killers.
This essay in the New York Times by the Governor of Hawaii discusses how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caused the deaths of dozens of individuals in Samoa due to his vaccine misstatements:
But when vaccination rates fall, preventable diseases can regain a foothold and pose a new danger. And that’s precisely what happened in Samoa, after misinformation spread by anti-vaccine activists eroded trust in vaccines and led to the 2019 outbreak. Thousands of preventable cases of measles sprang up, leading to the deaths of 83 people, mostly children. One of the most prominent voices behind the anti-vaccine campaign was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Vaccines and public health vaccination programs are not just medical interventions; they are also moral imperatives. They embody our commitment to saving lives, ending disease and protecting the health and well-being of future generations. If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under Donald Trump and serves as our nation’s chief health care officer, there is a real danger that he will continue to spread doubt and misinformation, potentially causing vaccination rates to fall and leading to more preventable deaths. America can’t allow that to happen.
Anti-vaccine advocates should not be put in positions where their irrational beliefs will cause large numbers of people to die needlessly. We should do what we can (write emails, stop supporting anti-vaccine candidates or public officials or support their opponents) to prevent this from happening.
The index to my prior essays (mostly post 5 November 2024) is here.
I have another blog on Cancer and Medicine.
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