Donald Trump and his White House team unveiled “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again” to some fanfare on Thursday afternoon, and as The New York Times noted, “The document echoes talking points Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed for decades.”
With this in mind, few were surprised when the White House report started crumbling under scrutiny. The Washington Post reported, “Some of the report’s suggestions … stretched the limits of science, medical experts said. Several sections of the report offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.”
But also of interest was what RFK Jr. had to say shortly after the document reached the public. NBC News reported:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who released a long-awaited report on the causes of chronic disease in children, said in an interview with CNN tonight that people should be skeptical of ‘any medical advice’ and that ‘they need to do their own research.’
This, alas, is not uncommon advice from the secretary of health and human services. In fact, about a month ago, Kennedy sat down with Phil McGraw, the television personality known as “Dr. Phil,” and the Cabinet secretary told the host that he advises parents of newborns to “do your own research” before vaccinating their infants.
At a superficial level, this might even seem compelling to some people, at least at first blush. People do research online all the time, looking up movie reviews or the best place to buy a toaster, so what’s wrong with people taking advantage of available resources when making decisions on matters related to science and health care?
In case the answer to this question isn’t obvious, The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse wrote a compelling column on this a few weeks ago.
It probably goes without saying, but just in case: Researching a vaccine is substantially more complicated than researching a stroller. You research strollers by typing ‘best strollers’ into Wirecutter and buying whichever one has cupholders. You research a vaccine by getting a PhD in immunology or cellular and molecular biology, acquiring a lab in which you can conduct months or years worth of double-blind clinical trials, publishing your findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal, and then patiently navigating the government and industry regulations that are required to make sure your vaccine is safe and effective.
Quite right. When the United States has a health secretary who talks about public health issues as if they’re “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, it’s a reminder that the country has the wrong health secretary.
I, for example, don’t have a background in medicine or scientific research. So I’m not in a position to go online and make competent assessments on matters related to immunology. Instead, I rely on the scientific consensus crafted by knowledgeable and experienced scientific professionals, whose work has been subject to extensive scrutiny by other knowledgeable and experienced scientific professionals.
In other words, I can’t do my own research, because I’m not qualified to do that research. People who know what they’re talking about can do their own research, at which point the scientific canon takes shape.
RFK Jr. appears to approach these issues with the assumption that the scientific canon is inherently suspect because it’s crafted by those who reject his conspiratorial and unscientific perspective. When he advises Americans to “do their own research,” it’s a recommendation rooted in the idea that people should poke around the internet until they find sites that give them information that seems true — or that they want to be true.
But that’s not a responsible approach to public health. On the contrary, it’s madness.
As my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem recently explained, “Laypeople cannot understand more technical information about vaccine ingredients, efficacy reports or safety assessments on their own, since understanding that information requires specialized knowledge and a broader contextual understanding of the diseases they guard against. Instead, people have to rely on expert intermediaries to interpret and explain that information for them.”
That the incumbent U.S. secretary of health and human services doesn’t understand this fact should be the source of widespread concern.
