Canadian Doctor Responds to Kennedy's Vaccine Madness

By: Robert Issenman

Robert F. Kennedy’s conduct as head of U.S Health and Human Services is consistent with Trump’s “Put the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse” administration. Throughout his career, Kennedy has been a loud and vocal opponent of childhood immunization, a subject on which he has zero qualifications, but over which he now wields a massively influential megaphone. By contrast, after spending my career caring for children, I have a few thoughts to share with him.

Cities form the backbone of modern civilization, enabling large populations to coexist in limited spaces. Yet many overlook the inevitable trade-off: increased urban density raises our vulnerability to epidemic infectious diseases—a hidden cost of our collective city life.

As a pediatrician who has practiced for decades, I ask every child’s family whether they have been immunized. After thousands of encounters, I have learned a lesson or two.

The first is that until recently, the vast majority of children in North America have been immunized against illnesses such as polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles and German Measles.

One of the effects of the COVID pandemic was to interrupt this normal and orderly vaccination of children and to politicize the issue of immunization altogether.

While reported rates of measles are similar in Canada and the US, it is highly likely that there is significant under-reporting in the U.S. Access to health care there is very uneven, and cases in immigrant populations may be going undocumented given that so many are not connected to health services, and are naturally wary in the current political climate of calling attention to themselves.

With increasing frequency, I encounter families that are not immunizing their children. The ensuing conversation has this predictable consequence: I consistently fail to talk any non-immunizing family into having their child vaccinated.

After all these years, I have accepted that you can’t talk people out of their belief system. However, I also learned that most people will allow you to share your own experiences. As someone who grew up in the 50’s and started medicine in the 70’s, I have a number of stories to tell.

Story 1- in 1954, my 4-year-old sister developed a vaccine-preventable throat infection. Within hours, she was transported to hospital and underwent a lifesaving tracheostomy in which the surgeon cut a hole in her throat, inserting a tube that allowed her to breath and survive.

Story 2 - The following year, my older brother contracted polio at summer camp, after drinking from a water source labelled “Do Not Drink This Water.” Ten percent of the kids with polio ended up on an iron lung respirator—the other 90% were sick at home for months after the illness. He was in the second group. In later life, many of the survivors went on to experience the effects of “long polio”.

Story 3 - Our next door neighbours had two daughters; the elder daughter was bright, energetic and attractive. The younger daughter was deaf, mute, and blind with severe developmental delay, the result of German measles her mother caught during her pregnancy. Stephanie spent much of her childhood caring for her younger sister, who died young. Later, Stephanie committed suicide for reasons we can only guess about.

Story 4 -I have never recovered from my medical school experience on a dark pediatric ward listening to the howling of a child whose brain had been destroyed by Measles encephalitis

Story 5 - During Emergency Department night shifts while on pediatric residency, it was customary to perform spinal taps on three to four children in a desperate effort to diagnose bacterial meningitis early enough to prevent death or devastating disease. The vaccine against this infection was developed during my medical residency.

These vaccine-preventable diseases are part of ancient history for today’s young families, leaving them unfamiliar with the tough lessons of the past scourges. This unfamiliarity leaves them susceptible to a host of alternative health practitioners who peddle “all natural therapies”. These individuals, once called “snake oil salesmen,” used to sell homemade remedies out of the back of their wagons. Now, they do it over the internet.

It's not hard to spot families immunized by alternative health practitioners into distrust of conventional medicine. They buy into the belief that natural medicine is good, carefully researched, quality controlled and government-certified, and that conventional medicine is bad. They have joined the groupthink that conventional doctors are on the payroll of big pharma, which in turn is in league with the government as part of a vast conspiracy.

Shortly into a conversation, the physician hears the stock phrase, “I’ve done my own research and haven’t decided whether to immunize little Liam yet.” This emphasis on the ‘I” and “my own research” in the sentence raises a question or two.

The broader truth is that immunization is only partly done to protect the individual child. The chances of any one child catching measles, German measles or polio are low, but put that child in a classroom of 30 children and you have an ideal incubator of disease. In some respects, day care is only partly about socialization and partly about putting the child in infectious disease boot camp— educating their immune system about how to deal with disease.

In the US, children catch 12-16 infections in their first winter in a group setting. The fact that they suffer half that number in the second year is proof of what their immune system has learned about infectious disease. These illnesses are “kind” teachers, unpleasant but not lethal.

The real killers, though, are held at bay by immunization—they are still there, however, waiting for the day when we let immunization rates fall below about 85-95%. Like wildfires in Los Angeles hills, they stand ready to surge back into our communities, despite contrary claims from figures like Robert F. Kennedy.

To add to the worries of this Canadian doctor, Trump has recently appointed Casey Means as the Surgeon General despite having an unconventional medical background. Although she completed medical school, she left her residency to become a wellness influencer, maintaining her MD title with an inactive Oregon medical license. Her appointment reflects a significant shift in leadership at a key federal health institution, as she promotes alternative wellness philosophies including metaphysical beliefs about the body as a "radio receiver" for divine instructions and predictions that "the future of medicine will be about light."

---

Bob Issenman is a Canadian Harvard Harvard-educated Professor of Pediatrics. His past contributions include a newspaper column, magazine articles and 3 self-published books on a wide variety of subjects including travel, adventure, politics and health.