Study! I love to study. A pot of coffee, a comfortable chair, and a deadline that isn’t today — nothing makes me happier than to dive into a subject, stacks of books around me, obscure databases on the screen. It’s perhaps the most appealing aspect of my job.
One day, I’m digging into the circumstances behind Oscar Wilde’s famous line about the Water Tower (“a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it” — not a quip, as commonly described, but pre-meditated provocation). The next, I’m exploring solar eclipses (if you are ever stumped as to where helium was first detected, remember helios is Greek for “the sun,” where the gas was noticed spectrographically during an eclipse in India in 1868).
So study is good. However. I also know that “study” can be a code word for wanton dismissal of facts that don’t serve your personal narrative, and I’ll give you an example. If someone says they are studying the Holocaust, trying to determine what really happened, then you can be sure you are not dealing with a scholar, but an antisemite. Your immediate answer should be along the lines of: “Well, I hope your ‘study’ involves reading a few of the thousands of meticulously documented books outlining the precise enormity of the crime, you odious bigot. Sticklers for bookkeeping, those Germans were. Fifteen minutes in a library should lay it out pretty clearly.”
With anti-vax advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. up for the role of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, whose spine occasionally stiffens before going soft again, warned that nominees hoping for Senate approval should “steer clear” of undermining the polio vaccine.
Prompting a classic weasel response from Katie Miller, RFK Jr.’s transition spokesperson.
“Mr. Kennedy believes the Polio Vaccine should be available to the public and thoroughly and properly studied,” she said.
Proper study! What a good idea. Let’s look into it! How about taking 1,349,135 children and submitting them to a blind trial at 244 test areas around the country, with half getting the cherry-red vaccine, and half a placebo, or nothing. Then we’ll really find out if this vaccine is any good.
Oh wait, we did that. In the spring and summer of 1954. To this day, it’s the largest medical experiment in United States history. Thousands of doctors, nurses, principals, teachers, parents and other volunteers banded together, working for free — the government wasn’t paying because that smacked of socialized medicine.
Gosh Neil, you might ask, being yourself an inquisitive sort, just like me, why did thousands of doctors, nurses, principals, etc., all supposedly with busy lives, drop everything to help run this giant medical test for no compensation? Possibly because polio was scything through their children: more than 57,000 cases in 1952, with over 3,000 deaths. A child could be healthy at breakfast and dead by dinner. That catches the attention of the neighbors and dials up public spiritedness.
The Sun-Times trumpeted the success of the polio vaccine on its April 13, 1955 front page after a nationwide test. Parents lined up to get their kids vaccinated, though in later years many would forget the horrors of the disease and draw back from the cure.
The vaccine worked. Now that kids don’t die of polio, alas, we’ve forgotten they ever have. Society has atomized into a buzzing cloud of random individuals, bouncing off one another. Respect for authority that isn’t Donald Trump has evaporated, and many in our country are deciding: Screw this medical authority business, I alone will determine what is good for my children. Ignorant rejectionism has put on the trappings of genuine academic skepticism and wanders the land, gaining converts.
Nor should we overlook the first part of Miller’s sentence: “Mr. Kennedy believes the vaccine should be available to the public…”
Well gosh, that’s big of him, considering that he’s spent years urging gullible people to swallow the lie that vaccines cause autism.
People are sheep. The recent election proved that. After Kennedy soft-pedaled a measles outbreak in American Samoa in 2019 and cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccines, he was accused of causing dozens of people to die needlessly.
Baseless undermining of medical advances is nothing new. Just before the 1954 test began, radio commentator Walter Winchell — the Fox News of his day —- went on the air to warn the vaccine “may be a killer” and that the authorities were stockpiling “little white coffins” just in case. The next week, 10% of children were pulled from the experiment by worried parents.
They were worried about the wrong thing. The vaccine wasn’t the killer; polio was. That’s as true today as it was in 1954. History will some day gape in shock that a leader could try to lure us back into the past. Actually, we don’t have to wait for history to pass judgment. It’s pretty shocking right now.