This is very telling -- along with my next post, on the three-decades high spike in measles, nation-wide. Depressing, in fact.
Serious public health scientists' very rational and well supported (by peer reviewed evidence) views are having to be passed along almost in secret emails. The costs to public health -- and confidence in good advice more broadly -- cannot be overstated.
Both the Wa Po and NYT have pieces on this, this week. Here's the Here is the NYT one:
. . .I never predicted that a fringe conspiracy theorist like Mr. Kennedy would one day become leader of the health care system, but it doesn’t surprise me.
Anti-vaccine groups have developed into a potent force. They have learned to stoke suspicion of authority with masterful precision, they have become adept at applying a veneer of scientific legitimacy to their ideas, and they’ve prepared a superficially compelling response to seemingly every argument that doctors make to encourage immunization.
These rhetorical tactics were first worked out at dinky conferences and obscure media outlets, but now the government itself has become a propaganda organ for the movement. This makes confronting vaccine skepticism much more challenging — and, amid growing measles outbreaks nationwide, far more urgent. . . .
Onward, resolutely -- just the same.
नमस्ते
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