megapanalo Don’t Call Kennedy a Vaccine Skeptic. Call Him What He Is: A Cynic.

The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.

He has claimed that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” (Childhood vaccines have prevented more than one million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations over the past three decades.) He has encouraged people not to vaccinate their babies: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’”

When asked about the polio vaccine, Mr. Kennedy claimed that it caused an “explosion in soft tissue cancers” that killed “many, many, many,phmoba app many, many more people than polio ever did.” Setting aside the fact that an “explosion in soft tissue cancers” hasn’t occurred, studies comparing children who received early batches of polio vaccines with unvaccinated children found no differences in cancer incidence. By 1979, paralytic polio was eliminated from the United States. When Mr. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.

Here’s what good-faith vaccine skepticism looks like: In June 2022, I was one of the F.D.A. advisory committee members who voted against authorization of bivalent Covid vaccines (updated vaccines targeting both the original strain and the Omicron variant). I wasn’t convinced they were any better than the vaccines we already had, which targeted only the original strain. While the committee ultimately voted to approve the shots, the vigorous debate around the data — as well as the debates my colleagues and I have had on other issues, such as the merits of Covid booster shots for healthy young adults — shows the value of rigorous discussion about vaccines.

Vaccine skepticism is baked into the systems with which health experts monitor vaccines after they’re authorized for use. We know that clinical trials are not enough; we need to constantly ask questions and examine new data. That’s why we have surveillance systems that can detect problems too rare to be picked up in clinical trials. It’s how we know that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines caused the heart condition myocarditis in about one in 50,000 people and that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine caused dangerous clotting in about one in 250,000 people. Detecting such risks allows us to weigh these rare harms against the enormous benefits of these vaccines.

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