The health secretary noted that deaths from contagious disease dropped before the introduction of vaccines.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sept. 29 challenged the common assertion that vaccines against diseases such as measles and polio have prevented hundreds of millions of deaths.
When Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee earlier in September, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) displayed a chart titled “How Vaccines Helped All But Eradicate Diseases” and credited vaccines with lowering morbidity for measles and six other diseases by 99 percent or 100 percent.
The chart showed “the need for vaccines is very clear,” Cantwell told Kennedy.
Kennedy said on Monday that “the vaccine industry has long used this kind of chart as proof of the common claim that vaccines had saved hundreds of millions of American lives” but that vaccines have prevented fewer deaths than thought.
The health secretary pointed to a 2000 paper funded by the government that found significant drops in deaths from infectious diseases prior to the introduction of vaccines.
Measles deaths, for example, numbered about 13,000 a year in 1900, but had declined to a few hundred by 1960, Kennedy said. The first measles vaccine was not released until 1963.
Kennedy also cited Dr. Edward Kast, a Harvard Medical School professor who, in a 1970 speech, said that “the principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers in the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors in extending life expectancy.” In the case of tuberculosis, he said, there was a sharp decline in deaths before the vaccine was introduced.
Kast also said health professionals “must convince the public not by slick advertising tricks,” in a speech Kennedy summarized as “warning that actors within the medical industry would try to take credit for the momentous reduction in disease fatalities in order to advance their profits, their prestige, and their influence.”
“The deceptive graph that Senator Cantwell showed the nation is precisely the kind of scientifically baseless propaganda device against which Professor Kast warned us. And yet it is a common trope promoted by the pharmaceutical industry and allied medical associations and their highly paid politicians to evangelize us into believing that vaccines alone saved all those lives,” Kennedy said, noting how Cantwell has accepted contributions from pharmaceutical companies.
