What R.F.K. Jr. Might Do on Vaccines

Opinion|Vaccines Have Saved Millions of Lives. Kennedy Threatens That Success.

Vaccines save lives and reduce health care costs. Those are facts. They have been critical public health tools for more than 200 years. Their hallmark achievement was against smallpox, a frequently disfiguring and often fatal disease that killed over 300 million people in the 20th century before a worldwide vaccination campaign eradicated it in 1980.

Thanks to a vaccine, smallpox virus no longer exists outside the confines of a few secure laboratories. And there are many more success stories: polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, diphtheria, yellow fever. Outbreaks of all of these diseases have been sharply reduced by vaccines.

Which is why it is both head-scratching and outrageous that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a political figure with no medical or public health training, who has been accused of being an anti-vaxxer, or, more charitably, a vaccine skeptic, is Donald Trump’s choice to take the nation’s most powerful and important public health job.

Mr. Kennedy said the day after the election that “I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines.” But the potential to use the bully pulpit as secretary of health and human services to cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccines could mean that many people will skip their vaccinations, become sick from diseases we can prevent and die for no reason.

As The Times noted last year in an examination of “five noteworthy falsehoods” furthered by Mr. Kennedy, he “has promoted many false, specious or unproven claims that center on public health and the pharmaceutical industry — most notably, the scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism.”

Before vaccinations were available, parents worried constantly about their children contracting dangerous viruses. As recently as the 1950s, parents feared every summer, when polio epidemics were most common, that their children might contract the disease and become paralyzed. Today, vaccines are close to eliminating polio from the planet.