A pall of apprehension hangs over the minds of many American liberals today. It is an anxiety born out of the belief that we are in an accelerating and irreversible state of post-truth decline. Veracity, it seems, no longer underwrites the political domain as it once did—or so it is wistfully claimed. Among the most impassioned alarmists, the clearest sign of our epistemic malaise consists of the ever-growing expressions of distrust that have been directed toward contemporary institutional science. But hostility to vaccines and pasteurization do more than incite consternation among liberal defenders of science; for some, anti-science is regarded as a threat so pernicious that it imperils the very foundation of American liberal democracy. Just a few years ago, the professor and vaccine scientist Peter J. Hotez contended in Scientific Americanthat anti-science “has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force,” presenting as much of a threat to “global security . . . as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation.” What we need in order to “combat” anti-science, he argues, is a “counteroffensive” as robust as those launched against the threats of international political violence. A war, in other words.
The stupefying fear that anti-science provokes has lately been all the more inflamed by the confirmation this week of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. The panic is understandable. Covid-19 rates have not abated, a bird flu outbreak looms, and Trump kicked off his second term by withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization and ordering all federal health agencies to temporarily halt public communications. The HHS is now run by a fervent and vocal vaccine skeptic, whose many public proclamations have veered into an inconspicuously conspiratorial style of thinking. He has, for example, defended the allegation that the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy; he claimed that John Kerry’s 2004 election bid was stolen by the Bush administration; that fluoridation of water supplies reduces IQ levels in children; that environmental toxins cause gender dysphoria; that AIDS is not caused by HIV; that the prevalence of school shootings is a result of the increased use of psychiatric drugs; that 5G cellular networks cause cancer and are used by governments to surveil and control their populations; on and on, down the rabbit hole.
It is, however, Kennedy’s long-running suspicion of the efficacy and safety of vaccines that has become his most well-known position; it was a conviction that came to a head during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he maintained not only that vaccines were dangerous but that vaccine mandates were the result of corporate and political collusion, a form of corruption that hindered the medical freedoms of ordinary Americans. There is, as such, an entirely justifiable fear that as HHS secretary, Kennedy will seek to strip away whatever regulatory power the CDC and the FDA still have. In a dismaying sign of what might lie ahead, it was reported that in 2022 a legal advisor to Kennedy had petitioned federal regulators to revoke the approval of the polio vaccine. Kennedy has since softened his stance—at least performatively—in response to Republican backlash, which included a not-so-veiled rebuke from Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor and the sole Senate Republican to vote against Kennedy’s confirmation.
Perhaps the most dangerous way to politicize science is to claim that it is off-limits to debate, safeguarded in some way by truth and expertise.
Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism has been promulgated through the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit organization he founded in 2007, and which seems to be largely organized around two main objectives: to protect what it deems to be the deteriorating health of children in the United States against a host of threats, including fluoridation, pollution and other environmental toxins, processed foods, and, of course, vaccines; and to protect medical freedom—that is, a person’s right to maintain absolute bodily autonomy with regard to any and all medical decisions and concerns. CHD’s goals of bolstering child health and medical freedom converge in the belief that the decision to vaccinate should be one’s own (or, in the case of a child, the parent’s) and that vaccines should never be mandated because, CHD alleges, they are simply not as safe as scientists claim. Kennedy’s dedication to a hyper-entitled form of bodily autonomy, however, is somewhat Janus-faced, at least from the standpoint of the current state of American partisan politics, in that it underwrites his defense of abortion rights, much to the dismay of some of his Republican critics.
Kennedy’s notion of medical freedom is, in other words, seemingly equivocal—as are his larger set of convictions, which have ranged from perhaps the most conventional of conspiracy theories to expressions of anti-corporatism that would otherwise be palatable to a left-liberal sensibility. His reproach of the complicity between regulators and corporate lobbyist is far from unfounded; Biden’s secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who held the same position under the Obama administration, spent his time between the two administrations as a dairy industry lobbyist, a position he will likely return to. This is notable when we consider that agribusiness fears of revenue loss may have likely influenced the USDA’s delayed efforts to curb the rising prevalence of bird flu among cattle. Now, whether Kennedy will actually put a stop to the revolving door between regulators and lobbyists is a different issue altogether, and I suspect he’ll do nothing of the sort. What we’ll likely see, at best, is a variation on the usual Trump strategy of decrying insider complicity between government and business, only to replace one set of cronies with another. Either way, it will be the rest of us who will suffer the consequences.
Still, to understand Kennedy’s somewhat enigmatic political orientation, we should situate the roots of his turn to vaccine skepticism, perhaps counterintuitively, in his work during 1980s and 1990s as an environmental lawyer who successfully litigated several major environmental protection lawsuits against corporate polluters. In 2007, when he was already defending the debunked association between vaccines and autism, he delivered the closing arguments in the civil suit against DuPont, where a jury ruled the company deliberately dumped toxic chemicals from one of its smelting plants into the drinking water of residents in West Virginia. What’s interesting about Kennedy’s environmental protectionism, however, is that it could have translated into a form of activism that might have taken on a distinctly anti-capitalist course. This is not to suggest that all forms of environmental activism amount to left-oriented forms of climate justice or eco-socialism, but that a dedicated environmentalist might, at some point, find it difficult to avoid acknowledging the link between capital and climate catastrophe.
But for Kennedy, such a commitment was effectively impossible, presumably on account of his dynastic privilege, to say nothing of his overt devotion to free markets. He was, as such, forced to make a somewhat orthogonal maneuver, to continue to advocate for the environment but in a way that allowed him to defend his economic commitments. In his introduction to Dick Russell’s 2017 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for instance, Kennedy presents a spirited defense of green capitalism—the alleged commensurability between environmental protections and free markets—through a critique of Big Oil’s “socialism for the rich.” It’s not capitalism as such that’s bad for the environment, Kennedy tells us, but only a kind of tyrannical profiteering; going green and free market enterprise are actually mutually beneficial and reinforcing prospects. The continued redeemability of free capital persists in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which Kennedy argues that the solution to the exploitative tendencies of the American health care system lies not in the enactment of universal health care but, instead, in the institution of individualized “health savings accounts,” a diluted form of social welfare weighed down with free-market thinking.
This is consequently what the notion of medical freedom fulfills: a way of engaging environmental politics without addressing the pesky question of capital’s unqualified culpability in climate catastrophe. Some forms of capital are fine for Kennedy, for ultimately it’s whatever puts the status of bodily autonomy and medical freedom into question that becomes the real danger. For that reason, from where Kennedy stands, there is no daylight between a corporate polluter and a vaccine manufacturer. Dupont’s chemical dumping is functionally equivalent to public fluoridation programs and vaccine mandates; and that interchangeability only makes sense when capitalism is no longer seen as a disorder tout court but, instead, in its unencumbered form, as a necessary precondition for social health and vigor. For this is what medical freedom ultimately means for Kennedy—a medically encoded form of economic freedom.
On the CHD website, Kennedy contends that “what we are fighting for are the essential tenets of American Democracy, which is free market capitalism, which we don’t have.” Vaccine mandates, which otherwise seek to redress the epidemiological risks of contagion, necessarily bypass market freedoms, and it is on that basis alone that medical regulations such as vaccinations and fluoridation programs are seen as equivalent to the violence of corporate pollution. From an actual medical perspective, of course, it would be far-fetched to compare the risks associated with vaccines with the hazards of dumping forever chemicals into major rivers.
For Kennedy, however, the medical threats are commensurate. But we shouldn’t understand this commensurability as an expression of Kennedy’s misunderstanding of science (though it certainly could be, I do not deny). If anything, the confluence of medicine and economics is entirely rational, if only crudely so. It is not possible to be healthy, in Kennedy’s worldview, if one is dispossessed of medical freedom. What is health, Kennedy seems to imply, if one is not free to enjoy it, and free in only one very specific economic sense? To think of health in any other way—as a human right, for example—would potentially grant to the institutions of medical administration a market-bypassing power hazardous to the body politic.
Kennedy, of course, is hardly responsible for the privatization and commercialization of science and medicine that has taken place over the past five decades and, with it, the subsumption of medicine into an unadulterated form of economic thought. Health and illness have been effectively transmuted into economic concepts, and it’s for this reason that we must understand vaccine skepticism as an expression of economic reasoning rather than as a form of irrationalism or illiteracy. Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, however, represents something of an inverse position to most vaccine skeptics who do not share Kennedy’s dynastic and financial privilege.
For Kennedy, to oppose vaccines is to defend free market capitalism, but for ordinary science skeptics, the concern with vaccinations may be less an endorsement of free markets than an acquiescence to them. After all, when medical care is itself nothing but a series of economic decisions, wagers, and hedges, why not see the choice not to receive treatment as merely an expression of a mislaid sense of autonomy that economic markets spuriously promise? This raises the question of whether the solution to vaccine skepticism is to be found in a “war” on anti-science rather than, say, through the disentanglement of medicine from markets. Perhaps if ordinary Americans experienced medical care as a political right that they were free to accept, they would be less inclined to view it as an entitlement that they felt compelled to perform.
Still, the question persists: Why do Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers arouse the paralyzing fear that skepticism toward science threatens to destabilize American democracy? A far more pointed way of asking this would be: Why do defenders of science see more of a threat in science skepticism than in the rampant commercialization of science that has developed unabated since 1980, or in the militarization of science which has been one of the hallmarks of scientific research since the end of WWII? The answer lies largely in a structuring political fiction that emerged after the war, a fiction whose origins have been retroactively projected as an Enlightenment ideal, that science is the paradoxically non-political ground for politics.
If science represents a form of truth that can achieve universal ends—truth, for everyone—then it possesses something akin to a democratic quality and can therefore function as a bulwark for liberal democracy, but only if it remains autonomous and unfettered by politics itself. Science can protect and even function as a model for democracy, so long as it remains technically non-democratic in its operations, an incontestable form of truth that holds for all people. Indeed, in some of the earliest postwar defenses of scientific autonomy, a direct analogy was posited between science and free markets, two institutions that were purported to be good for democracy, so long as the state did not interfere in their operations.
If we accept that science is inherently political, then the task becomes to politicize science otherwise.
Science has consequently come to function as a crucial, if tacit, model for liberal public reason, as a basis for how a harmonious political consensus might possibly come about. What has accompanied this fiction of science’s role as the safeguard of liberal democracy is the fear of science becoming “politicized,” which is to say, interfered with at the level of its aims, procedures, and determinations. To politicize science, to influence its outcomes or truth claims—even to shape its directions or orientations—is to throw democracy itself into peril. To that end, Kennedy is seen by his critics as emblematic of this trend, given his denial of vaccine efficacy, his promotion of unproven medical alternatives, and his promise to weaken, if not at least to dangerously contort, scientific regulation and policy.
That being said, what is especially striking about the concern over scientific politicization is how much some transfigurations of science are regarded as clearly political while others are not. Why, for instance, do we not tend to consider the fact that American taxpayer dollars subsize private vaccine research, the products of which companies like Pfizer sell back to the federal government at tremendous profit, as an unambiguous instance of the dangerous suffusion of politics into science? Or the fact that federal agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency receive billions of dollars of federal funding, while the Pentagon continues to fail independent audits? Why, in other words, is it not considered political to mold the aims of science to serve U.S. military hegemony or the accumulation of private profit? There is, of course, a clear answer here: American democracy has fundamentally anchored itself, particularly in the postwar era, to free market capitalism and military hegemony; a Cold War and later neoliberal style of thought has effectively depoliticized science’s militarization and commercialization.
What we see, then, is that science continues to be imagined as both a form of truth that grounds democracy, as well as a technocratic solution to political conflict, even while it is deployed largely for political and economic ends. And this otherwise apparent performative contradiction is obscured simply on account of the fact that militarism and capitalism are not inherently seen as incommensurate with the aims of American democracy, at least from the standpoint of Capitol Hill. What can be drawn from this is that the very idea that science is apolitical, and must thus be protected from politicization, is itself a profoundly politicized way of viewing science. For to say that science is neutral is another way of saying that science must remain not only autonomous but immune to contestation and dissent; and that science only becomes politicized when it is resisted. To tamper with and effectively weaken vaccine regulations, then, is regarded as just as political as any effort to demilitarize or decommercialize science—and that is an odd equivalence to say the least.
The purported neutrality of science, then, can become a strategy by which to fulfill targeted political and economic ends under the rhetorical auspices of objectivity and truth. And since the purpose of such a strategy is to hinder contestation, one of the dangers of politicizing science is that it assigns a truth value to otherwise contingent political interests, thereby insulating those interests from debate. But it’s actually not enough simply to say that science is merely capable of being politicized, for such a qualified view continues to reinforce the belief and the aspiration that science could and even should be sequestered from the tumultuous domain of politics. But this is yet another dangerous fiction: science is a human craft like any other, and no amount of technical scaffolding or sociological oversight can remove the political value with which it is always laden. Science, after all, is never value-free, nor does it possess any inherent moral worth, since it only ever reflects the values of its practitioners. Perhaps the most dangerous way to politicize science is to claim that it is off-limits to debate, safeguarded in some way by truth and expertise.
If we accept that science is inherently political, then the task becomes to politicize science otherwise. Let us, in other words, instrumentalize science for our ends—not in the name of profit or military advancement but for the sake of solidarity, accessibility, and for the promotion of flourishing and dignity for all. In response to Kennedy’s call to “Make America Healthy Again,” we should not cower into the tired defense of science’s self-proclaimed autonomy as the precondition for a “healthy” body politic. If we truly desire a thriving democracy, then we must demand otherwise: Give science over to the people! Fight the politicizations of science with politics, not with the veil of reason and neutrality! Political and democratic control over science does not mean threatening expert judgment with lay opinion; it means, for example, demilitarizing science, or severing the relationship between health and capitalism which so profoundly animates a notion like medical freedom, and which likely underwrites so much scientific skepticism today. What we must in the end realize is that in its conventionally depoliticized sense, science will not save us; indeed, from such a standpoint, no institution will. Only we can save ourselves.