At the confirmation hearings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., starting from Wednesday, senators are expected to question him closely about his controversial opinions on vaccines.
For years Kennedy has questioned the security of vaccines, including those for polio and measles, two diseases that continue to damage children. More recently, he said that he has no intention of removing the vaccines from the Americans but wants to release security data to the public, even if almost all data are already publicly available.
The opposite opinions of Mr. Kennedy extend well beyond vaccines. And as a secretary of health and human services, he would have had a huge influence on health policy, also on issues generally under state control, cutting funding for certain programs or raising others.
Here is a control of the facts of some of his statements.
This is false. Mr. Kennedy’s number is off for magnitude.
The national report on diabetes statistics estimated that in 2021, about 35 for 10,000 children and teenagers under the age of 20, or 0.35 percent, had a diagnosis of diabetes. Another study found that 0.1 percent of young people from 10 to 19 had diabetes in 2017.
Kennedy also seems to confuse youth or type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease, with type 2 diabetes, which can derive from an unhealthy lifestyle. It is right that new cases of diabetes – both types – are increasing. But the prevalence in teenagers is still much lower than adults and increases with age; The highest prevalence, 29.2 percent, is among adults from age or over 65 years of age.
In a subsequent comment that included prediabetes, Kennedy said: “These children now depend on insulin and diabetes treatments, on the treatments of chronic diseases for the rest of their life, and this is making our health system fail”.
While prediabetes is a warning sign for diabetes, most cases do not require insulin treatment and can be reversed with lifestyle changes, including a modest weight loss. Prediabetes is also increasing; About 28 percent of teenagers is predial.
This is false. Every year, scientists keep track of the effectiveness of the annual flu vaccine. And every year, dozens of studies document the effectiveness of the vaccine against hospitalizations and deaths. The exact numbers vary, but the results always show that vaccination is beneficial.
The influenza vaccines injected do not contain alive viruses and nasal spray vaccines contain a weakened virus; Neither types can transmit the flu.
The composition of the flu vaccine is generally determined in the spring, based on the dominant variants in the southern hemisphere at that moment. In some years the vaccine produced is an excellent game for viruses that emerge in the autumn, and in other years the best hypothesis of scientists is a little out.
Consequently, the effectiveness can vary from 30 to 90 percent, depending on the age group and the influence subtype. But even when the effectiveness is low, the vaccine can reduce the duration and severity of the disease.
Since the influence tends to be more serious in children under the age of 5 and in the elderly, the vaccine is particularly recommended – not mandatory – for those age groups. And since the flu vaccine was introduced in 1945, life expectancy, even among the oldest adults, has increased constantly.
This needs context. Mr. Kennedy is partly right. One out of 36 American children is diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder, according to the centers for the control and prevention of diseases (the estimate one in 34 is specific for the boys). And in California, one in 22 children has autism.
But autism is a spectrum and most diagnosed people can participate in sport, write poems (if they are so inclined), payments, date and get married; Many are parents. The list of people with autism includes successful athletes, writers, actors, activists, artists, politicians-and even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the head of the effort to reduce the costs of the government of the Trump administration.
Studies suggest that most of the increase in autism diagnoses are at the milder end of the spectrum, in part because the diagnostic criteria have expanded.
What Mr. Kennedy describes is a subset of autistic people, about one in four with the diagnosis, which are deeply affected. But they too are more likely to damage themselves than others. (The prevalence of deep autism is increasing, but slowly.)
Mr. Kennedy may not have seen these people when he was a child because then, most of them was isolated at home or institutionalized, erroneously diagnosed with mental and heavily medicated diseases.
This needs context. Firstly, most of the states requires that children receive about 20 shots to enter school, but those shots include doses of about eight vaccines (depending on the combined vaccines) that together protect from a dozen diseases.
Also including vaccines that are recommended and not requested, such as an annual flu vaccine, children can receive 35 shots at the age of 5. Mr. Kennedy’s mathematics would be correct only if the number included the vaccines indicated in pregnancy and if each component and each dose of a combined product was considered a separate vaccine.
All vaccines must meet the rigorous requirements for safety before approval. Even after their approval, federal officials monitor relationships on the side effects in several systems that analyze medical records and patients and doctors’ relationships.
The affirmation of Mr. Kennedy according to which none of the shots was tested in the tests controlled by placebo also requires a context. Some of the vaccines currently in use were actually tested against a placebo; Others are new alternatives to vaccines subjected to placebo controlled tests before approval.
A new vaccine is often tested against an approved – rather than a placebo – to demonstrate that it is equally good at preventing the disease. The most recent treatments for some diseases such as cancer are in the same way tested in these studies, which are called non -inferiority studies.
This is because it would not be ethical to deny some children in a protection of experimentation against a dangerous pathogen, as it would be to deny patient treatment with a disease, giving them a placebo.
This is false. Numerous studies have examined this statement and his unknown. On the contrary, the same pertussis, rather than the vaccine, can be dangerous or even fatal for small children.
In both statements, Mr. Kennedy refers to a pertussis vaccine, or for the start cough, which was interrupted in the 90s. The vaccine was made with inactivated bacteria and, compared to new vaccines, has been associated with greater side effects, including fever, sleepiness and irritability.
But the research has not found serious short or long -term consequences. According to a large study, for every 100,000 doses of vaccine, less than nine produced a feverish attack on the day of vaccination.
Feverish convulsions are convulsions caused by high fevers and can occur during any childhood disease, including an ear infection; They do not cause lasting damage. Long-term follow-ups by several teams did not show evidence of brain damage in children who received the vaccine.
Kennedy is right about the fact that a team reported greater mortality after vaccination for pertussis in West Africa. But a series of independent panels that was called up to examine their studies unanimously that the team data did not support this conclusion.
“In fact, the documents provide substantial evidence against this conclusion,” the experts wrote.