Fight the Anti-Narrative with Pro-Science
React to skepticism with curiosity. Who knows? We might learn something.
Anti-vax. Anti-mask. Anti-lockdown. Anti-science.
Anti, the A-bomb of modern rhetoric, is used to cast someone as diametrically opposed to some overly broad category of good thing. Often, somebody drops the A-bomb not because somebody says they hate the entire, broad category of good thing, but because they express some niche and misunderstood opposition to a specific subset of all good things, or maybe they just express uncertainty. The A-bomb eliminates all nuance from the conversation. Any deviation from complete ideological purity leads to rhetorical escalation, A-bomb, mic-drop, boom.
A bombs are a satisfyingly blunt rhetorical tool, a bloody baseball bat of what we call modern dialogue. However, when you use the A-bomb a few times, its absurdity becomes clear and the way it degrades our rhetoric and bypasses the discussions we need to have becomes evident.
Do you not like that yapping Chihuahua? You’re anti-dog!
Do you not like opioids? You’re anti-medicine!
Do you not like mandating the mRNA vaccines for kids? You’re anti-vax!
Do you not like mandating toddlers wear masks? You’re anti-mask!
Do you not like the Ford Pinto? You’re anti-car!
When the “anti” rhetoric appears in modern media and social media, especially when used to cast some opposing party as bad or unfit for consideration, it almost always stems from a broad misrepresentation of their views. The anti-dog A-bomb bypasses discussions of how some yapping dogs are annoying. The anti-car A-bomb of the Ford Pinto hater bypasses discussions of the design flaws of the Pinto.
I’m reminded of this with the recent NYT article claiming that RFK’s lawyer Aaron Siri (who also represents other clients) asked the FDA to revoke their approvals for the polio vaccine, leading to outcries that RFK himself is therefore “anti-vax”.
How did we get here?
Aaron Siri claims that he was acting on behalf of another client (Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN) when asking the FDA to revoke their approval for a polio vaccine (not THE vaccine). The specific vaccine technology at issue is not the polio vaccine of lore (the Salk or Sabin vaccines), but a newer Sanofi vaccine that ICAN felt had not received the same tried-and-true testing of prior polio vaccines.
Opposing a specific polio vaccine led to overblown claims of opposition to ALL polio vaccines, and RFK was lumped in with guilt by association having hired the same lawyer presumably for different purposes.
We saw the same downward spiral of dialogue with the mRNA vaccines during COVID-19. A few scientists ahead of the curve realized there was widespread natural immunity by the time the mRNA vaccines passed clinical trials, but clinical trials required negative serology tests for inclusion and thus didn’t evaluate their effectiveness for patients who had already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Additionally, the risk profile for mRNA vaccines raised eyebrows - this new vaccine technology had uncomfortably high rates of severe adverse effects, and some worried that the process of mass-producing mRNA could lead to impurities such as DNA, leading to longer-term expression of immunogenic proteins (possibly causing longer-term inflammation or other adverse effects). By early 2021, there was even evidence of waning immunity from the NYC surge and Alpha surges across US states, suggesting the vaccines may not provide lasting immunity thus decreasing the estimated benefits against which the risks are weighed. When combining the prevalent natural immunity, low risk of severe outcomes to COVID-19 for young & healthy patients, the high risk of severe outcomes fromm mRNA vaccines, and the likelihood of waning immunity, the proposal to mandate vaccines for kids or young & healthy workers felt unwise to many.
There were reasons to question the broad-strokes claims that mRNA vaccines were good for everyone always, and that these vaccines should be mandated for hospital staff already likely exposed to the virus during the course of work and other populations of patients at low risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19.
Yet, when a vaccine expert with decades of experience like Martin Kulldorff raised his sincere objections to the rollout of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, he was cast as “anti-vax” and kicked off his position evaluating vaccines for the CDC. Opposition to either novel vaccine technologies, departures from individualized medicine considerations of vaccine risks vs. benefits for specific patients, or the policies by which vaccines were rolled out or mandated was branded as ‘anti-vaccine’ by many scientists.
If you mention the costs of lockdowns, you are branded anti-lockdown. If you mention the adverse effects of vaccines or prevalence of natural immunity, you are anti-vax. If you present any theory that is not The Chosen theory (chosen by whom? the people who proposed it, of course), then you are “anti-science”.
The natural result of this divisive rhetoric is an increasingly siloed band of academic elitists who have maintained purity at every purity test in the pandemic. Outside the ivory tower, the rest of us form an increasingly large majority of people who feel marginalized by the academic elitists, as our irredeemable anti-science souls have failed at least one purity test… or so they say.
Having heard enough false cries of “anti-wolf”, and having had my own views misrepresented in this same manner, forgive me but I have a hard time believing a word people say when they call someone anti-anything. Rather, after all I’ve seen, I assume they are oversimplifying someone’s true position. The true position someone holds - not the caricature blown out of proportion and projected on an oppositional wall - is what we need to understand to understand someone.
Does RFK Jr. want to bring back polio? Let’s ask him. His spokesperson says RFK’s position is that “the polio vaccine should be available to the public and thoroughly and properly studied”.
Wait a minute… That doesn’t sound like somebody who wants to stop polio vaccines. That doesn’t sound like somebody who is “anti-vaccine” writ large and wants all vaccines to be halted, but rather somebody who wants to know more about possible adverse effects.
It’s tempting to mine quotes and present those quotes as the be-all, end-all of someone’s beliefs, but sometimes people are speaking extemporaneously, and sometimes we need to give them opportunities to clarify their positions. Once, I told my brother “I hate you!” In reality, though, I do not hate him. I love my brother. If you asked me if I hate my brother, I would say “absolutely not”, and if you showed the video of me saying otherwise I would say “I’m sorry, I was wrong then”.
There is a difference between what we say and who we are. There is an even larger difference between what other people say we are and who we truly are.
Going back to RFK Jr.’s quote, it seems he’s most interested in getting independent confirmation that the adverse effects of vaccines are what studies report. There are many examples throughout medicine when adverse effects have been swept under the rug, from opioids to mRNA vaccines, and so it’s understandable some people may not fully believe everything they’re told by “the experts”. The experts used to recommend cigarettes for asthma, among many other things we now believe to be harmful.
Studying adverse effects is not “anti-vax”. In fact, I believe turning over rugs and studying adverse effects one of the most “pro-vax” things you can do. By studying adverse effects, we can improve medicines and vaccines. Old versions of the polio vaccine contained an insufficiently attenuated virus that led to circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV). By studying cVDPV, researchers learned how to improve their vaccines, make more robustly attenuated viruses, and reduce the risk of the attenuated virus mutating and regaining its ability to cause polio.
Studying adverse effects helped us improve the polio vaccine. Our modern, safe, and effective polio vaccines are improved versions of older, less-safe, and less-effective vaccines. I can already hear people saying I’m “anti-vax” for simply pointing out that vaccines are not perfect, that vaccine technology can still improve.
Polio is not the only attenuated vaccine to have had issues. In 1977, efforts to make a flu vaccine led to an attenuated flu virus emerging and causing an entire pandemic, killing an estimated 700,000 people.
History, including the parts of history that are not our proudest moments, is not “anti-vax” any more than studying Chernobyl makes one “anti-nuclear” or studying the Holocaust makes one “anti-Germany”. On the contrary, studying our mistakes helps us improve our vaccines, our nuclear reactors, and our society. Learning from our mistakes is an essential part of progress.
When I try to hear RFK’ Jr.’s many quotes, it sounds to me like he distrusts vaccines (he’s not alone there), and he wants to study vaccines. It could actually be remarkably pro-science for those of us with self-confidence in our technology and scientific theories to embrace this distrust, to react to skepticism with curiosity and open scientific minds.
Suppose RFK becomes HHS secretary and devotes funding to study adverse effects of vaccines that he and others feel are not adequately studied. Then, suppose RFK Jr himself gets data corroborating the theory that, for many vaccines on the market, the rewards outweigh the risks. Imagine if RFK Jr. himself gets evidence rejecting his hypothesis that a specific vaccine technology is not sufficiently safe & effective for widespread use, and then he embraces the technology. That would be science! RFK has a hypothesis that some vaccines cause currently unaccounted-for risks, but the evidence may well reject his hypothesis. Imagine if the process of lifting up rugs, turning over stones, and kicking tires left us with a larger, more robust, and RFK-approved body of evidence that most vaccines on the market are safe and effective.
Imagine if we, as citizens, also provided RFK Jr. the grace to change his mind.
Some tests have already been done looking for e.g. any association between vaccines and autism, and they have found nothing. It is understandably frustrating to know these studies and still see the hypothesis that vaccines could cause autism linger, to still hear of measles outbreaks in Disneyland. I get that frustration, and if I could chat with RFK Jr. I would show him these studies and ask how he would run a different experiment to test his hypothesis. Meanwhile, even here there is an opportunity for curiosity. The fact is, we really don’t know what causes autism. If we drop our weapons for a second, can we pick up our curiosity briefly and ask: what causes autism? Maybe the rise in incidence could be due to changing diagnostic criteria, but that doesn’t explain the underlying cause.
What causes autism? Skepticism, meet curiosity.
Imagine if RFK Jr. were confirmed as HHS director and requested more funding to learn the cause of autism. Imagine if we learned the cause of autism, whether it’s inflammatory microbes in the mothers, some chemical we’re exposed to at a higher rate, or what have you. If we learned the cause of autism and the cause has nothing to do with vaccines, then, by learning the definitive cause of autism, we could remove all doubt about vaccines causing autism.
Curiosity, if we’re brave enough to follow it, could advance our understanding of human health and improve public trust in science.
For too long, scientists have reacted to public curiosity with an elitist disdain. RFK Jr. presents an opportunity to switch from disdain to curiosity, to design experiments and test hypotheses, to bring the public along for our next scientific adventure to improve public trust in science. If we can maintain curiosity about adverse effects of medical countermeasures and vaccines, if we can compile evidence in a transparent and trusted fashion, we can improve public trust in the process by which medical countermeasures and vaccines are studied and approved.
If we can respond to RFK Jr.’s skepticism with scientific methods, we just might end up better off than we started, with new versions of old countermeasures that mitigate the older versions’ risks.
Every piece of technology we use today has been improved by studies of prior technological failures and inefficiencies. Modern cars have seat belts and air bags after prior makes and models had a high risk of deadly crashes, and everyone avoids recreating the mistakes of the Ford Pinto, a car that would burst into flames. Computers continually update their software because computer scientists are continually finding and fixing bugs and vulnerabilities. Modern aviation is made possible thanks to people studying carefully how jet engines fail, yielding modern jet engines less liable to foreign object damage. Doctors used to prescribe cigarettes to asthma patients… until further studies found adverse effects of cigarettes include cancer.
It’s not anti-science to question the perfection of modern technology.
On the contrary, if modern technology were perfect then there would be no more need for science.
If we can drop our egos, drop the “anti” narratives, and respond to skepticism with curiosity, studying modern technology’s imperfections could lead to new discoveries. If we stop trying to censor questions and start answering questions with the scientific method, the people we’re calling anti-vax could, in their questions, goad us to learn the cause of autism, develop new reporting systems to improve public trust in vaccine approvals, and improve vaccine technology to lower the risks of adverse effects.
On a meta level, we may even learn that the academic elite’s current strategy of calling everyone anti-vax or anti-science is harmful to vaccine adoption and public support for science. By examining the adverse effects of our current practices, we might be able to come up with something better. Science!!!
Bravo Alex, I think you are pinpointing maybe the most overarching issue of our era: the binary tribalism inherent in what I call "the great dumbing down."
It's a flat out tragic (as well as extremely dangerous) feature of this period in human evolution that the modern mind is being scoured of any and all traces of nuance. That every position, question, situation that humans face collectively must reflexively be reduced to some binary proposition and all humans required to "take a side". None of this has anything to do with reality which is nothing but infinite shades of all possible colors all the time. Somehow modern humans have normalized a process of dumbing everything down to a binary and then becoming a religious zealot on one side or the other.
As I've written elsewhere (https://iamascientist.substack.com/p/epistemrna), we scientists are collectively very much part of the problem. Though there are some notable exceptions here and there, scientists have collectively gotten caught up in this disease of the modern mind and most have abdicated the central pillar of our nominal practice: QUESTION EVERYTHING. If you are not curious, you are not a scientist. And most practicing "scientists" (sadly, particularly academics), instead of asking fundamental questions in good faith, are actually practicing a liturgy as either priests or bureaucrats of scientism - a religious scourge upon science.
We must all do better.
Nicely balanced article. I think one of the changes in the past 2-3 years is that many more people are open to listening to and accepting this argument.