Since taking office, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the health and human services department (HHS), has undermined vaccines at every turn. He has dismissed the entire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory panel, narrowed access to life-saving Covid-19 vaccines, filled scientific advisory boards with conspiracy theorists and fired the newly appointed CDC director for refusing to rubber-stamp his actions.

But his rejection of vaccines is only part of the problem. Secretary Kennedy is unfit to be our nation’s leading public health official because he rejects the fundamental principles of modern science.

For generations, doctors have agreed that germs – like bacteria or viruses – cause infectious diseases.

In the 1850s, John Snow, known as the father of epidemiology, traced a cholera outbreak in London to water contaminated with human waste – not the “bad air”, or so-called miasma, that many at that time believed to be the cause.

In the 1880s, Louis Pasteur, the French chemist, in a controlled experiment, injected one group of sheep with an anthrax vaccine while another group went without it. Then he injected all of the sheep with anthrax bacteria. The vaccinated sheep survived, the unvaccinated did not.

The germ theory led to a revolution in public health and medicine which, over the years, has saved tens of millions of lives.

Just a few examples.

At a time when many women were dying during childbirth at hospitals, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis found that........

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