During Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interview with Phil McGraw, better known as “Dr. Phil,” on Monday, an audience member asked him how Kennedy would advise new parents on vaccine safety. “We live in a democracy,” Kennedy said, “and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research. You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well.”
Kennedy’s advice to “do your own research” sounds superficially reasonable. But in the context of his longtime opposition to vaccines and the milieu of misinformation in which anti-vaxxers operate, it is a misleading and irresponsible mantra.
“Is this stroller safe and well-built?” is not the same kind of question as “Is this vaccine safe and effective?”
It is true that making informed decisions is part of what it means to be a responsible member of a free society. That involves, at times, taking the time and effort to read up on an issue. To use Kennedy’s example, it makes sense for a new parent to look up consumer guides and online reviews when shopping for a stroller, to help ensure a baby’s safety and a convenient user experience. It is not hard for the average consumer to sift through this information and make a decision on which one to purchase.But “Is this stroller safe and well-built?” is not the same kind of question as “Is this vaccine safe and effective?” Laypeople cannot understand more technical information about vaccine ingredients, efficacy reports or safety assessments on their own, since understanding that information requires specialized knowledge and a broader contextual understanding of the diseases they guard against. Instead, people have to rely on expert intermediaries to interpret and explain that information for them.
The rub is who you consider an expert intermediary. In a high-trust society, which America was far closer to a couple decades ago, people rely on the counsel of physicians and medical and public health authorities. They listen to researchers whose work is peer-reviewed and who are affiliated with institutions requiring credentials, like universities. People who turn to these kinds of institutions will find that there is a consensus that vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and provide benefits that generally far outweigh the risks they pose to recipients. And people “doing their own research” can read information published by these institutions conveying that assessment at a level laypeople can understand.In other words “doing your own research” isn’t necessarily about always understanding an issue, which is simply impossible. It’s about demonstrating humility about what one can know and identifying credible sources.
But for people who are skeptical or opposed to vaccines like Kennedy, “doing your own research” is a cue to seek advice from activists and self-appointed experts who exist outside of institutions requiring credentials. These fringe organizations and networks push misinformation and uncorroborated claims about vaccine safety, and because they lack rigorous standards for evidence or entry into the debate, the information goes unchallenged within these spaces.
This is the world that Kennedy and his allies have thrived in for many years. This is the world that has allowed Kennedy to become a superspreader of misinformation online and champion of anti-vaccine activism. This is the world in which he can go unchallenged for falsely stating that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” or suggesting incorrectly that there is evidence that vaccines cause autism, or arguing that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people are “most immune.” In this world, “do your own research” implies a kind of relativism about the truth wherein gut-level discomfort and suspicions are treated as the same as evidence.
The point is not that experts from accredited institutions are always right. It’s that the institutions are shaped by norms of evidence and expertise, and they are designed for accountability and can change in response to new evidence. Random internet users who peddle retracted papers that most of them can’t understand have none of those constraints and face no costs for getting things wrong. One of these is clearly a safer bet.
The scary thing about this moment is that Kennedy has managed to use savvy politicking to breach the walls meant to keep hucksters and peddlers of misinformation outside of expert institutions. And he’s using his new role at HHS to discredit the government as a serious authority on vaccines, by spreading misleading information about treating measles and commissioning a study purporting to look into a link between vaccines and autism by a discredited researcher. On McGraw’s show he also pushed false claims about how drugs are approved and made misleading claims once again about vaccine safety.
It’s a good idea to do your own research. It’s also a good idea to recognize the limits of what you can know — and to be judicious about determining who can help you.
