The Science Guy™ is sick and tired of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his vaccine conspiracy theories.
Months before Kennedy was appointed to run America’s public health policy, he was harassing generational science educator Bill Nye, trying to convince Nye that there was merit to his unfounded beliefs that vaccines are tied to autism, according to a Men’s Health profile of Nye published Tuesday.
The two had been connected years ago by way of a mutual friend, Ed Begley Jr., when Kennedy was still focused on championing environmental causes.
Nye showed the magazine “miles and miles” of texts from RFK Jr. in an old exchange that only ended when Nye put his foot down with the virulent conspiracist: “Okay, no more texts,” he told Kennedy. Those texts included links to conspiratorial articles focused on vaccines, but the missives weren’t effective at changing Nye’s mind. Instead, they only convinced him that Kennedy is “not suited for this job.”
“Just no self-awareness,” Nye said. “And if you read these articles he sent, they’re all this speculation about autism and just cause-and-effect, and mercury in vaccines, that maybe there’s a connection.
“I wrote him back and said, ‘Okay, I’ll read your book. I think you’ve confused causation with correlation. Your friend, Bill.’ And he sent this,” Nye said, showcasing droves of more messages. “So I wrote, ‘Okay, no more texts.’ And he started again! So I cut him off. He does not have good judgment,” Nye said.
But revisiting their correspondence got Nye fired up again, sparking a rant about Kennedy’s disastrous approach to handling a historic measles outbreak in Texas, which, since January, has amounted to 744 confirmed cases and 96 hospitalizations, according to the state health department.
“It was a religious sect that has historically low vaccination rates. And the argument from the other side is: They have rights not to get vaccinated. No, you don’t!” Nye told Men’s Health. “And unvaccinated people can, and usually do, spread a disease. And that’s why we have these rules, for public health! It’s not arbitrary. It’s not about your rights. It’s about my rights, people.”
And that fed into a diatribe about the excessive amount of misinformation that has spread about the safety and efficacy of the jab thanks to high-flying personalities like Kennedy.
“So furthermore, there’s a real subtle problem: There is a certain tiny fraction of people who get polio from the vaccine, but that is so rare. And it’s not true of measles,” Nye continued.
Should it need repeating: Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. They are so effective they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases, from rabies to polio and smallpox, a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual. But people from prior generations—like Nye—aren’t so quick to forget the radical developments in America’s public health sector.
“I’m of a certain age: You got measles, you got chicken pox, you got what used to be called German measles, now it’s called rubella. And you would go through that. You’d be sick and out of school, and everybody understood that’s what you were doing for five days, and your parents had to stay home from work.
“And by inventing these vaccines, you don’t have to do that. So let’s look at it this way: Now the parents can go to work and pay taxes! There you go! Isn’t that good? They don’t miss a day of work; they’re more productive,” Nye said. “It’s just an amazing time.”
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