Last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced down the Senate Finance Committee amid a barrage of insults that concerned parents—especially mothers—are all-too-used to hearing. Words like “ignorant,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “anti-vaccine,” applied to RFK Jr. throughout the hearing, have for decades been thrown at mothers raising important questions and concerns about the safety of America’s childhood vaccine schedule.
What our top officials don’t seem to recognize is that American mothers no longer trust them. Demonstrable steps towards transparency and accountability will do more to regain “compliance” than name-calling ever could.
The COVID-19 debacle showed mothers like me that our voices didn’t matter and that public health couldn’t be trusted. Indeed, public health officials’ countless failures during the pandemic made us question everything they’d told us about health, not just COVID.
When it came time to think about vaccinating my infant daughter, for example, I decided to take a closer look at the childhood vaccine schedule and relevant safety data. Baby Boomer senators berating RFK Jr. on Friday likely only received four to five childhood vaccines. Therefore, rigidly insisting that parents today comply with a much more intensive schedule for their children, without addressing their valid concerns, is uncaring and out-of-touch.
IW Features storyteller and board-certified physician Dr. Monique Yohanan made this point in her tell-all report “Rethinking Vaccine Policy,” which urges lawmakers to take a more nuanced approach in order to win back parental trust in vaccines.
“Current vaccination policy increasingly undermines its own objectives by treating all vaccines as equivalent community protection measures, dismissing legitimate concerns, and operating under information models that technology rendered obsolete decades ago,” she wrote.
Dr. Yohanan also made the important point that in countries like Sweden, which has a voluntary vaccine program and emphasizes parental education, 97-98% of parents still choose to vaccinate their children.
Instead of emphasizing “education over mandates” like Sweden, however, some institutions are eroding trust even further. Despite FDA senior leadership’s goal of building back public trust, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently called for a total ban on religious and philosophical exemptions to the childhood vaccine schedule. This misguided and heavy-handed approach will do nothing to win back parents and will raise suspicions even higher.
So, what exactly would win back parental trust? As Dr. Yohanan wisely pointed out, a more flexible, nuanced schedule that prioritizes more important vaccines over less important vaccines is a great start. At an even more basic level, however, what I and many mothers like me want to see is a change in attitude on the part of our medical providers.
We have dedicated our time and energy to researching vaccine inserts, studies, and safety data only to be called ignorant and irresponsible by the medical establishment. Providers’ willingness to explore alternative options and have respectful, in-depth conversations would go a long way towards winning back trust in an age where no one knows what to believe or who to turn to for accurate information.
We want doctors to see our children as individuals and to work with us to identify our child’s unique risk factors. We also want the public health establishment to provide a broader array of vaccine schedules, such as those from Europe and Canada, so that we have choices when it comes to what’s best for our children.
What we do not want are threats, coercion, and one-size-fits-all mandates. Until mothers feel that we can safely trust the medical establishment with our children’s health, until we feel confident that our pediatrician’s honest opinion is not being clouded by financial incentives, and until we are treated with the respect we deserve as parents, we will remain skeptical of our public health system. Radical transparency, and seeing parents and the public as partners, not adversaries, must be the first step to earning our trust back.
