Don't call Kennedy a vaccine skeptic. Call him what he is - a cynic

My job at the FDA is to ask tough questions of vaccine makers. That's not what Robert F. Kennedy is doing.

- Paul Offit

The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr a "vaccine skeptic". He's not. I'm an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the vaccine advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it's effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn't.

He has claimed that "there is no vaccine that is safe and effective." (Childhood vaccines have prevented more than one million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations over the past three decades.) He has encouraged people not to vaccinate their babies: "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, I say to him, 'Better not get him vaccinated.'"

When asked about the polio vaccine, Mr. Kennedy claimed that it caused an "explosion in soft tissue cancers" that killed, "many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did." Setting aside the fact that an "explosion in soft tissue cancers" hasn't occurred, studies comparing children who received early batches of polio vaccines with unvaccinated children found no differences in cancer incidence. By 1979, paralytic polio was eliminated from the United States. When Mr. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That's not skepticism.