Torah, our health, and a destructive duo

Among the scariest developments coming out of Washington these days are Elon Musk using his chainsaw on our nation’s health system and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., beginning to implement the dangerous plans he has for the Department of Health and Human Services he now heads.

Both men are putting the health of everyone in our nation, children’s health especially, at serious risk — Kennedy more so than Musk. Unlike Musk, however, it appears that Kennedy can be swayed to reverse course if enough pressure is applied.

Regarding the threat they pose, consider what is being done to the Epidemic Intelligence Service. This nation’s ability to successfully protect us from such scourges as last decade’s Ebola and Zika outbreaks and the current ongoing efforts to mitigate the effects of covid-19 have depended on EIS’s ability to function fully and competently. Its work was crucial in understanding these viruses and controlling their spread.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established EIS in 1951. Its “disease detectives,” as its officers are often called, undergo rigorous training in classrooms and in the field to enable them to identify and respond to all manner of public health threats at home and abroad. Despite the pivotal role EIS plays in protecting our health, Musk has already slashed its disease detectives staff in half. They were among the 5,000 employees Musk has either fired or given notice to throughout HHS’s various health agencies — including at the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy, though, poses an even bigger threat. Despite his disclaimers, Kennedy wants to end or significantly alter (and not for the better) the nation’s vaccine schedule, which has protected millions from contracting measles, polio, and other diseases. That should not surprise anyone. Nearly a decade ago, Kennedy helped found the anti-vax Children’s Health Defense after he was “confronted with the inconvenient truth about the chronic disease epidemic and its links to an ever-growing childhood vaccination schedule,” according to the group’s website. In 2021, Kennedy was one of 12 people referred to by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as “the disinformation dozen” because they were “responsible for almost two-thirds of [social media’s] anti-vaccine content.”

Vaccine advisory committees exist within the CDC, the FDA, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and HHS itself. These committees are composed of experts in various scientific disciplines (vaccinology, immunology, virology, infectious diseases, etc.) who study the latest data regarding disease development and direction, infection rates, the most up-to-date scientific research, and so on, to determine what afflictions are headed our way, when and where they will arrive, what vaccines or other drugs will be needed to combat them, and when and how these vaccines or drugs should be administered.

This is especially crucial when it comes to the annual influenza outbreaks. The flu virus is constantly evolving. What works this year may not work next year, and it takes several months to create effective new vaccines. The task of planning for flu outbreaks falls on the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. The panel “is critical for making the decision on strain selection for the next influenza vaccine season,” according Norman Baylor, a former director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccine Research and Review.

The committee was to meet next Thursday to plan for next winter’s emerging flu strains, but Kennedy abruptly canceled that meeting, just as he had canceled the CDC’s flu committee meeting a week earlier. In both cases, he did not offer any reason for doing so. An FDA statement said it would still make its flu vaccine recommendations in a timely fashion but did not explain how those recommendations would be determined or by whom.

Kennedy also put on hold a promotional ad campaign the CDC had devised to encourage vaccinations in the U.S.

Kennedy, long considered by many to be the nation’s anti-vaxxer-in-chief, is doing all this even as a measles epidemic is raging in Texas and is now spreading outward. It began in late January and quickly climbed to 164 cases in just a handful of weeks. (It rose by 80 percent in one week alone.) It has since spread into New Mexico. In 2024, by comparison, it took approximately eight months for 285 cases to be reported here. The majority of those who have contracted measles so far this year have never been vaccinated, and children make up the overwhelming majority of those cases so far. The outbreak is also responsible for the first measles-related death here since 2015, when it claimed the life of an unvaccinated school-aged child on February 25.

Notably, Kennedy kept the CDC from commenting on the outbreak for almost a month.

While Texas requires that all public school children be vaccinated, there is no such requirement for the state’s approximately 1.1 million children attending private secular or religious schools or who are home-schooled. The outbreak began in a Mennonite community.

Although “the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is very safe and effective,” according to the CDC, “vaccination coverage among U.S. kindergartners has decreased” over the last few years. Blame for that rests in great part with Kennedy and his “disinformation dozen” colleagues. Experts say that this has put as many as four million school-aged children at risk nationwide.

Some consider Kennedy and the CHD to be partly responsible for a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, which affected 5,700 people and resulted in 83 deaths, including more than 70 children under the age of five. In late 2018, a vaccine-hesitancy movement took hold in Samoa. Kennedy and the CHD quickly moved in to actively encourage its growth. This left Samoans vulnerable to a measles virus that was imported in early 2019.

Kennedy seemed unconcerned last week when he was asked about the Texas child’s death during a cabinet meeting at the White House. He nonchalantly said that the outbreak “is not unusual” because “we have measles outbreaks every year.”

Many saw Kennedy’s response as callous, cruel, and offensive. The mounting criticism caused Kennedy late last Friday to announce that “ending the measles outbreak” he had so cavalierly dismissed was now “a top priority for me.” He also ordered HHS to send 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to Texas. However, he said nothing to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated. This sparked a flurry of new criticism, including from two conservative-owned newspapers — the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. On Sunday, therefore, Kennedy posted an op-ed on the Fox News website in an effort to calm his critics without completely burning his anti-vax bridges. While he wrote that the MMR vaccine was “crucial to avoiding [a] potentially deadly disease,” he merely suggested that parents consider getting their children vaccinated, adding that the “decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”

There is an irony here, by the way. Kennedy has a “close connection” of sorts to the measles strain used in the MMR vaccine — the strain that forms the basis for “the only measles vaccine used in the United States since 1968,” according to the CDC. That strain was collected from a 13-year-old schoolboy in the city Kennedy was born in (Boston), in the year he was born (1954).

Kennedy is taking aim at more than vaccines, however. “There are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA, that have to go,” he said recently, because they “are not doing their job…[by] not protecting our kids.”

Kennedy and Musk also have put vital medical research at risk by targeting the $48 billion National Institutes of Health budget and freezing $1.5 billion in promising new research grants.

Jewish law takes a dim view of what this destructive duo is doing to our national health system because it violates the pre-eminent principle of law: pikuach nefesh, threat to life. This principle takes precedence over almost all other biblical and talmudic mandates. (See the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 74a.)

That is because the Torah makes clear that life comes before law. Leviticus 18:5 quotes God as saying, “Therefore, keep My statutes and My ordinances, for if a person does so, he [or she] shall live by them.” Said our Sages of Blessed Memory, this means that we are to “live by God’s laws, not die by them.” (See BT Sanhedrin 59a and also Maimonides’ Mishnah Torah, The Laws of Shabbat, 2:3.)

Life comes before law even if a person’s life is only suspected to be in danger. On Yom Kippur, for example, our Sages mandated that if a person who is fasting either is or might become ill, that person “is to be fed even with non-kosher food,” if that is all that is available. (See BT Yoma, beginning with the mishnah on 82a.)

During the height of the covid-19 pandemic in Israel, Rabbi Baruch Meir Yaakov Shochet, the leader of the Karlin-Stolin chasidic sect, urged his followers in the strongest terms to obey all government mandates, which many of them were resisting. “Can it be that some [of you] have forgotten the simple laws of pikuach nefesh, which is the basis of Judaism…?” he said. “[We] should be happy for the opportunity…to protect human life.”

We, too, can be happy for the opportunity to protect human life — of children especially — by doing everything we can to influence our legislators to reverse the damage being done by this destructive duo. This could be especially effective regarding the damage Kennedy is doing or plans to do. His decision to send emergency supplies of the MMR vaccine to Texas and his Fox News op-ed promoting the MMR vaccine’s efficacy suggest that he has not been as fully vaccinated as Musk surely has against giving in to public pressure.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

Opinion

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