This month Dr. Mikhail Varshavski, the New Jersey-based family medicine physician and medical social media influencer better known as Dr. Mike, appeared on the popular YouTube channel Jubilee. As part of its series “Surrounded,” he debated a bunch of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters, one at a time. (Other examples in this series: Ben Shapiro versus 27 Kamala Harris voters, one cop versus 18 criminals, Dr. Mike’s previous appearance.) He started with the claim that Kennedy “is decimating public health and should step down” as secretary of health and human services, and then Kennedy’s supporters challenged Dr. Mike for almost two hours.
He does a magnificent job of calmly and clearly explaining the benefits of putting fluoride in tap water, as well as the basics of the scientific method. From my perspective, Kennedy’s supporters do not have a good grasp of the science behind the points they’re arguing, and while there is truth to some of the facts they recite — they’re correct that OxyContin was a scourge, for example — these facts are warped beyond recognition or taken out of context. While Kennedy’s fans are very skeptical of Big Pharma, they do not extend that skepticism to Big Wellness, even though Dr. Mike encourages them to.
In spite of Dr. Mike’s excellent performance, most of the Kennedy fans appear inured to the doctor’s reasoning, digging deeper into their own beliefs and support for the man they call Bobby. In a clip that Jubilee posted to Instagram, one of the Kennedy supporters involved in the debate jumped into the comments to continue to spar with people and disagree with Dr. Mike. “Watch the whole episode. I think he got destroyed. He didn’t deny any facts I brought.”
In June I wrote a column in which I suggested that public debates like these could be a useful way to rebuild Americans’ trust in vaccines. I thought of this as a kind of sunshine effect: Encourage these views to be aired in the open, where they can be debunked directly. But I changed my mind about it this year.
While I commend Dr. Mike for fighting the good fight, I no longer believe that debating Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again stalwarts is going to build trust back up. This kind of format, in which someone with real scientific expertise is put on the same level as an impassioned layperson, is not going to work as long as Kennedy is in office.
As of Dec. 12, there were 126 confirmed cases of measles in an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina, and 119 of those cases were among unvaccinated people. Almost all of the people affected were under 18. The United States is on track to lose its measles elimination status. While a vast majority of parents are still giving their children basic childhood inoculations, anti-vaccine influencers continue to chip away at the public’s trust.
According to a KFF/Washington Post survey of 2,716 parents polled between July and August, “Nearly half (45 percent) of parents who have skipped or delayed vaccines for their children aside from Covid-19 or flu say they have seen content related to vaccines for children online.” Don’t get me wrong: Pediatricians and family doctors should continue the hard and necessary work of privately persuading parents to vaccinate their kids. And public health and medical influencers should keep spreading the correct information online as frequently as possible.
I could probably be construed as a public health influencer, and I will continue to write about these issues, even though I worry that it is increasingly futile. I just think they are wasting their time debating MAHA types on social media or podcasts.
The other opinion I changed my mind about is from a column I wrote in February about how the Trump administration would dismantle protections for students with disabilities. I still agree with about 95 percent of what I wrote then; recent cuts to the Department of Education will affect struggling families. Just this week, The Times ran an article about how the Trump administration slashed programs that assisted deaf and blind children; there’s no word for it other than cruel.
But in the column I also cast doubt on a comment by the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that “students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests.” I questioned the way he characterized this problem as widespread, and I went further to say that it cost nothing to give students more time on tests.
Two things led me to realize I was too quick to dismiss this as a real problem (though I think it is an issue that is isolated to wealthy school districts and families). One was that I heard from many teachers like the commenter Emma, who described the extra time and unpaid work that she has to spend on behalf of students who are taking advantage of questionable diagnoses. “It’s a system of constant exploitation and free labor, and it contributes to the teacher shortage,” she wrote.
The other is a recent article in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch, in which she explains that in the past 15 or so years, “the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations — often, extra time on tests — has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at U.C. Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled.”
Since it’s my last newsletter of 2025, here is what I am thinking about as we head into the new year: common-sense regulation of artificial intelligence centered on children’s needs, the continued incursion of technology into schools and how parents are fighting back, and where the feminist movement goes from here, given the continued coziness between Trump world and online misogynists like the Tate brothers, and what this means for young men.
I would love to hear from you, so as always, drop me a line here if you have expertise, research or just general thoughts about these subjects or other ones. I have so appreciated all your notes this year and wish you a peaceful holiday season.
End Notes
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It was a truly dreadful and violent weekend. As I lit the menorah with my children on Sunday, the first night of Hanukkah, I thought about all of those affected by the mass shootings at my alma mater, Brown University, and in Australia at a yearly celebration of the festival of lights. My heart breaks for all of us. Children should be able to go to school and families should be able to worship without fear. There were 75 mass shootings at schools in the United States this year. I checked that statistic in three places because I could not believe it was true. I hope that 2026 brings us less violence and hatred. (I also hope that it brings us gun control legislation, but I’m not holding my breath.)
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