The way we respond to the disappointments, dangers, and defects of the present helps determine our political affiliations. If you think the answers lie somewhere in a future condition we’ve yet to achieve, then you may be persuaded by progressive politics; if you think the resources for rescuing society lie somewhere in the past, you may be attracted to conservative politics.
This general pattern helps explain the recent alignment of conservative politics and the anti-vaccine movement, despite its long-standing association with crunchy, left-ish causes. Today, the two tendencies have joined in mutual agreement about the wholesomeness of natural health versus modern medicine, indulging in nostalgia for a world before the widespread use of vaccines.
The past does contain its share of treasures, and it can be hard to accept that a world so rife with pain and despair is in certain ways the best it has ever been. But the idea that the past held a secret to health and happiness that we’ve lost somehow—especially with respect to infectious disease—is a fantasy with potentially lethal ramifications.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine-skeptical current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, originally shared politics with the older anti-vaccine advocates, back-to-the-Earth types who themselves demonstrated a conservative impulse in their search for a primeval Eden. (Plenty of left-leaning people persist in that tradition, though it seems better fit for today’s right, which has a certain appreciation for the pastoral.) A Democrat until 2023, Kennedy entered public life as a champion of environmental protection, battling against corporate interests in court to keep harmful waste out of the air and water. Over time, this overall concern with modern impurity destroying pristine nature evidently extended to other areas of his thinking. As his career progressed, Kennedy adopted several controversial opinions regarding healthy eating, condemning, among other things, meat issued from factory farms, seed oils, and processed food. In a 2024 campaign video from his presidential-primary run, Kennedy promised to “reverse 80 years of farm policy in this country,” harkening to a time before synthetic pesticides and chemical additives to animal feed.
If a conservative is, as William F. Buckley Jr. famously wrote, someone who “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” then Kennedy certainly fits the bill. A proper conservative fights to preserve the status quo. But the most reactionary members of the right won’t settle for protecting the ground their party has already staked out; their project is to return to the status quo ante, the way things were in the (sometimes distant) past. The slogan “Make America Great Again” manages to disparage the present while promising a return to an era in which Christianity was nationally dominant, manufacturing jobs were the bedrock of the economy, and the country was ever expanding. Kennedy’s positions on processed food and pharmaceuticals fit perfectly into that picture.
“Today’s children have to get between 69 and 92 vaccines in order to be fully compliant, between maternity and 18 years,” Kennedy said during a recent Senate hearing about Trump’s 2026 health-care agenda, by way of comparison with children of the past, who were required to receive fewer vaccines (if any at all). Likewise, Kennedy has rejected the introduction of fluoride into drinking water, a practice initiated in the mid-1940s to help prevent tooth decay, as well as the pasteurization of milk, which began in the late 19th century. “When I was a kid” in the ’50s and ’60s, Kennedy said earlier this year, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world. And today we’re the sickest.”
This is in some respects true, but in other ways dangerously wrong. Kennedy is quick to point out the relative rarity of chronic conditions such as childhood diabetes and autoimmune disorders in the past. But he is apparently hesitant to acknowledge that mid-century America came with its own share of serious health problems, including a high rate of cigarette smoking and horrifying infant mortality rates compared with the present. When Kennedy was young, vaccine-preventable childhood illnesses such as measles routinely killed hundreds annually. So far this year, only three people in the United States have died of measles—largely the result of an outbreak of the disease caused in part by declining vaccination rates. And if modern innovations in food and medicine have come with their share of hazards, it would be wrong to conclude that their predecessors were superior. Raw milk allegedly caused the hospitalization of a toddler and the miscarriage of an unborn child as recently as this summer.
At the center of the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade is a high degree of trust in the wisdom of nature. But the contemporary appeal of unadulterated nature springs from human successes in controlling the elements; it’s hard to romanticize a relatively recent vaccine-free past while considering photographs of children’s bodies ravaged by smallpox, a disease that persisted well into the 20th century. Likewise, long before COVID-19, America experienced cholera and flu pandemics with hundreds of thousands of associated deaths, as well as lesser outbreaks of illnesses such as diphtheria, polio, and pertussis, all three of which were notorious child-killers. Today, the rarity of those conditions has fostered a false sense of security, and a naive assessment of the natural world. Relinquishing the successes of general vaccine coverage, however, is guaranteed to belie the idea that untainted nature contains all the keys to health and wellness. Our historical moment has enough strife without revisiting past battles fought and won.
*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; GHI / Universal History Archive / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.
The post The Misplaced Nostalgia for a Pre-Vaccine Past appeared first on The Atlantic.
