Public Health, Vaccines and Modern Eugenics

Last month, we published “The Shameful Legacy of Tuskegee” which focused on a proposed experiment in Guinea-Bissau. The study’s plan echoed the notorious Tuskegee disaster, withholding safe, effective vaccines against hepatitis B from some newborns while inoculating others. It was to be financed by the U.S. but performed by a controversial Danish team. That project provoked a multi-national outcry, leading to a remarkable response from the World Health Organization:

WHO has significant concerns regarding the study’s scientific justification, ethical safeguards, and overall alignment with established principles for research involving human participants.

As reported in Rolling Stone, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drove support for this unethical experiment:

... CDC appointees allied with Kennedy circumvented critical scientific and ethical safeguards in an apparent rush to fund research that might loan support for sweeping changes to the U.S. vaccination schedule.

Under his tenure, US public health agencies continue to make widely disputed and potentially dangerous decisions which reflect eugenic logics.

Confirmation hearings are ongoing for Trump’s surgeon general nominee, MAHA wellness influencer Casey Means, who has been declining to directly answer Senators' questions about vaccines, including whether she would recommend that parents vaccinate their children against measles. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who became chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in December, has been more direct.

“What we are doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order, not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order,” Milhoan explained on a Jan 22 podcast quoted in Stat. He seemed excited by the research prospects:

“What we’re going to have is a real-world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles,” he said. “What is the new incidence of hospitalization? What’s the incidence of death?”

Milhoan also suggested that “the public might want to reconsider the use of polio vaccines” on the grounds that “individual freedoms should be a north star of the panel.”

Elizabeth Jacobs, professor emerita at the University of Arizona and a founding member of Defend Public Health, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that Milhoan “wants to experiment on the people of the United States by seeing what happens as vaccination coverage plummets and infectious diseases spread. This is so dangerous as to approach criminality.”

The proposal hearkens back to the early days of Covid 19, when some government and public health officials favored letting the virus spread in order to quickly reach “herd immunity.” This argument, as we suggested at the time, makes it clear that “eugenic thinking is still with us.”

Attacks on vaccines are just one aspect of a pervasive project of so-called “soft eugenics” re-emerging in the second Trump administration. That’s a slightly more subtle version of the eugenics that was proposed by Francis Galton in the 19th century and became infamous in the 20th. Derek Beres wrote about this in The Guardian last May. The headline and internal headings sum up brutally but accurately the approach Kennedy is taking:

Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’
Let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
Illness only affects the weak
Make ‘smart’ people have more children
Public healthcare is too kind

Resistance

The administration’s push to upend public health policy has not gone unopposed. Several federal officials have been forced out after resisting Kennedy’s attacks on vaccines. As the New York Times recently documented, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has run through a series of leaders since Trump took office and appointed Kennedy as Health Secretary. Their first CDC director, Susan Monarez, was fired after a month when she refused to resign over disagreements about vaccine policy; four other senior officials left with her.

Lawsuits against the administration have been brought by 15 states and several major medical societies suing to block changes to the childhood vaccine schedule. One of the organizations, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), issued its own recommendations for childhood vaccines that differs significantly from the new CDC schedule. (The AAP continues to recommend 18 childhood vaccines, whereas the CDC now only recommends 11).

This is the morass of regulatory confusion within which governmental decisions about reproductive policies and genetic interventions would be made. As we’ve seen with DOGE and Elon Musk, tech-forward pronatalism is the other side of the "soft eugenics" coin. Silicon Valley’s billionaires are pouring money into companies offering embryo ranking and selection, along with attempts to commercialize embryo editing and lab-made gametes. Designer babies anyone?