Balto, RFK Jr., and the Value of Vaccines

Just outside New York City’s Central Park Zoo, not far from where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once stealthily deposited a dead bear cub, stands a bronze statue to another animal: Balto, the husky that, 100 years ago this month, played a leading role in a daring and perilous rescue that captured the world’s attention.

Nome, a small town in the northwestern reaches of the Alaskan territories, had been hit with an outbreak of diphtheria, a highly contagious and cruel respiratory infection that can be particularly deadly to the young. As the children of Nome and surrounding communities fell ill, and some died, the town’s one doctor sent a desperate plea to state and national officials for a fresh supply of the antitoxin serum needed to treat the infected and stem a larger epidemic.

But Nome, with its subarctic climate, was icebound in winter and nearly unreachable. With little time to waste, locals organized a relay of dogsleds to transport the needed doses across 674 treacherous miles of Alaskan wilderness in temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero. In all, 20 heroic men and 150 dogs braved the unsparing elements to deliver the lifesaving serum. Balto anchored the final lap.

The centennial of this heroic expedition is particularly timely, coming as the United States Senate considers President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, a serial purveyor of dangerous disinformation about vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

It is not too obvious, in 2025, to state that vaccines work. In 1921, before the scientific breakthrough that led to the Tdap vaccine, approximately 200,000 Americans were infected with diphtheria, and 15,000 died. By the turn of the century, thanks to compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren, the number of cases dwindled to almost nothing. From 1996 to 2018, America experienced an average of fewer than one case a year. Polio, measles, and many other potentially deadly diseases also were virtually eradicated by vaccines.

Yet a rising anti-vax movement, fueled by click-hungry demagogues and a growing populist revolt against experts, institutions, and mandates, threatens to drag America backwards. The movement was turbocharged by political resistance to the COVID vaccines, whose development Trump helped speed and deservedly heralded. Near-universal vaccination rates among America’s schoolchildren are dropping. Even slight declines threaten the herd immunity that protects entire communities from the spread of disease. Predictably, potentially deadly childhood diseases are becoming more common again.

For two decades, RFK Jr. has stood at the forefront of this anti-vaccine movement. In books, speeches, and social-media posts, he has championed a widely discredited theory that certain vaccines promote autism and suggested that life under America’s COVID-vaccine mandates was worse than under Hitler’s fascist regime (he apologized for the latter remark).

In 2021, The New York Times recently reported, Kennedy’s Children Health Defense organization petitioned the FDA to withdraw its authorization of the COVID vaccines, which already had saved hundreds of thousands of people and would allow Americans to resume their normal lives. In the petition, Kennedy’s organization argued that the vaccines were not only harmful but unnecessary, and embraced disproven and dangerous theories about alternative treatments.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

In 2022, the attorney Aaron Siri, a top Kennedy adviser, filed a petition asking the FDA to rescind its approval of the polio vaccine, which, since its inception in the 1950s, has been used by billions of people and has helped subdue that dreaded scourge. For a time, Siri reportedly helped Kennedy screen candidates for future HHS positions and was thought to be in line for one himself, but a transition spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal last week that he was no longer involved.

Kennedy presents the Senate with an interesting dilemma. He bears the name, if not the outlook or gravitas, of his famous father. His emphasis on healthy eating and physical fitness to combat obesity is as sensible now as it was when First Lady Michelle Obama championed those causes in the previous decade, to the scorn of many Republicans. His environmentalism is so pronounced that Trump has publicly assured the “drill, baby, drill” crowd that Kennedy won’t “touch the oil and gas.” His anti-corporate bent and deep suspicion of government bureaucracy appeal to populists on the left and right. And government bureaucracies, which are particularly prone to inertia and special-interest influence, should be challenged.

But their renewal must be guided by facts, not exotic, debunked claims. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the FDA, which approves vaccines. He will have authority over the National Institutes of Health, which funds and underwrites essential research that leads to vaccines and cures, and the CDC, which plays a central role in quelling public-health threats. It is an awesome responsibility and a crucial platform, dangerous in the hands of a charlatan who places conspiracy theories over science.

[Read: RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency]

Vaccines and medications should be rigorously tested and scrutinized for their efficacy and side effects, free of pressure and lobbying from the firms that develop them. The public needs and deserves that confidence. But those tests and standards should be based on proven science and not quackery.

Kennedy will face intense questioning about all of this, as well as his stability and judgment, at his confirmation hearing, which is slated for Wednesday. If he is confirmed, his promotion of junk science and vaccine hesitancy could prove as threatening to American public health as the barriers posed by an unforgiving, frozen Alaskan wilderness were to the desperate children and parents of Nome a century ago.

At the foot of Balto’s memorial in Central Park are three words: Endurance, Fidelity, Intelligence. Can enough United States senators overcome political pressure and demonstrate those same qualities in the coming days?