Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

Today’s “controversy du jour” is prevention in health care. More specifically, vaccines and their role in preventing disease, disability, and death while promoting health and lifespan.

Prevention is the mother’s milk of health care. It is core to reducing illness and disease. Sadly, the udders producing that milk are drying up quicker than you can shake a fist at what is happening before our very eyes.

Baby beware: Hunger and even starvation are just ahead unless something is done to allow continued production of that life-saving milk.

A lawsuit (see here for text) was filed July 7 (see Washington Post article discussing the litigation here) in Federal District Court to enjoin various government officials and agencies from continuing their bold-faced, ill-advised, and unsupported attack on health prevention, and more specifically, life-saving, health-promoting vaccinations. Those are the same vaccines that have saved millions of lives over decades. There is no question about their effectiveness and their broad safety profiles confirmed by decades of use.

Side effects? Yes. Disastrous based on population-wide statistics? No.

As discussed in the lawsuit, the lead plaintiff—a pregnant obstetrician-gynecologist—is directly affected by Secretary Kennedy’s continuing vendetta against protective vaccines, creating considerable vaccine hesitancy among patients and families across the nation.

The impact of those directives is immense, and clinicians are having difficulty constantly defending routine vaccinations. Insurers and pharmacies are denying coverage for those vaccinations given the role the advisory committees have in granting directives that influence insurance coverage.

Doctors are concerned about liability and licensure as well, turning on its head what had been the situation previously, where doctors who promoted fictitious treatments for diseases like COVID-19 and now measles (especially Mr. Kennedy’s promotion of vitamin A and a healthy diet as a prevention and treatment strategy for measles) cause harm and more hesitancy. Now it is the doctors who have followed evidence-based recommendations and who still want to recommend vaccines who find their conversations compromised, as discussed in the lawsuit.

Mr. Kennedy has been riding this horse for years. He has made millions from his promotion of disproven vaccine theories, such as autism from measles vaccines—another item that is reviewed in the lawsuit. He has surrounded himself with fellow travelers, including a very bright, accomplished physician-economist who advocated “herd immunity” as a means of reducing risk of illness and death from COVID-19. Unfortunately, no herd existed, and that meant that people like me could well have been part of the herd that was sacrificed on the altar of junk science. So much for humanity in health care and public policy.

I have a personal observation about the plaintiffs who signed on to the lawsuit, the sort of “inside baseball” stuff that most folks don’t know and frankly don’t care about:

The organizations that joined in the suit to stand up and be counted on this issue did include a group of specialists in maternal-fetal medicine, the expertly trained physicians who provide care to pregnant women with complex pregnancies.

However, missing from the list of supporting medical organizations was the leading group representing the larger community of practicing obstetricians and gynecologists, the frontline docs who provide the everyday health care for women.

Maybe I am over-reading this, but that absence was notable, the reasons unknown to me. I am left to speculate that their absence from signing on to this lawsuit—especially when the key plaintiff is a pregnant OB/GYN—was deliberate, and not by chance.

Why would they not have signed on? Did it have anything to do with what is also going on in the current political environment? Could it be that the abortion debate and their concern about state-by-state retribution for their doctor-members who practice obstetrics and are hog-tied by laws that could put them in jail for a long time, or cause them to lose their professional licenses, or end up on the wrong end of a needless lawsuit clouded their desire to advocate for other important issues related to women’s health?

I am left to ask, to wonder, to speculate—which is not a good thing. Maybe they will have an answer one day. Right now, it stood out to me as someone who has long toiled in these fields of health policy and practice.

While this lawsuit is focused on vaccines, we should not ignore the wider implications of what is happening to our health care and our ability to detect, define, and treat all sorts of chronic illnesses.

We are on such a bad path right now that it is downright ridiculous, not to mention harmful for the long-term health of our nation.

This Secretary is clueless. He has placed his personal agenda above that of the nation. He has surrounded himself with “yes-people,” who can only agree with him and stand there smiling while he throws out the nonsense he is feeding us on a regular basis (the “yes-people” aspect is also commented on in the lawsuit).

Now our trusted leaders come along with “new ideas” to make us healthy, ignoring what has contributed to our health and survival for a long, long time:

• Create considerable hesitancy about vaccines—or get rid of them entirely
• Pet the cows to determine if they have infections life-threatening for humans
• Send addicts to health farms to recover while they pick vegetables
• Wear smartwatches
• Destroy the public health infrastructure
• Ban information to the public about disease management
• Cancel research grants and decimate the research enterprise for decades to come
• Do everything possible to make health insurance less available and less affordable

Talking heads, talking trash. What a way to run a nation!

I am old enough to recall the model and the legacy of Dr. C. Everett Koop.

Dr. Koop was the surgeon general from 1982 to 1989. He was a pediatric surgeon of world renown.

I knew Dr. Koop personally. As a medical student, I held him in the highest regard. I also knew that he was very religious, a man intensely committed to conservative religious principles. Dr. Koop didn’t proselytize me or others, but we knew what he believed in his heart. Even temperamental cardiac surgeons behaved themselves when doing surgery at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Koop became surgeon general during the time of AIDS. His religious principles did not look kindly on same-sex relationships. But when he took on the mantle of surgeon general, his commitment was to the health of the nation, and to the mostly young men who were becoming ill and dying in alarming numbers.

Dr. Koop became an advocate, a staunch believer that medicine and pharmaceutical research needed to do whatever possible to stem the tide of death and destruction.

That was then. This is now.

That was a time when someone acknowledged they could be a loud voice in support of an unpopular cause, namely gay health. He advocated research and understanding, not polemics and destruction. Dr. Koop did what was right, not what was convenient or tied to his personal religious beliefs. Dr. Koop valued health and life above all else.

Right now, we need a Dr. Koop. We need a broom to sweep things clean, to get back on track, to stand up and be counted and not cowered into submission because of fear for retribution by a “greater power.” We need the public to understand that we are not the enemy we are portrayed to be when it comes to their health—although admittedly there have been missteps along the way.

There will always be missteps. Nothing is perfect. But when the good overwhelms the difficult or the very seldom “bad,” we need to think of the population, the number of people who benefit from the vaccines and treatments we can offer and have compassion—and compensation—for those harmed.

But to crap on the beautiful bird of prevention paradise when you hold the reins of power is not the path to success, or to health, long life, or a useful healthspan.

This lawsuit is but a small step. It will enter the litigation merry-go-round, and take a long time to be resolved, if ever. Whether it will have a direct effect on what is happening here remains an uncertainty.

But what is certain is that finally someone with a voice is standing up and saying loud and clear, “No mas!” Enough. Done. Caput. Finished: We want our health back and out of the hands of a bunch of true believers that want to destroy everything in their path that stands for expertise, excellence, and above all, science and evidence.

Meanwhile, Rome is burning. We need to find a fire hose quick before it all falls, and we start falling along with it.

J. Leonard Lichtenfeld is an oncologist.