The NIH is picking up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s argument that a healthy immune system can keep even pandemic germs at bay.
The standard pandemic-preparedness playbook “has failed catastrophically,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew J. Memoli wrote in City Journal, a magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank. The pair argue that finding and studying pathogens that could cause outbreaks, then stockpiling vaccines against them, is a waste of money. Instead, they say, the United States should encourage people to improve their baseline health—“whether simply by stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more.”
On its own, Bhattacharya and Memoli’s apparently serious suggestion that just being in better shape will carry the U.S. through an infectious crisis is reckless, experts told me—especially if it’s executed at the expense of other public-health responses.
The miasma theory claimed diseases were caused by bad sanitation, foul odors and unhealthy air. Before the discovery of germs, it led to the creation of a sewer system in London, and ventilation systems in hospitals, (both of which helped reduce exposure to the germs they didn’t believe in) although it didn’t stop greedy water companies from pumping drinking water from downstream on the Thames, or ease overcrowding and poverty.
The problem with Kennedy’s “just get healthier” version is that like all other Republican schemes it doesn’t provide any actual support for doing so. Because that would take money from the deserving wealthy to aid the indigent poor!
We all know where the real foul odor is coming from…