None of the “Ship of Fools” Donald Trump appointed to head his major government departments was qualified for their new roles.

Their only obvious “talent” was their subservient loyalty to the president. Uniquely however, Robert Kennedy Jr, accepted, boasting that as head of Health and Human Services he would destroy the government’s current evidence-based initiatives including many funded research programs and advice for healthcare. This approach was to include the generation of “vaccination hesitancy” which he had been promoting for decades.

In so doing, he was adding fuel to a dangerous epidemic of health misinformation already well established and expanding on social media platforms and in public fora. This has been an evolving phenomenon that markedly accelerated during the COVID pandemic, often promoting concerns regarding the safety of vaccines and fuelling resistance to the compulsory vaccination of certain professionals and particularly vulnerable populations such as residents of nursing homes.

In our country, responding to outrage on social media platforms, our newspapers on one occasion reported that “Hundreds of protesters have been locked in a stand-off with police on the steps of federal parliament angered at vaccine mandates and restrictions, as support for the Coalition Government has slumped to its lowest level in more than three years."

So, for the last decade, two troubling and related developments are increasingly problematic, namely the inability of many to recognise and respect genuine expertise and the belief by many that social media is the best source of reliable information.

I had first-hand experience of this reality during the height of the COVID epidemic. In the US, claims appeared suggesting that COVID infections could be cured by taking a drug used to kill worm infestation (Ivermectin) and/or the anti-malaria drug Chloroquine. Both claims were wrong. Social media, however, continued to claim that the drugs were effective and vaccination was ineffective and dangerous. Famously Clive Palmer bought 32 million Chloroquine tablets and I have often wondered what he did with them all! COVID vaccines, however, were clearly demonstrated to be safe and able to protect one from serious Covid induced illness.

Sky News invited me to do a TV interview about the safety of COVID vaccination which I accepted and, of course, I strongly supported. However Sky News then interviewed the Liberal politician Craig Kelly who was unqualified to comment, stridently opposed to vaccination and promoted the use of Chloroquine and Ivermectin. Equal airtime for two opinions, one expert, the other not!.

Since Robert Kennedy became the US Health “Czar” he has enacted a series of initiatives that undermine public confidence in vaccine safety. Despite some 1400 reported cases of measles in the US and three fatalities, he has suggested that, rather than using measles vaccination, children infected be treated with Cod liver oil and antibiotics. Very dangerous nonsensical advice.

He sacked his 21-person advisory committee that advised the Centre for Disease Control on vaccination strategies and replaced it, with half of the new appointees having no medical training and an anti-vaccination bias.

He altered research priorities at the National Institutes of Health by canceling studies on mRNA vaccines (a most important breakthrough in vaccine science that so quickly enabled the production of COVID vaccines) and the reasons for steadily increasing _vaccine hesitancy_ as well as closing a network of centres working to prevent future pandemics.

Incredibly, he hired David Geier, a well-known vaccine sceptic who Maryland regulators disciplined for practicing medicine without a licence, to lead a study to reinvestigate the long-discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.

No vaccines for healthy pregnant women, terrible advice, Hep B, COVID and RSV vaccinations for example are recommended and safe and protect Mum and her baby! The Hib vaccine, a public health achievement that has saved the lives of countless children who might otherwise have died from meningitis, is one of the vaccines that the newly constituted ACIP may discontinue. If children stop getting the Hib vaccine, the horrific death toll from the 1980s will return. Once again, infants and children will start dying from Hib meningitis in large numbers, but this time with a tragic difference: Their deaths will have been completely preventable, caused by the reckless discontinuation of the vaccine.

US researchers estimate that in the US, routine vaccinations have prevented nearly 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalisations, and a million deaths among children between 1994 and 2023. As is true for most developed countries, Australia has advocated similar vaccination strategies for decades with similar wonderful benefits.

Arguably vaccination is our oldest and most successful therapeutic strategy, saving more lives than any other intervention. There is reliable evidence that in the 11th century in China and elsewhere it was recognised that if one took a little pus from a patient infected with smallpox and scratched the skin of a healthy person with the material they would either die from smallpox or forever appear to be immune to the disease. How come?

I have been involved in immunology for nearly 60 years, both as a researcher and clinician, and I am still in awe of the evolutionary happenings that provided us with a life enabling immune system. During foetal life, thanks to the extraordinary abilities of our thymus gland which lives at the top of our chests, we generate zillions of cells each of which has on its surface a three-dimensional structure (receptor) which you can think of as a padlock. Their only job is to circulate and be on the lookout for a structure entering our body that has on its surface a three-dimensional structure (a key) that will bind to the immune cell with the complementary lock.

Once the key is in the lock, the cell activates numerous cells in our body to attack the now recognised foreignness. While all these immune cells have locks, relatively few cells have the same lock as we must be prepared for very many different “keys” entering our bodies. After recognising something that is foreign, the cells that do so multiply many times over so that a second encounter with the same virus will be far more efficient in attacking and killing the invader. This is the reality we utilise with our vaccines. When we give a child an injection of inactivated measles virus, the population of long-living cells capable of recognising and attacking a live measles virus has so expanded that we can quickly recognise and kill an actual infection with the virus.

In our world, a Kennedy nonsense such as his claim that vaccination causes autism is quickly circulated around the world via social media which, of course, has no borders. Many of us unfortunately propagate an anti-establishment agenda on social media and want to believe sensational, but dangerously wrong, claims. Many others, we find from research, don’t necessarily believe the claims being made but feel they can’t be sure so they decide not to take the risk that may be present if, for example, they vaccinate their child.

With new COVID variants in circulation, it is madness that only 47% of our over-65 population is immunised against the virus. We should all be alarmed that vaccination coverage rates among children in Australia have declined for the third consecutive year and many children are being immunised much later than is advised.

Countering the dangerous misinformation that populates social media on so many platforms is a huge challenge which I hope will be increasingly discussed within Pearls and Irritations, but I strongly believe that when the government finally establishes our very much overdue Centre for Disease Control, now promised for January 2026, an initial initiative will involve a major public awareness campaign presented on all our media outlets, but particularly social media, to counter misinformation about vaccination.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.