To the Editor:

An affirmative vote for R.F. Kennedy Jr. is a vote against modern medicine.

Years ago, in college biology class we conducted an exercise in which we found out how long we would have lived 100 years ago. I wouldn’t have made it out of childhood.

As a child, I had rubella, measles (twice), rheumatic fever (confirmed twice), mumps, chickenpox, influenza and more. I remember lying on the couch with blankets over the curtained windows, because any light hurt my eyes. I had to have a tutor in second grade because I missed so much school. If it hadn’t been for penicillin, I wouldn’t have survived or survived severely handicapped. Thankfully I missed contracting polio and have vivid memories of standing in line at the school with my sister to get our polio vaccines. 

Others weren’t so lucky. I have friends who were stricken and dealt with a limp or unusable arm the rest of their lives and then the returning pain of post-polio syndrome. And there were those who lived the rest of their lives in an iron lung. Visit the Barton County Historical Museum to see what that was like.

Due to the advent of vaccines, I and hundreds of millions of humans are alive today, leading healthy, fulfilling, useful lives. I don’t want to return to that time when children died in pain and misery, when pregnant women lost their babies due to rubella. 

R.F. Kennedy Jr. wants to send us back to those times. If he becomes secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, he wants to spend millions of dollars to “revisit” the efficacy of vaccines. Research that has been accepted by the medical profession for decades. He has no medical background and yet in 2019 he was involved in a real life “experiment” in Samoa with unvaccinated children. As a result, 83 died, mostly children. “As measles raged, Kennedy stayed connected to the island, writing to the prime minister to raise concerns about the vaccine and providing medical guidance to a local anti-vaccine activist who posted false claims about the vaccination campaign and promoted unproven alternative cures”. (Brandy Zadrozny NBC News)

It is not the time, never the time, to install someone who has no medical background and espouses totally unproven claims to lead the world’s largest public funder of medicine.

Pam Martin

Great Bend