Opposition to vaccines in the United States and around the world was a fringe view for a very long time, but it’s not anymore now, thanks to people like Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.
While this type of thinking has proliferated in the age of social media, in fact, being anti-vax is as old as the vaccines themselves. It’s a history worth exploring and knowing about, not just so that you can have better arguments for why vaccines work, but also so that you can understand that the arguments against inoculations are basically unchanged since the early 18th century when they became commonplace in the West.
Thomas Levenson, my guest in today’s episode, has written a very fascinating history of vaccines called A Pox on Fools, that is the focus of our discussion today. He’s a professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s also the author of several other books, including Einstein in Berlin and Newton and the Counterfeiter.
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The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
07:01 — Inoculation is a ‘newfangled’ idea that is three centuries old
13:16 — Vaccine opposition as a form of eugenics
19:10 — Cotton Mather’s Christian argument for inoculation
25:14 — Vaccines are a political technology, because they cannot work without it
33:26 — Nazi ‘Deutsche Physik’ and Russian Lysenkoism
39:30 — How the pro-science consensus was built in the postwar U.S.
53:31 — Business leaders uniformly agreed on the necessity of science as a civic culture
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Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Tom Levinson. Hey, Tom, welcome to Theory of Change.
THOMAS LEVENSON: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Good to have you.
All right, so let’s start off our discussion here today. Just give us a, brief overview of the book so people can understand what the argument is and the scope.
LEVENSON: Well, Pox on Fools _came to be because one of my editors, my, London-based editor right after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got nominated as, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, told me I had to write this book. I didn’t have any choice. And the reason was the, that it was clear that with that nomination anti-vaccine not just the rhetoric, but the actual anti-vaccine policy was gonna land at the center of the American public health apparatus, and it was gonna have, you know, in ways that it hadn’t at any time previously, however [00:03:00] influential it may have been, have real impact on, um, the way the US encounters infectious disease for, you know, the foreseeable future.
And so that, that’s something that, that is really scary given what what we know about infectious disease what we’ve learned in, painful ways over many years. So I set out to write the book, and I didn’t wanna just write another, simple vaccines work, which they do, and we should use them, which we should.
And the people who tell you they don’t are not telling you the truth, and here’s why. That, you know, those facts are out there. That story has been told, that argument has been made over and over again, and I don’t actually believe that at this point in our history, the argument has a lot of effect on the people it most needs to most needs to reach.
We can talk about who I think those people are in a moment if you’re interested. Uh, so I have a historical turn of mind, and what really struck me as I began to sort of try and respond to my editor’s [00:04:00] demand, uh, was thinking really about the major anti-vaccine arguments and realizing from work I’d already done and from some research I very quickly did just in this first, first phase of thinking about the book, um, that for all the enormous, just, transformative changes in the science and medicine of infectious disease over the last 200-plus years, the arguments against vaccination have changed very little, if at all.
Um, and what was most striking to me is in the beginning, you know, in the, the early 18th century for one sort of proto-vaccination advance, and then in the 19th century when, when the age of vaccination truly began, um- At least some of those arguments were, plausible or, at least, you know, reasonable as responses to something about which, you know, at the outset very little was known.
Uh, but that over time as our, as knowledge changes, as, the [00:05:00] science and practice of medicine advanced, and in particular as we discovered what the actual pathology, the mechanism of infectious disease really is, those arguments became less and less tenable, and yet they get repeated over and over again.
And I was really fascinated by that, and I realized that you could use that history of these claims that vaccines you know, the three big causes I identified, violate the natural order don’t do what they... You know, aren’t effective and in fact cause harm, and finally that any requirement around vaccines is, uh, intolerable as a violation of personal liberty, whether or not vaccines are effective against a given disease or not.
Uh, those are the three major arguments. The last one is philosophical. You have to work that out as a matter of values. The first two are matters that can be settled by fact and have been, and the interesting thing is the way that even though the science of those questions is completely settled the arguments that are used to try and undermine [00:06:00] them really haven’t changed.
They’ve just sort of persisted. It’s, something that Paul Krugman in, in economics has called zombie ideas. Doesn’t matter how many times you kill them, they just keep shambling on. And I thought if I told that story and really traced these, these, uh, arguments back to their beginnings, acknowledged their plausibility in one context, and traced how they became less and less viable, uh, that would help people who are, not the hardcore anti-vaccine people who are committed to that position in a way that, that, you know, is either core to their identity or it’s the source of their power or wealth or whatever it may be.
Those people are extremely hard to reach. But the peop- there are many more people who are vaccine hesitant ’cause they hear the noise. And my... This book is really an attempt to cut through the noise of, I think, vaccine misinformation and give them a, a, not just the facts, but the context required to interpret the facts in a way that I think, really affirms the value of [00:07:00] vaccination.
Innoculation is a ‘newfangled’ idea that is three centuries old
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, and you’re certainly right that the arguments really, and you demonstrate that very well in the book, that people are just recycling the same arguments in a way that eh, that yeah, that is, is very undead. It’s undead science is, what I like to call it. And, it, but, core to that argument is, the most fundamental from a sc- from their pseudoscience standpoint is, well, these are unnatural.
These are dangerous substances that aren’t found in nature, and these are newfangled ideas. And you show very clearly that these are practices that existed a long time before they were ever industrialized in the West.
LEVENSON: That, that’s right. I mean, I think of vaccination and its, its sort of proto forms you can lump them all together under the idea of engineering immunity to a pathogen. So variolation, which is the, business of taking sort of actual [00:08:00] pus and material from smallpox sores on a patient who’s suffering from smallpox and, solving that and then scratching it into, just taking this device that was like, this three-clawed thing and scratching it into your arms and then rubbing it, rubbing that, smallpox material in there.
You’re es- in, in essence giving patients a hopefully mild case of smallpox to avoid the, the, as many as one-third lethal, one, one-third of all those who catch smallpox will die of it. Y- you wanna prevent that outcome, so you try and give people a mild a mild case of smallpox because of the knowledge that was established by experience that if you had smallpox and survived it, you were immune for the rest of your life.
You didn’t, you never got got the disease again. So that was practiced, it was practiced in Africa, it was practiced in Central Asia or, the, the Near East, it was practiced in China for, at least a century and, possibly quite, further back [00:09:00] before Western European medicine encountered it.
Really only made it into the sort of Western consciousness in the early years of the 18th century. So, it’s, it’s you know- That you can understand why people would be hesitant about that. and, it clearly is, quite a leap to give yourself a disease to avoid the worst consequences of the disease.
That’s something that, that I can understand why that’s a hard thing to get your head around. And it really, I think hits hot buttons in that early stage because, if you are a devout believer in one of the revealed religions and you see, God as the, omniscient but also the ultimate judge of the world.
SHEFFIELD: Master of fate, yeah.
LEVENSON: Yeah, they see the fall of the least sparrow and all that.
Thus, giving somebody a disease in this way to engineer immunity was seen as really interfering in God’s prerogative. God decides who gets sick and [00:10:00] who dies and who gets well. And to put yourself intervening in that, in that judgment was explicitly seen—I mean, preachers delivered, really fire and brimstone sermons to this effect as variolation first came to be used in, in London and in Boston was the, were the, uh, first sort of Western European world, uh, applications. And, um, you know, that’s sort of the beginnings of what becomes a really three-century long argument that vaccination is fundamentally unnatural.
The argument persists even when that sort of overwhelming explicit faith in God takes a back seat because, you know, instead of God, you get nature’s god or, nature as created by God, which, there is this whole history of seeing in nature sort of the true source of wellbeing, very much part of the romantic, um, sort of message or theme of the romantic [00:11:00] literary movement.
But you see it in a number of ways in reaction in particular to the noise and smog and filth of the Industrial Revolution as it pops up. This idea of somehow a pristine natural world as, as the proper way to live becomes very persuasive. And, um, it’s Again, it’s not entirely wrong to say, in fact it’s very much not wrong to say, that you will have better outcomes for your health if you have clean water and clean air and take regular exercise and eat, you know, nutritious, wholesome food that’s unadulterated, all these good things. That’s still good advice.
It was often very difficult to achieve if you were, you know, a member of the working class during the Industrial Revolution, and suggesting that this would, you know, sort of help your overall w- state of wellbeing, absolutely true. The problem with it, and the problem in asserting that you don’t need [00:12:00] vaccination and in, in essence you’re, you’re
By intervening, by doing this sort of engineering, um, you are interrupting or, uh, upsetting the ability of nature to put you in the right place. it, That you are no longer, uh, you know, trying to live in harmony with our circumstances. That leads to serious problems because of course, no amount of, eating a vegetable-based diet or, bicycling instead of driving or whatever it may be, is going to stop, the measles virus from infecting you if you are susceptible to measles, if you’re unvaccinated, and you encounter somebody who’s sick with the measles.
You’ll most likely catch the disease and suffer whatever consequences. And that’s true of course across the, range of, uh, of microbial pathogens. You know, living well has all kinds of benefits, but it isn’t a, shield against a direct encounter with something that can cause a disease in you.
SHEFFIELD: And we see RFK Jr., like that is his arguments.
LEVENSON: Yeah. Oh, very much.
SHEFFIELD: Really [00:13:00] is. And, and it’s very bizarre, or I guess it’s illustrative of how little he actually knows about vaccines and biology in that he calls what he believes in, he believes in terrain theory. That’s what he believes. But he, he doesn’t call it that.
Germ theory destroyed the credibility of believing that disease had a moral component
LEVENSON: One of the critical things that happened to really alter the terms, or should have altered the terms of the anti-vaccine argument, uh, was the discovery of germ theory in the 19th century when it was finally firmly established that particular diseases are caused, infectious diseases are caused by particular microbes.
So, you know, cholera is always caused by the uh, Vibrio ch- uh, cholerae. I’m pr- I’m sure I’m pronouncing it badly. The cholerae bacterium. Um, smallpox is always caused by the smallpox variola virus, and so forth and so on. And that there’s a distinct microbial pathogen for each of these diseases.
They pref- uh, you know, and the, immune system, [00:14:00] not, it took a while to get to a developed sophisticated understanding of the immune system. But, you know, with the idea of germ theory, as it was called in the late 19th century, that there are these individual distinct germs or pathogens associated with each of the diseases and wound infections and th- those kinds of things that were afflicting humankind.
That gave you both, uh, a clear unders- a c- a much clearer causal understanding of disease that, among other things, overturned the, from medieval medicine and forward, this idea of miasmas, of bad air wafting something that would disrupt your, your, uh, your biological equilibrium and cause a disease.
And different, uh, different sort of miasmas could generate different responses in different people. But, basically the idea of disease is that it was an internal imbalance driven by an encounter with something [00:15:00] in the environment but not a specific, individual pathogen that was doing something inside your body.
So that’s all overturned in the, you know, between the 1870s and the 1890s. Uh, and with it, with that new germ theory, you actually have sort of an underlying theory of vaccination. Pasteur even r- you know, is one of the, the two, most famous figures associated with the germ theory. Louis Pasteur calls it the principle of vaccination, which is, uh, if you can challenge somebody with a some kind of substance that would produce the same immune reaction, same internal reaction to a pathogen without causing a disease, you could induce immunity, you could create a shield of protection against the time when you encountered the actual pathogen. And it’s basically the underlying idea behind all vaccinations still today. Find something that doesn’t make you sick but produces s- teaches the [00:16:00] body how to recognize this p- this threat.
And that gives you some help against the threat should you actually encounter it in the wild. You know- That’s the, that’s the way it, it actually works. For Kennedy I mean, the underlying sort of theme of all his various attempts to give a kind of scientistic gloss to his, forgive me, BS the is I think what’s ultimately a eugenic notion.
I mean, his argument ultimately comes down to the fact that if you get sick, it’s your fault. You didn’t do the right things. You, you weren’t a healthy person. You haven’t done enough pull-ups, whatever it may be. And, uh, and the idea that those who do fall ill are in some way personally to blame, morally on the hook for their illness, does two things.
One is, it, it makes it your fault for being sick. But it also absolves, it absolves society of any real duty of care to you. Again, [00:17:00] if you hadn’t done all those things that clearly made you vulnerable to illness, we wouldn’t have to help you. And it creates a category of undesirables.
The people who get sick are revealing themselves to be, sort of morally suspect because it’s their fault. They, they did this to themselves in some way. And that to me is, is, that’s the sort of... If you take the anti-vaccine, this, part of the anti-vaccine argument to its explicit logical conclusion, you get a really, really ugly view of humanity and a, and of a hierarchy in humanity.
Virtuous people who stay healthy and sort of morally, defective in some way people who don’t. And we’ve seen different formulations of that cause immense harm in the last century, and I, really hope we don’t go there again.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and unfortunately we did see that during the COVID-19 pandemic as well with a lot of people saying things [00:18:00] like, “Well, if you’re old and you die from COVID, well then it was just your time to die. You you, d- basically deserve to die anyway.” And there was Dan Patrick, who was the lieutenant governor of Texas, who had said that “Well, I’m an older person, and I think that older Americans should just be willing to sacrifice our lives for the economy, because if we don’t, then we won’t have an economy, and, like, we should just be willing to die.”
It was, I mean, it was monstrous. This was monstrous.
LEVENSON: Absolutely. I mean, it’s w- you and I are speaking now just a couple days after D-Day, and it’s like this sort of notion somehow that, society letting its vulnerable die of this pandemic disease is equivalent in somehow to the bravery of the folks who, went ashore on the beaches of Normandy.
And it’s our, I’m, I’m not in my first youth either, and it’s like the idea that I’m supposed to sort of throw myself in the way of the COVID virus so that the [00:19:00] rest of America can continue to shop on at the mall. Somehow it doesn’t have the same resonance as, freeing the world from Nazis, but, maybe that’s just me
Cotton Mather’s Christian argument for innoculation
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, so this is, I mean, it, flows naturally though from their religious views and their epistemological views. But it is also worth pointing out that, as you do in the book, that one of the earliest proponents of vaccines in the United States was Cotton Mather, who was a religious fundamentalist.
But he correctly understood that, in fact, not only do does vaccination or variolation, in his case work, but it’s also a moral duty because if you allow s- people to... If you prevent people from having a treatment that makes them have a lower cause of death, a less likelihood of dying, if you prevent that, you have actually killed them, and it is on your
LEVENSON: Right.
SHEFFIELD: Conscience.
LEVENSON: e- Yes, there were [00:20:00] plenty of religious figures in that, in, you know, in Mather, who opposed Mather directly who said, you know, “You’re, you’re, messing with God’s province.” And Mather countered by saying exactly what you just said, that the Sixth Commandment, thou shalt not murder, says, you know, you gotta
You know, if you ha- if you can save a life, you must. It’s n- it’s not just a, a good thing to do, it’s a, it’s an obligation. And even though I’m not a Puritan and I’m not a particularly, um, you know, religiously observant person I entirely agree. I mean, there ... I don’t agree with Mather about much.
I’m, I, really
SHEFFIELD: You’re not gonna burn witches
LEVENSON: Exactly. But but in that one instance, I’m in complete agreement with him. Again, it’s, I think one of the things I distinguish I really came to realize as I was writing this book is there is a difference between the people like Kennedy who, who are, for various reasons, in, in, Kennedy’s case, though I don’t know what’s in, in his heart of course I suspect really [00:21:00] mundane and ugly motives.
He gets power, he gets clout, he gets, he has gotten a lot of money off being an ant- a prominent anti-vaxxer. There are people like that who, for whom, for ... and, and there are true believers. There are people who are genuinely ter- you know, I think they, have been taught wrong things, they’ve absorbed wrong things, they’ve done their own research and come, and, come to terrible conclusions.
They suffer from all kinds of logical fa- uh, fallacies, all this kind of stuff, but that doesn’t mean they do not sincerely believe that vaccines pose a threat to them or have caused harm. But you know, there’s a much, much larger number of people. Y- you know, we all do this. You know, we’re all busy.
We all have, limited parameters to our knowledge, and we offload, our thinking about all kinds of things. I don’t try to learn, how plumbing works. And when, if, I, if a plumber comes into my house and says, “I need X, Y, and Z.” I accept that. I have to offload [00:22:00] that, I mean, it’s, I’m not gonna take the, the couple, three years it takes to become a competent plumber.
And you can do that across, across all kinds of, the, all kinds of decisions we all make in our daily lives. And most of us, almost all of us are not vaccine experts. We’re not public health statisticians. We aren’t virologists. It’s ... There are, we have to come up with some structure of trust that allows us to rely on what other people say. And it’s that context in which people can play on, that necessary sort of offloading of decision-making in this way. And it’s, there is something about vaccines that makes it easy to bullshit about.
I mean, think about it. You’ve got, some- somebody walks up to you with a, a little glass tube and a needle at the end of it, and there’s a clear liquid in it, and something in, some invisible thing in that clear li- liquid [00:23:00] goes into your body, has some interactions with other invisible things, and if it all works, an event doesn’t happen.
You don’t get sick. That’s, ... It’s hard to have, a sort of immediate faith in that if you come to it completely naively. And if somebody says, “Oh, no, no, that, there are all these problems with it,” you’re gonna be concerned, right? And it’s that concern, it’s that, that possib- Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, her, her, her collaborator, wrote this marvelous book called The Merchants of Doubt, which is about how basically the tobacco, the tobacco industry persuaded for a long time people that the, sort of
It was the God of the gaps argument applied to science because this last step of proof for all the, epidemiological statistical proof that existed that, you know, smoking causes lung cancer, that last little bit meant that, you couldn’t say for sure it does, therefore we don’t have to, act on it.
Th- the [00:24:00] vaccine, anti-vaccine world trades on a similar transaction. I think the s- the science they claim in defense of their, position is even less tenable than what the tobacco companies were relying on. But
SHEFFIELD: Oh, there’s certainly a lot bigger body of time and of studies showing that vaccines work.
LEVENSON: Absolutely. And, and the thing, and the thing is we know in detail the mechanisms by which they work. You can trace it sort of cell type by cell type how, a different vaccine challenge to the body sort of progresses through the immune system to create recognition of the, of the pa- pathogen and response to it, which is, the ability to stop it, when it does happen to come into your body.
But, the task, I think, for people who are, who are trying to affirm the value of vaccines is not to change Kennedy’s mind, but to find a way to reach all the people that Kennedy has very successfully made feel uncertain about the value of vaccines and say, “No,” “you’re [00:25:00] being lied to in this particular way.
You can trace the history of this lie. Let’s, let’s not go back to the age when parents routinely expected to bury their children.” That’s, really ultimately what’s at stake here.
Vaccines are a political technology, because they cannot work without it
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, as you describe it accurately the, the scenario that of, the person with the clear vial inj- wanting to inject it into you vaccines are a magical technology in the Arthur C. Clarke sense, but they’re also a political technology. And, this is where I think Aristotle is very relevant in that, he was somebody who had his own university that he founded basically, and they did all kinds of scientific research in, in all kinds of different disciplines.
But the, one of the things that he always said was that politics was the master science. And not because it was harder to understand, but it was because it decided how they all [00:26:00] should be fitted together and what the purpose of science should be as a societal institution. and I think that’s where the public health advocates and the p- policymakers and the, elected officials, that’s where they’ve let down, been, failed the most, is that they didn’t understand that science is political, and it always has been
LEVENSON: I think I’m not sure that throughout this history that, that p- that public health and political leaders didn’t understand that. I think they just,
SHEFFIELD: Oh, I, mean recently I’m saying. Yeah, recently.
LEVENSON: I think that’s true. But yeah, I mean, the ... You, really see that, I mean, you cer- certainly see it very much now where, basically the whole infrastructure of American biomedical research is both being whittled away, a substantial chunk.
You know, the funding has gone down, the pace of funding that has gone down, which surprisingly is incredibly destructive, I mean, perhaps surprisingly. If you shut down a [00:27:00] lab for six months, you’ve destroyed the lab. People go off, they do other things, and all the institutional knowledge in that one area of research that all the things, you know, which reagents work well with this, you know, just all this informal knowledge it takes to, do, leading-edge science, uh, goes away, and you don’t get it back right away.
You have to rebuild it, and it can take it can take years. Even if, you know, you, you restored sort of all the resources tomorrow, it would still take years to return to your former capacity. That’s going on all the time right now. And of course, also what’s being funded is shifting. Uh, Kennedy pulled half a billion dollars out of mRNA vaccine, uh, research basically unilaterally disarming America in the face of not just microbial threats, but cancers which turn out to be potentially treatable by that technology and so forth.
Because, because the COVID vaccines had the, the in- infernal gall to be [00:28:00] built on that particular extraordinary discovery. Those are the kinds of things where obviously politics and political power matters a great deal, but where the rubber really hits the road is when it comes to the idea of, Whether the state should be able, should be able to and should compel the population at large to vaccinate in any, against any particular set of diseases.
And that’s an argument that’s been going on since the, really the 1850s, uh, at least as, different pl- different jurisdictions, uh, started to require vaccination against smallpox. Actually, the first smallpox vaccination mandates date back from the, uh, date all the way back to the 18-teens. And, uh, you know, that’s an entirely political argument.
On the one side you had people who argued, again the idea that blocking vaccination is murder. There was a, a mid-19th century, a very [00:29:00] senior British government doctor who referred to, you know, the anti-vaccine position demanding liberty you know, the, right to refuse the state’s intrusion into the most...
I mean, again, sticking something into your body, uh, especially something that may not have been fully, you know, characterized and understood and all that you know, that’s a very intimate demand that the state is making of an individual. And this doctor, uh, John Simon, flipped the argument around and said, you know, “What y- what you’re asking for is not personal liberty, but the liberty of omissional infanticide, the right to kill your kids by not providing with them with this protection against a deadly disease.”
And by extension, that was what, really the sort of framework of the argument omniscient homicide by leaving society at large more vulnerable to epidemic diseases. Um, and that’s been the core of the argument ever since. Does the individual’s right to say what happens to their own [00:30:00] body trump society’s, uh, interest in protecting those who can’t protect themselves, like infants or transplant patients who are on immune disorders and can’t be vaccinated, or the elderly whose immune, na- natural immune systems wane in eff- efficacy?
All these, you know, there are lots of people for whom vaccination is an, is either- unavailable or im- or, imperfect and they can’t protect themselves. So, you know, does the state have the right to compel you to ensure that society as a whole doesn’t suffer the loss and harm of a pandemic or epidemic outbreak?
And does the state have the right to compel you to take an action that will benefit you by, by m- you know, giving you immunity to a disease, but is also being required of you because it will benefit somebody else you don’t know? There’s the argument. I come down pretty firmly on the side of, yeah, the state does have that right and obligation.
And that has been the state of certainly [00:31:00] American jurisprudence since 1905. I mean, it s- went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said, “Yep, Massachusetts can make you get vaccinated against smallpox. Sorry.”
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and George Washington himself was in favor of, vaccination. Like, he forced it on his troops in 1776.
LEVENSON: that’s a, well, that’s another argument, and it speaks directly to what the current Secretary of Defense, I will not refer to him by his made-up title Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth in eliminating the vaccine requirement for the military. As George Washington knew, that directly threatens national security.
There was a really good reason that the military was, I mean, when soldiers went off to Vietnam, they were pin cushions. They were stuffed full of every available vaccine against tropical diseases that there was, along with, the, if, for some reason they hadn’t been vaccinated with the sort of conventional childhood suite of vaccinations that were just becoming available as the Vietnam War was taking place.
’Cause, nothing says we’re [00:32:00] gonna lose a war than having, significant fractions of your fighting force fall ill from a preventable disease. Throughout history, war has been attended by disease, and it’s been attended by disease in the armies and, when y- in the, in the American Civil War, the, the outbreaks of typhoid and measles and other infectious diseases that happened when you brought, all those Union soldiers into con- from different regions, often very remote, rural farm boys coming in to encounter, people from New York City or what have you, in these, in- incredibly crowded camps with often very poor sanitation and so forth.
The North and South, those sort of initial recruiting stages were famous for the so-called camp diseases that would rip through regiments. Y- two out of every three deaths in the Civil War were caused by either infectious disease or infection- or wound infections, not by direct battlefield trauma.
Those were, 400, out of the 600,000 to a million people who died 400 [00:33:00] to 660, 670,000 of those deaths would have been preventable, had, the vaccine age opened just a, a little bit earlier than it actually did in history. And so, vaccinating your troops is actually a really good idea if you want to have success on the battlefield, but this seems somehow to escape to have escaped the current leadership in the Department of Defense.
Nazi Deutsche Physik and Russian Lysenkoism
SHEFFIELD: It has. And the history of science just more generally also does show that it’s always been interrelated with politics as well. And one of the more famous examples of that is that in Nazi Germany there was this idea that quantum physics was a Jewish stain and lie.
And,
LEVENSON: a-
SHEFFIELD: and yet-
LEVENSON: relativity as well.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and the relativity. That’s right.
LEVENSON: Degenerate modern Jewish, deformations of the, glorious tradition of [00:34:00] classical physics. I mean, really just amazing stuff
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, and Hitler himself, as far as I can remember, didn’t actually directly engage with that p- in particular, but his, a lot of his lieutenants did, and they developed this, idea of what they called Deutsche Physik so German physics i- which was, yeah, anti-relativity because, relativity is wrong.
We don’t want to be relative. We have the truth.
LEVENSON: Right. and, we don’t want to have to acknowledge that Albert Einstein was a, an important figure. He’s a Jew, we’re gonna make a f- a, it’s... when they, when, Einstein actually finally emigrated in late 1932 just before Hitler took power when Einstein then in early ’33 repudiated his German citizenship one of the Nazi news- associated newspapers said, “Einstein is gone, good riddance,” “we don’t need no stinking Einstein. We’ve got Deutsche Physik.” So it’s yeah, I mean, and, and, and certainly there are plenty of [00:35:00] examples where sort of overt political motivations have directed science. We were talking before we sort of got the recording going about Lysenko and the whole Soviet tradition of, really subordinating everything in Soviet society to politics.
And it did enormous damage to I mean, the L- Lysenko himself did enormous damage to Soviet biology and, a- and in particular agriculture. You can, associate him specifically with, really quite, s- quite terrible famines. And certainly just the progress of, of Soviet biology was studies of, of biology in the Soviet Union were, stymied for years by his authority over what was considered legitimate Soviet science.
Which, it’s, it sounds kind of funny in retrospect, as Deutsche Physik sounds, sort of buffoonish. But, behind the historical distance and the laughter, of course there were individual [00:36:00] and, and, s- society-wide human consequences, uh, that were just horrific.
The You know, you, but you don’t even have to look to some of those 20th century nightmares to see how, uh, how this is a running theme. I mean, there are lots of different ways to frame the conflict between heliocentric astronomy, Galileo, and the church. But certainly as I was speaking some years ago to, um, a leading Jesuit astronomer, he said, “You know, you have to understand from the church’s point, perspective, it wasn’t the science of heliocentrism that was the problem.
It was Galileo’s claim that science had independent authority not just in science, but in the interpretation of scripture.” Heliocentrism said in effect that, for example, when was it Joshua holding up his, or,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, Joshua, yeah. Yeah
LEVENSON: the sun still? That was not exactly consistent with the heliocentric, universe and, then the [00:37:00] theory of gravity and all that sort of stuff.
You know- You could, you could absolutely, observe the mountains on the moon and reveal that the planets traveled not in perfect circles but in ellipses and all these good things but don’t tell us how to read the Bible. That’s our job. And that was, and, Galileo got into trouble over that and, suffered serious, though thankfully not, life-threatening consequences. But yes, polit- politicians have their own ends and they will happily use science and scientific scientists to advance them, but they will ch- you know, if they have the power, they will not tolerate challenges to their authority or to their worldview that a scientific interpretation or a scientific discovery, uh, might pose to them.
So, and given that nowadays science is essentially, uh, you know, a society-wide, society-level endeavor, it costs billions to maintain,[00:38:00]
Scientific research at the scale that, that major nations do. That money comes from people who are not themselves scientists, and the people who have the money obviously assert a great deal of control over it.
They set priorities. They determine not just which areas are of interest and which aren’t, but also which individuals, which kinds of individuals have access to scientific resources, and so on. So, science, it turns out as, not as a body of knowledge or a accumulating series of discoveries, but science is a daily enterprise, something that humans get up in the morning and go to work and do.
That is often a mirror of both the strengths and pathologies of whatever society they’re happening in. So right now, as our, as the United States has, as power has moved to, the current administration and the current sort of view of, of the proper organization of, our [00:39:00] politics you’re seeing that reflected in who gets to do science, who gets funded, who gets promoted, what kinds of sciences are permitted, af- are funded which is a permission slip.
And yeah, politics shoots through You can say there are no politics in equations, and at least mo- much of the time you’ll be right. But getting to those equations and interpreting their results in ways that make a difference in people’s lives, that’s, yeah, that, there’s plenty of room for politics to, to muck around.
How the pro-science consensus was built in the postwar U.S.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that, that that post-war consensus that you’re alluding to there and the, the massive amount of scientific funding that happened it, it, came as a result of the, the fact that the Manhattan Project and basic science research is what ended the war in, Japan.
And, one can argue with whether that was ethical or not. But let’s say I, I, strongly suspect [00:40:00] that even if they hadn’t dropped the bomb, but they had just demonstrated, “Here’s what we can do to you guys,” that would’ve made them surrender, I think, or a lot of them
LEVENSON: yeah, I, I don’t disagree with you. I certainly, I’ve never understood or accepted the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. I can understand in the midst of the sort of emotional reality of the Second World War why, people in the military would take the ultimate weapon and drop it on this ca- this came right after some of the absolute bloodiest, highest casualties as a percentage of the force battles of the entire war in Okinawa and Iwo Jima. And I think, I don’t think it makes it moral, but I think it does help make it understandable why the weapon might get used.
But I agree with you. I mean, dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, far enough offshore not to immediately kill everybody would’ve been a powerful signal and, would’ve been interesting to see.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess
LEVENSON: but, the, the thing about [00:41:00] the funding after the war, the, the joke was, I don’t know if it’s really, I, it, there has to be s- there is some truth in this, I think, but the, joke is that even though politicians didn’t have a clue what the physicists were doing, they realized that our physicists beat their physicists to, at the end of World War II, and you wanted to keep feeding your physicists both to keep them happy and doing good things for you, and to make sure the other guy’s physicists didn’t get the jump on you.
So that, that helped up until the ’70s, really.
SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and in particular a particular person I think was pers- had a big role in that, somebody who was the vice president of, your university actually, Vannevar Bush. When he wrote a report for Truman after the war called “Science: The Endless Frontier,” and that, it, He did something with that report from a rhetorical standpoint that I think was really important because, people like Kennedy or Pete Hegseth, or Russell Vote, these, these guys are reactionaries. They’re far right. [00:42:00] They hate modernity. They want, to repeal the 20th century and the 19th century.
That’s what they want. But there’s a lot of people who, vote for Trump and, and, and other Republicans who are-- They’re conservative, but they’re not reactionary. And, and what Bush’s report did, I think it set a rhetorical posture that made it so that even if you didn’t understand science or, and you weren’t that interested in it, or you didn’t understand, like you weren’t committed to, s- secular, secularism or, atheism or agnosticism, whatever you wanna put it you didn’t have those commitments, but you wanted to make America great.
Like, that’s what that report did. It said the best way to make America great and to help us win our military conflicts is to invest massive amounts of money in science and in education, and it worked for a lot of conservatives actually.
LEVENSON: a- and, I would say empirically [00:43:00] it worked. US wealth and power turns on its domination of world science after the Second World War. We were not the dominant player in science before the Second World War. That really is, a shockingly recent thing. But also I think there are a couple of-- one of the things Bush did is, you know, yes, he very much had a sense of the applications of s- you know, the value of the applications of science. You do science because you do all these things that affect, human circumstances directly. Our, material wellbeing, our ability to defend ourselves, our ability to grow rich, um, all the different things that, that, you know, you can point to that science in fact delivered over the last 75 years.
Uh, but he also made a separate, and I think really important claim, and it’s one that I think is still a dominating faith certainly amongst, you know, my colleagues in the sciences of more or less my [00:44:00] age. People who are, senior, you know, uh, I mean, unkindly on the downhill curve of their careers.
More accurately people who’ve been in the sciences doing, good work for 20, 30 years or more. And that is, You want to liberate science as much as possible from exactly what we were just talking about a kind of immediately teleological and ideological control. And this notion is that we should only spend money on things that we know are gonna produce, you know, good workers for the industrial- for the post-industrial age or, technologies we can use, directly next week or next year.
One of the things that Bush pointed out is that, you know, the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb completed in 1945, turned on genuinely you know, c- purely curiosity-driven research of the previous 30 years, you know, the nature of the atom. I mean, one of the wonderful [00:45:00] things in, I think one of the really great history of science, popular history of science book, uh, the, um, Richard Rhodes book on, um, the birth of the atomic bomb I’m blanking on its exact title.
But anyway, he, he, went back in that book, and he s- he started really with the turn of the 20th century’s investigation of the true structure of the atom. Um, and, uh, you know, the findings of relativity that confirmed that energy and mass are interchangeable, which is, doesn’t help you build an atomic bomb, but it tells you why an atomic bomb is so destructive, why it produces so much, so much energy that then, you know, burns a city. all that curiosity-driven research. People, there was no expectation when Rutherford’s, bouncing particles off the nucleus of an atom that this is going to lead to anything from, nuclear power to atomic clocks to the atomic bomb, right? Similarly-
SHEFFIELD: [00:46:00] Einstein, sorry, even Einstein himself, like his theory of relativity was rejected as it’s more art than science.
LEVENSON: Yeah. I mean, it’s... And, and, now it turns out every, that lovely little mapping function you carry in that tiny computer we call a phone that we have in our pockets the accuracy of that map turns on making damn sure you’ve got general and special relativity right in your calculations as they figure out what the signal, as they figure out the signals coming down from the geolocation satellites.
It turns out that the most seemingly... And quantum mechanics, as you were saying, I mean, quantum mechanics seems it’s the realm of the very tiny. It’s, you know, you’re explaining things like, the s- initially the spectrum of a hydrogen atom, why it, emits light in the way it does, uh, when it’s excited and all that kind of stuff.
Seems, you know, in- intolerably far removed from anything a, you know, a sort of normal human being would calculate, except every transistor in every device in your house, which includes your [00:47:00] car, your refrigerator, your phone, your computer, everything turns on, a proper understanding of quantum mechanics so you can build those devices correctly.
Turns out that things that seem very abstruse have all kinds of interesting practical applications. And Vannevar Bush said, basically, you can’t predict in advance. And, you know, there’s certainly some curiosity-driven science that is just beautiful and wonderful and has no real bearing on the price of eggs.
I mean, you could say basically everything we do in cosmology and deep space astronomy is pretty much there for the beauty of it and the, sort of curio- you know, c- literally curiosity, the wonder of coming to grips with and, d- uh, deciphering this extraordinary universe we live in doesn’t really affect the price of eggs.
But you can’t predict, most of the time you cannot predict in advance, um, which piece of, I just wanna understand that thing, uh, will lead ultimately to something of extraordinary value. The classic example of this quite far removed from what we’re talking [00:48:00] about, is, this Berkeley professor and his graduate student who were, fishing for bacterial samples in Yellowstone National Park.
You know, nice work if you can do it. Free, you know, taxpayer paid for vacation in Yellowstone. And they identified, um, that was when they discovered these, uh, extremophile bacteria, who could live in, very, very hot water. It turns out the, extremophiles now extend across a whole bunch of extreme conditions.
But these were the first. And, on the one hand, it’s really cool. Life can exist in conditions we wouldn’t have imagined possible. which among other things makes the search for extraterrestrial life spicier because it turns out the range of possible planetary environments that, that something could, develop in is larger than we thought.
That’s great. More curiosity-driven science, very cool. But it also had completely unexpectedly, completely divorced from the reasons those two scientists were making that expedition, they were trying to find that stuff Uh, it turns [00:49:00] out to be, you know, the beginning, the first step in the sequence of discoveries that led to the polymerase chain reaction, which is one of the absolutely most fundamental tools in, uh, you know, the making of bio- of biotechnology manufacture of drugs.
And there is an enormous number of people who have no idea that their wellbeing, their lives are, have been preserved because, you know, two guys from Berkeley, wondered what might live downstream from a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Who knew? That’s what Bush was defending. That’s very much what we’re not getting right now in the current administration of American science
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the thing is that the longer you have this cramped view of scientific investigation and, what it should be allowed to do the, more b- f- further behind you fall. Because, and, and that’s, that’s the real risk of, all of these policies that the Trump, the second [00:50:00] Trump administration is putting in.
And not just the, budget cuts, which are massively bad, but also, the immigration crackdowns and the free speech removals and the censorships, and the and y- trying to intimidate academic institutions
LEVENSON: Successfully, it is successfully intimidating them. I mean, just this morning I read a story about how the leaders of the American Diabetes Association kicked out of their conference six researchers, including two former presidents of the association for distributing an editorial published in the association’s own journal that criticized Trump’s, the Trump administration’s science policies.
And so you’ve got this national association of people doing research into a disease that’s becoming more and more, certainly type 2 d- diabetes diagnoses have been going up. This is a big serious area, and you have, very prominent figures in that area of research saying there’s a problem, and other leaders saying, “You cannot say that out loud.”
That’s a chilling effect. That’s very, very dangerous. And, it’s worth remembering, [00:51:00] as we were talking about Vannevar Bush, that report came out, I think, in 1950, ’51, something like that,
SHEFFIELD: 50,
LEVENSON: it led, directly to the formation of the National Science Foundation, which was a, politically difficult...
it didn’t happen. It had to come back up in a second congressional session and required a lot of of, hardcore, hard-nosed Washington politics to get it through. But, American leadership in world science is recent. It’s contingent. It turned both on funding and a welcoming of, the, the Manhattan Project was staffed by European physics, physicists to a very great extent immigrants, all of them.
And, American science over the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s attracted, the world’s best talent all coming here to develop our own scientific establishment. None of those things were inevitable. All of those can be reversed. You can cut funding. You can deny immigration. You can direct research in ways that [00:52:00] basically will not interest the, the most creative minds who will look for other, other places to work.
There is no guarantee, there is no law of nature, there’s no, power you can get down the barrel of a gun that says the United States will be the leader in scientific inquiry and the technological benefits that flow from it. we can, and I would say we are, we can blow it. It can go away, and it can go away shockingly quickly.
I mean, Germany was the leading scientific nation in many ways in, right through the ’20s and into the early ’30s. Nazi policy then destroyed, that preeminence in a very few years. And It’s just, it, there is this, I th- I think there is this naivete amongst certainly a lot of our political leaders, but I think a lot of Americans as well, in the population at large, that there’s something magical [00:53:00] about, you know, the United States.
There’s something, defies the laws of gravity, of intellectual gravity. Um, and it would be nice if it were true, but it really ain’t. I’m not sure it would be true. I think, you know, I, I think American exceptionalism is, problematic. But even, even if, your personal national pride says, “I want to be number one,” and it’s, it’s our sort of like birthright to be number one in science or whatever the answer is no, it’s not.
Yeah, you know, it has to be earned
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
LEVENSON: generation.
Business leaders uniformly agreed on the necessity of science as a civic culture
SHEFFIELD: It does. And, and the business leaders once upon a time, and the technology leaders, they understood that as well, which is why, you did see huge support for in- investments in and donations to universities by companies like IBM and Ford and GM and, all of these aerospace companies as well.
And, now you kind of see the opposite. I mean, Elon Musk himself, was the DOGE guy and going in there and [00:54:00] slashing and burning science,
uh, because it
was politically incorrect to him.
LEVENSON: Yeah, we, we’ve been learning recently as, the screw worm has, we eliminated a screw worm from the United States, I think in the ’60s, right? And did so by treating cattle and, basically pushing the disease out of our borders and eventually quite far south.
And it’s been moving north for various reasons. the, screw, the screw worm fly, the screw worms themselves are the larvae of these flies. And these are flesh-eating larvae that can infect cattle and, basically...
SHEFFIELD: Or any mammal, yeah.
LEVENSON: Yeah, and, yeah, and, do enormous damage to, horrible for any organism that, that, that acquires it.
But it, economically damaging to the beef industry if it gets into herds of cattle which it has just done in Texas after DOGE had eliminated the the folks in the US I forget, the Department of Agriculture or elsewhere, [00:55:00] that were monitoring and attempting to address the screw worm crisis.
So it’s like,
SHEFFIELD: yeah
LEVENSON: not exactly foresighted. I mean, really is Musk is really bizarre because, he, he went all in on, on getting Trump elected and he succeeded. And he proceeded to, that, that turns out to have destroyed the federal support for the infrastructure that, you know, directly and enormously benefits the Tesla Corporation.
And, all of his companies turn on, high tech and, ultimately scientific advance, and yet DOGE was insanely disruptive to to American science. It seems, this is a case where it really appears that Musk went after his own bread and butter. And it doesn’t make any sense to me, but, then I am not a master of the universe or, a multibillionaire, so perhaps I just don’t have those sort of special depths of understanding required to figure that out.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I, you’re, you’re, you’re-- I think you’re onto something [00:56:00] though. So, let’s maybe end, what’s your message to people who are in science who would just say, “Well, this facts will-- the facts will speak for themselves. I don’t have to do anything.” Everybody knows that science is good.
What, what’s your-- what would you say to them?
LEVENSON: Well, I think there are many fewer of those people who, would say that everybody knows science is good, ’cause the evidence is rolling in that not everybody knows that. I’d, say it’s terribly naive. Nothing speaks for itself. People speak for the facts or for, mute nature or what have you.
And you need to speak in ways... And it’s not simply enough to say the facts out loud. Yes, it is true, vaccines work. We understand the underlying mechanisms. They are enormously life-saving. They are the single greatest life-saving gift human beings have ever given themselves. For, you know, many, many centuries, infectious disease was the single [00:57:00] leading cause of death for, you know, basically that’s how more humans got taken out than any other, um, mechanism.
And it’s no longer the case. And it’s no longer the case for, a number of factors, but preeminently among them is the rise of vaccines. And just saying that, turns out not to be persuasive. And what’s really interesting is, you know, you mentioned Aristotle in one context earlier in this conversation.
Aristotle of course wrote the Poetics, and he had a very strong sense of, of you know, the theory of tragedy. He had a strong sense of the power of rhetoric and specifically of narrative. Rhetoric, uh, the, words organized powerfully to tell a coherent story that would both affect emotions and, remain in mind, that would stick.
And that insight, how you persuade people to, understand the things you want to understand and to do the actions you want to do and all that kind of thing, requires telling true, factually defensible, but [00:58:00] compelling stories. And, And, that’s kind of been my job for pretty much all my adult career.
And you could argue given the state of affairs in the United States now that my entire career has been a failure. But, you know, you gotta fight the fight you, you gotta fight the fights in front of you. But I would say, it’s important for people like, you know, you and me to try and present these stories from scientists to the larger engaged public, but it’s really important for scientists to do that as well, to try and understand their work not just as a series of experiments and results, but as a story they can tell, um, that has, um, you know, a beginning, a middle, and end.
Uh, some kind of heroic journey, you know? There are obstacles. You wanna figure something out, there are obstacles in your way. You do different things to overcome those obstacles. When you achieve your goal, you realize, “Okay, I’ve got this, but what new problem does that raise for me?” [00:59:00] The, actual daily life of science lends it to, to narrative description.
And scientists, I think need as much as possible to be able to express themselves in that kind of narrative to help reach people beyond the laboratory
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it means a lot more coming from them. As much as we might enjoy, touting our own work we’re not the ones in the lab, as you were saying. So
LEVENSON: I mean, look, how incredibly influential James Watson’s The Double Helix was. Lots of problems with that book. I’m actually a, a quasi-relative of Rosalind Franklin and never liked his treatment of Franklin in that book. But, what a compelling story, and how much insight into just sort of, not just the way scientists, some scientists think, but also the extraordinary feat the extraordinary value of the discovery of figuring out the structure of DNA.
Something figuring out how life tells itself, how to keep going generation after generation. That’s written in DNA. We understand [01:00:00] how it’s written in DNA because in large part, not solely, but in large part what Watson and Crick were able to do in deciphering the, structure of the DNA molecule.
And, what could have been an incredibly dry chemistry lecture turned in, in, in Watson’s hands into, this, gripping boy’s own adventure kind of, sort of picaresque tale
SHEFFIELD: Yep. Yep, Agreed. All right, well, so your book is A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines. So I hope everybody can check it out. Thanks a lot.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.
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