Science is, well, strange. Even contradictory, if we’re being honest.

A key tenet of science is that we do not know everything there is to know, so we must continue to study, to challenge existing beliefs, to refine theories, to follow where the facts take us.

Yet, as a multitude of scientists over the years will affirm, once scientists as a group have made up their minds that something is true, they will fight anyone who proposes a different view.

Ask Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician in the mid-1800s who proposed that the washing of hands and medical instruments would discourage disease. His view was so unpopular that Semmelweis’s colleagues ran him from his position at the General Hospital in Vienna. Yet his view is now foundational wisdom among doctors and public health officials.

Here’s another example: An archeological site in Clovis, New Mexico, contained the oldest known evidence for humans in the Americas when it was discovered in 1929. The site dates to approximately 13,000 years ago. Tools found there are similar to tools later found throughout North America, but no tools could be dated earlier. Scientists collectively called the culture that produced these tools the Clovis people, and they became convinced the Clovis people were the first humans to come to this continent from Asia. As other finds contradicted this opinion, established researchers attacked the new information as unreliable. It affected the careers of archeologists who dared to challenge the consensus. Since the beginning of the 21st century, though, the Clovis First theory has fallen out of favor as older sites of other cultures have been discovered and reliably dated.

Which brings us to the argument raging today in Washington.

Robert Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, has made multiple comments over the years against vaccination. On June 9, he fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with a hand-picked team, which met for the first time Wednesday.

At its first meeting, the panel announced it plans to scrutinize the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule — the assortment of shots children have to take before they can attend school.

The medical establishment was expecting the decision and had already started yelling. Multiple outlets report childhood vaccines have saved 154 million lives around the world in the last 50 years, a statistic that the World Health Organization posted in April 2024.

So have we reached a point where the establishment is holding fiercely to an erroneous belief?

Or are political players trying to throw out an established program that has saved 154 million people based on their own erroneous beliefs?

We ask the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to take up this mission with an open mind. 

The committee will have access to direct evidence about the efficacy of childhood vaccines. Do they save lives as health organizations say?

The committee will also be asked to consider Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines, and they should. Is there any truth to the idea that links them with autism or other ailments?

We hope that as committee members review the information available to them, they will not let politics nor favoritism nor the interests of the establishment sway them from finding the truth.

Because that’s how science is supposed to work.