Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a simple message that resonates with people who are hesitant about immunization. He warns against putting dangerous chemicals in your body. He claims that vaccines don’t work — especially mRNA vaccines, despite his boss’ success at implementing Operation Warp Speed during the pandemic. He fired scientists with decades of experience in vaccines and dismissed the science and data supporting these lifesaving wonders. 

And unfortunately, it looks like RFK's campaign against vaccines is starting to affect public health in Nevada and elsewhere.

You could conclude, superficially, that the simplicity of RFK’s anti-vax message appeals to populations vulnerable to misinformation — people without college degrees, people who rely on social media for information and communities of color with an understandable historic mistrust of America’s biomedical industry.

While that conclusion is correct, it is also misleading and incomplete. Professionals with advanced university or technical training are also prone to vaccine hesitancy or even hostility. Their education is very specialized, but they believe their expertise is so widely useful that they essentially become “experts” in every field they touch.

I should know. I am a pediatrician and disaster medicine specialist who formerly worked as a software engineer in aerospace and consulted on data science projects. My career put me in frequent contact with software engineers. Some were broadly educated and open-minded; others were narrowly educated, narrow-minded and deeply arrogant.

Hardware and software engineers are the heart of most tech companies. They are the key players who produce the profits at Apple, Nvidia, Broadcom, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Butterfly and other companies. Many have enormous egos that accompany their enormous compensation packages; anyone not a software engineer (accountant, office manager, security guard, vice president of diversity and inclusion) who foolishly crosses them in the workplace wins an express ticket to the unemployment line.

In 2021, a campaign began at Google in which hundreds of employees publicly stated their opposition to a company directive to vaccinate for COVID-19, despite the clear intention of this mandate to protect them and their colleagues from a devastating disease. That’s misplaced egotism at work on a dangerous scale.

I have personally seen these egos in the doctor’s office. Good physicians vaccinate their patients. They also answer questions honestly and refer patients and parents to reputable sources, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians or the Infectious Diseases Society of America. If patients or parents ask for more detailed study information about vaccines, we refer them to sources such as PubMed. 

In one conversation, a skeptical software engineer said to me, “Let me see the data. I’ll decide for myself and my children whether or not the vaccine is safe.” The last time I checked, expertise in creating algorithms or a mastery of programming graphics does not prepare anyone to evaluate vaccine study data. 

I’ve had a couple of vaccine-deniers with professional programming experience tell me they could evaluate double-blind study data better than the “corrupt lying” scientists who work for the drug companies or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I asked if they had ever taken an epidemiology course. No. What level of statistical training had they acquired? None. Were they actuaries? No. Did they have any graduate-level training in statistics or even minor in statistics in college? Again: No.

Had they taken biochemistry, chemistry or chemical engineering courses relevant to the production of vaccines or other Food and Drug Administration-approved active pharmaceutical ingredients, or intermediate substances used to manufacture them? No.

Did they have any experience or training in Six Sigma or Total Quality Management principles used in manufacturing? What’s that?

But can they still decide whether vaccines are safe? Absolutely!

I’m not saying every tech engineer has that attitude. Many, thankfully, recognize their own limitations. To be fair, many physicians also suffer from the same delusions. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. I have colleagues in the medical field who are confident they know how best to run schools, why health insurers should agree with every decision they make, why we should keep group homes for disabled children out of their upscale residential neighborhoods, and why physicians should be paid as much as insurance company chief executives. But I’ll leave that for another time.

How do we solve this problem? Let’s not let our egos get in the way of making good decisions. Let’s respect each other’s expertise.

One day a man brought his son to my office for care. The father was a former football player. He had won a walk-on position with an NFL team years before and had played in a couple preseason games before the head coach cut him. When I met him, he coached a middle-school football team. I told him his son needed vaccinations.

He initially resisted my attempts to vaccinate his son, citing what he had read about vaccines on the internet. When I pointed out to him that the websites he had visited trashed vaccines in order to sell him products not evaluated by the FDA, he said, “Look, Dr. Aryel, I know you are superior to me, but …” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He was being humble.

I cut him off. 

“I am not at all superior to you,” I said. “Suppose I wanted to start a football team and appoint myself head coach. I could read books about football and watch YouTube videos on how it’s done. I could look at advertisements and buy fancy gear for my players, and I could organize practices. I would, of course, invite you to watch our first game. 

“We would lose that game by 10 touchdowns and you would laugh at my stupidity and gross incompetence,” I explained. “I’m a doctor, not a football coach. Why would I spend all that effort and time just to embarrass myself and shortchange the kids when it would be so much easier to hire you and trust you to coach the team and take us to a winning season?”

I pointed at him. “You’re a caring and dedicated parent. You’re welcome to borrow the medical textbooks on my shelf, access the databases that I do, and read my medical journals. They are not secrets. I’ll be happy to help you if that’s what you want. And you will learn something. But will it let you do what I do? You are a coach, and there are only 24 hours in a day. Wouldn’t it be better for you to coach your team and hire me to take care of your son, and trust me to vaccinate him?”

I answered every question he had in detail. He let me vaccinate his son. I hope his teams always make the championships.

Ron Aryel is a pediatrician and disaster medicine specialist in Washoe County. He is also the executive director of Every Mind Matters, an organization offering financial assistance to underprivileged youth pursuing higher education.