When Roger Marshall echoes RFK Jr’s vaccine nonsense, there are consequences | Opinion

Roger Marshall doesn’t want you to forget he’s a physician. His weekly constituent newsletter is called “A Doctor’s Note.” His official name on Facebook is “Senator Roger Marshall, M.D.” He even went to the mat (and lost) in a fight to appear on Election Day ballots as “Doc” Marshall, after three top state officials ruled (rightly) that the title would give him an unfair advantage over other candidates.

Since he so regularly cites his clinical credentials as an appeal to authority, we have to ask: What does Kansas’ junior senator have against science? Thursday morning, as the Senate Finance Committee grilled U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a notorious vaccine skeptic — Marshall voiced some of his own medical suspicions.

“Hepatitis B vaccine, it makes no sense to me,” he said. “We do a hepatitis test on every mom. … And if she doesn’t have any risk factors, if she’s not an IV drug abuser, if she’s in a stable monogamous relationship, nobody at home has hepatitis, I don’t know. I don’t see the benefit myself in that hepatitis vaccine. … And my pediatricians always agree with me.”

We aren’t doctors, and we don’t know Marshall’s always-agreeable pediatricians, but we do know this: Rules are written in blood. Vaccine guidelines are not created out of thin air by some bureaucrat. They are shaped and codified over time, after people get hurt in preventable ways. We vaccinate babies to keep them from catching life-threatening illnesses needlessly.

Like many other viruses, hepatitis B is contagious and contracted through contact with bodily fluids. It is incurable and can cause liver disease, including cancer. Newborns are inoculated against it because decades of experience show the vaccine is safe and saves lives. It protects all of us as we grow older.

This is far from the doc’s first foray outside commonly accepted scientific fact. When the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, he took hydroxychloroquine, and commended Donald Trump for doing the same. That anti-malarial drug, along with horse wormer ivermectin, lit up the internet and talk radio in 2020 as supposed preventatives and cures for the coronavirus — despite zero evidence they are effective for that. He’s against widespread monkeypox vaccination. The senator also denies that climate change is an existential threat, while his home state suffers from what he correctly acknowledges as “historic drought.”

CDC, Florida relax vaccine rules

Sadly, in this post-truth era, a lot of Marshall’s fellow Americans don’t need science or facts anymore. Their own common sense and intuition are worth as much as uncountable peer-reviewed studies. As Trump famously told a Kansas City audience in 2018, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

And rejection of vaccines is rapidly becoming a Republican Party plank. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo this week ended vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, with the hearty endorsement of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Food and Drug Administration under RFK Jr.’s thumb has ratcheted back availability of this year’s COVID-19 vaccines to just those at risk or over age 65. His Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have already rescinded guidelines recommending that all healthy children and pregnant women be vaccinated. As our colleagues on The Miami Herald Editorial Board put it, this “risks setting us back to a time when people, in particular children, died of preventable diseases.”

We get it: Many voters went for Trump because he’s the ultimate outsider who makes major decisions on instinct. Marshall likes Kennedy because he’s a “disruptor.” The Grand Old Party is on track to lose the “Old” part because there are so few wise, anti-dictatorship, fiscally responsible adults left in the room these days. Throwing elbows and turning tables over can be a lot of fun, and obviously politically successful. However, learning from the specialists and heeding experience still matter. We can’t help but note that former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who survived childhood polio, was the lone Republican to vote against Kennedy’s confirmation.

Kennedy is serious about his war on facts. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he recently told far-right pundit Tucker Carlson. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy. It’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism.” Kennedy has it exactly backward. There are no pleas for faith or loyalty in scientific documents. We learn by technicians testing one another’s conclusions, and building a body of objective, reproducible truth. And when leaders at the highest levels of government peddle such fundamental misinformation, many Americans listen and follow suit. It’s hard to overstate the danger.

This is not the place for grabbing attention with antiestablishment theatrics. We are dealing with people’s very lives. Vaccines are among civilization’s greatest achievements, full stop — on par with public sanitation and the cultivation of crops. They prevent early death and save billions of dollars in medical costs. And despite what the internet or our U.S. health secretary might tell us, they work — with risks infinitesimally lower than the those of getting sick.

So if Sen. Marshall and his pediatricians disagree with hard-won, agreed-upon scientific facts, that’s between them and their patients. As for us, we’d like to take advantage of the spoils mankind has won in the battle to stay alive. Keep the political gamesmanship and internet conspiracy theories out of public health policy.

This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 4:41 PM.