The Racist Worldview Behind the New Vaccine Recommendations

There are other scapegoats too. Anti-vaxxers claim hepatitis B, for instance, is a disease of drug users, queer people, and sex workers, even though most people don’t know how they acquire the virus. The message is increasingly clear: In Donald Trump’s and RFK Jr.’s America, illness comes from—and is experienced by—other, lesser people.

Having high-level officials endorse this misinformation endangers people of color, as we saw when anti–Asian American hate crimes rose following rumors about Covid as a Chinese bioweapon or hoax. It endangers everyone else too, if it causes health officials to implement the wrong policies—for example, if they were to institute travel bans rather than a vaccination campaign for a disease already circulating domestically. “Scapegoating basically puts blinders on our ability to actually identify how to solve the problem,” Richard Pan, a pediatrician and senior lecturer in public health at U.C. Davis, told me. “You’re not actually getting to exactly what’s causing the problem—and then how do we solve it?” And this misinformation endangers people another way: Blaming immigrants leads nonimmigrants to believe they’re not at risk, which makes them less likely to protect themselves or to seek out testing when they become sick—harming themselves while infecting others.

Scapegoating outsiders for disease outbreaks goes back centuries. And it’s not just a narrative, but a worldview. “It’s a very long-standing trope, whether it’s immigrants or other groups, that disease comes from outside,” Pan pointed out. “If you see someone who’s sick, you run from them or expel them from your community because they might make other people sick.” Frequently, this comes with moral and religious implications. “Being sick often means that you did something wrong, or you’ve been cursed, or you’ve committed sin, and that’s why God is punishing you,” Pan said. There’s an idea that sick people “did something wrong, or they’re the wrong people, or they’re dirty people, or they ate or did the wrong things; they weren’t healthy.” By extension, in this worldview, health is a barometer of goodness; people who get sick are inherently lesser, weaker, deserving their illness in some way, while people who have the good luck (and financial resources) to stay healthy are simply built different. After all, RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in germ theory; he believes diseases are caused by poor hygiene and sanitation. If you keep yourself clean and pure, the logic goes, you have nothing to worry about.