MILES PARKS, HOST:
Covering vaccines used to be routine, but then came COVID, and now this year...
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PARKS: ...It's become something else entirely.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: It's been quite a ride this year. You know, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - he's never been a big fan of vaccines, and he's moved fast to put his mark on how we use them.
PARKS: Rob Stein is a health correspondent on NPR's Science Desk. He's covered gene editing, stem cells, genetics. But lately, vaccines have taken over his reporting.
STEIN: He's already, you know, kind of upset the apple cart in lots of pretty dramatic ways, and he's made it clear that there's a lot more to come.
PARKS: Even just looking at a list of recent headlines of stories Rob has filed this year makes it clear.
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PARKS: FDA claims there's a link between COVID-19 vaccines and pediatric deaths. The CDC revives debunked link between childhood vaccines and autism. Ancient miasma theory may help explain health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine moves.
STEIN: Secretary Kennedy thinks many of our, you know, established institutions haven't done their jobs protecting the American public and improving their health, especially when it comes to vaccines.
PARKS: And it's not just rhetoric anymore. Rob says the way vaccines are regulated and who gets to shape those decisions is changing in real time.
STEIN: He's installed some like-minded deputies who clearly have no qualms challenging sort of the accepted wisdom that vaccines are generally very safe and highly effective.
PARKS: For Rob, that's meant covering a beat where journalists can no longer fully rely on the same institutions they once did for clear, science-based answers...
STEIN: Those days are kind of gone, at least for now.
PARKS: ...All while facing a flood of misinformation. That is a challenge I, too, am familiar with, covering voting in elections at NPR. In recent years, that's meant spending a lot of time reporting on misinformation - misinformation about voting results, about voting machines, about the integrity of the system itself. And I find myself grappling with the same question over and over again. Is reporting on misinformation adding fuel to the fire? - you know, amplifying some of these false claims. So I asked Rob about that.
STEIN: It is really, really tricky, and it puts journalists like you and I in a really tough spot because there's actually been a fair amount of research showing that repeating, you know, disinformation, misinformation, often reinforces people's belief in that misinformation, even when it's repeated in the context of debunking it. So, you know, as reporters, it definitely puts us in a bind. We can't just ignore what's happening, especially when now it's coming from official federal agencies and - you know, who are creating official government policy.
But the implications, they're real. They have real-life implications. You know, vaccination rates in the U.S. had already been falling, causing, you know, resurgences of some really dangerous diseases that people really hadn't thought about much anymore, like measles and whooping cough. So anything that undermines confidence in vaccines and increases hesitancy, you know, can make - end up people getting really sick and even dying.
PARKS: At a time when the administration is pushing claims that are, you know, scientifically dubious, you might say, where do you or how do you change your approach to reporting specifically on vaccines?
STEIN: Yeah, so what's happened is that there's sort of this - we're in this world of sort of parallel universes. Because of all the concerns about what's - the messaging and the information that has been coming out of the federal government under Secretary Kennedy, you know, a lot of - a bunch of major medical groups, like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Family Physicians - they now - I mean, they always did put out their own recommendations, but now they have become much more the standard that, you know, reporters rely on for trustworthy information, that I think a lot of doctors are now turning to. They're no longer necessarily following the government's recommendations. They're looking to those recommendations for what to do and how to treat their patients.
There's a whole new entity that was created at the University of Minnesota called the Vaccine Integrity Project, where they're basically kind of replicating a lot of the activities. It's sort of like this alternative CDC. They're issuing very highly technical reports, evaluating the latest science and helping guide these alternative recommendation sets that are coming out from these medical organizations. And that's what a lot of journalists are relying on these days.
PARKS: Drawing on my own experience, a lot of the misinformation that I cover kind of focuses on some nugget of truth and then just kind of takes it out of context or puts it in a light that the - to push a broader narrative that might not be true or might be misleading in some way. Does that ever happen in your field as well in terms of you kind of have to think about how to cover a specific story because of the potential for it to be taken out of context?
STEIN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just take, you know, the most prominent issue, you know, this autism in vaccines. You know, Secretary Kennedy has talked a lot about how, you know, autism rates have been increasing, and that is absolutely true. Now, to make the leap that because - the reason autism has been increasing is because of vaccination, that's where we run into problems.
But, you know, you can see how it would make sense to people, that you would say, OK, autism rates have been going up, kids have been getting more vaccinations. The two things have been happening at the same time. Seems obvious that there must be sort - some sort of link. It sort of makes intuitive sense. But just because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean they're linked.
PARKS: Yeah.
STEIN: You know, just because people eat more ice cream in the summer doesn't mean that ice cream causes sunburns.
PARKS: I don't know why my brain just went to, like, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series the year that COVID happened. Does that mean that COVID made it so the Tampa Bay Rays were better at baseball? Or, like, I don't know. There are so many different things in terms of correlation and causation that are just not - we don't think of in that way. But...
STEIN: That's right. Correlation is not causation. Well put.
PARKS: Yeah. I mean, I do want to turn away a little bit from vaccines for a second because you've covered a wide range of advances in science and health. And I was just curious about any stories that you've covered in recent years that, you know, inspired a sense of awe or a hopeful or optimism in you.
STEIN: That's an easy one - gene editing. That's what I was really focused on largely before the pandemic hit, and I've still been following this field now for years, and it's just been an amazing time. And this - we're talking about technology like CRISPR, which is this gene-editing technique which developed that many people think is essentially revolutionizing medicine. I was fortunate enough that I was able to follow the first patient to receive a gene-editing treatment for sickle cell disease through the first clinical trial that demonstrated that it worked, and that was just, you know, an amazing, really awe-inspiring experience. It was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done as a journalist.
And this year, I reported on the case of Baby KJ. It was the baby that was born with this terrible, often fatal genetic disorder, but he was the first baby to be treated with a so-called bespoke gene-editing treatment. It's a gene-editing treatment that was tailored to his unique, specific genetic mutation. And again, it seems like it worked. He seems to have been cured. Then that's opening up the possibility for people think to the possibility that thousands of babies suffering from other, very, very rare genetic disorders could also be helped with gene editing.
PARKS: Wow. I feel like, also, whenever we talk about the concept of gene editing, it does open up to some pretty interesting questions about ethics, right?
STEIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, first of all, you know, this is brand-new stuff, brand-new technology. These are extremely experimental treatments that had never been tried before on any human being. So these people are getting these gene-editing tools infused into their bloodstream. Researchers did a lot of preliminary work, testing to try to make sure that it would be safe and it would be OK to do this. But, you know, until you actually put it into a patient, you never really know what's going to happen. So that raises huge ethical questions all by itself.
But now, it looks like these technologies are working and could really change people's lives in big ways. That's also raising lots of ethical questions. The main ones is like, is it going to be available? Is this revolutionary new medical treatment going to be available to people who need it most? - because they're incredibly complicated and extremely expensive and just not possible to do in parts of the world where these technologies are needed the most.
PARKS: Yeah, I feel like I always talk to my colleagues on the Washington desk about, like, the stories we love covering the most sometimes are the stories that, like, we don't know where it's going to end up or, like, the gray area stories, I feel like, my editor and I call them. I feel like that - your story is kind of fitting into that, where it's like, where is this headed? And, like, those are the most interesting sometimes to follow.
STEIN: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. I actually - those are the stories that I'm drawn to the most, where there's just an intersection between science and ethics and sometimes federal science policy and, you know, social issues and social trends. I find those just endlessly fascinating.
PARKS: That is NPR health correspondent Rob Stein. Thank you so much for spending some time with us, Rob.
STEIN: Oh, it's been fun. Thanks so much, Miles. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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