Pandemic Center

At first glance, newly released data on immunization rates among children in Massachusetts seem to validate the efforts by state officials to lead a national resistance to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s antivax ideology.

And indeed, overall vaccination rates this school year held firm, according to the Department of Public Health, itself an accomplishment at a time when the federal government is aggressively trying to reverse decades of time-tested immunization policy.

---

Today, we’re joined by sociologist Vivek Chibber, the provocative scholar and social critic who has a pointed critique of the modern day Left. The host of the Confronting Capitalism podcast joins us and argues that their management of institutions—including academia, media, the Democratic Party, and even public health—is completely out of touch with the lives and struggles of working and middle-class Americans. We discuss how this disconnect is fueling the widespread distrust of experts and institutions today, as well as Chibber's critique of the MAHA movement and its alliance with MAGA.

We also speak with public health professor and emergency physician Craig Spencer to explore how these critiques play out in the health space —on public health, cuts to scientific research, and the shrinking safety nets under the Trump administration. Finally, we discuss what, if anything, can be done to rebuild trust within communities that feel left behind, keying off of polling showing dramatic bipartisan support of the idea that good healthcare is a human right.

Dr. Brian Chow, an infectious disease specialist, is among the most qualified people in the country to speak about the importance of hepatitis B vaccinations.

He received advanced training at Brown University and was an attending physician at Tufts Medical Center. While there, he witnessed a young patient die of liver cancer that stemmed from a hepatitis B infection, a death that could have been prevented had the man received a common vaccine for the disease as a baby.

As I stepped into line to pick up my badge for the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) conference last weekend in Austin, Texas, a gregarious man approached holding two tall plastic tubes he said contained “clots” from Covid vaccinated bodies. After 36 years in the Air Force, he told me, he’d been pushed out for refusing the shot. Now in retirement, he calls funeral homes and surveys undertakers to document alleged vaccine harms.

It’s Election Day in parts of the country, so we thought it was time to talk politics.

Dr. Craig Spencer, from Brown University’s School of Public Health, penned a Substack last week that stopped us cold. In it, he makes a bold case that public health needs to get more political—not partisan, but political in the sense of organizing, mobilizing, and demanding what people say they value: cleaner air, safer food, prevention that actually gets funded.


It’s a striking call at a moment of profound change — what some call a reimagining, others a dismantling — of public health itself. But if you look at the polling across Republicans, Democrats, and the MAHA “curious,” there’s surprising common ground right in public health’s wheelhouse.

It’s time, Spencer argues, for public health to step into the political arena to fight for change or watch the system unravel.