Something sinister and yet vaguely familiar has been happening in American public health policy. This week’s federal court decision reversing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s gutting of Covid-vaccine and childhood-immunization policy, and overturning his firing of the independent scientists who had overseen it, amounted to a judicial rebuke of a campaign that echoes one of the darkest chapters in American history.
RFK Jr. has not merely gutted globally accepted vaccine policy. He has severely damaged some of the world’s leading public-health institutions. The scientists who built and defended modern vaccine policy and devised new treatments for disease are being targeted as a dangerous elite — the public-health equivalent of fellow travelers. His campaign recalls the McCarthy period, when scientists and other professionals were driven from positions of trust not because their work had been discredited, but because they were judged politically suspect.
That disconcerting parallel was heightened in February when I came across an article by two scholars in the New England Journal of Medicine. It told the story of the Chicago cardiovascular epidemiologist, Jeremiah Stamler and his research associate, Yolanda Hall, who in the 1960s stood up to an intimidation campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Many people believe that the abuses of the McCarthy period, a decade earlier, had ended an era of blacklisting and vulgar attacks on the patriotism and loyalty of American citizens. The article starkly showed that this was not the case, and that the story has special resonance today.
It opens with the words, “Today, science and medicine are under ideological attack in the United States, and their practitioners are feeling increasingly vulnerable and devalued, with some losing their funding.” I was immediately drawn in.
Reading the article opened up a dual perspective — of a now distant period in our history, when figures in the scientific community, the arts, and government were targeted and blacklisted as internal enemies and of our present, in which we are witnessing a different, but no less frightening, attack on the achievements of the post-World War Two era, with its remarkable progress in science, medicine, and technology.
Over eight years, beginning in 1965, Stamler and Hall mounted a brilliant riposte to HUAC’s attempt to brand them as anti-American for their involvement in a progressive movement that “included support of national health insurance and the elimination of racial discrimination in medicine.” I was stirred by the ingenuity and courage of Stamler and Hall’s counter-offensive, which allowed them to turn the tables on HUAC by bringing a suit against the committee in federal court. The grueling legal battle culminated in 1973 with the dismissal of HUAC’s case against them.
The parallels to today are both eerie and frightening: once again, scientists, artists, and public servants are targeted and blacklisted, in President Trump’s phrase, “enemies from within.” At stake is more than a discrete set of policies, but a broader faith in expertise, evidence, and the institutions that helped drive America’s extraordinary advances in science, medicine, and technology. I can’t help but think that what is being challenged now is not simply a set of policies, but a wholesale assault on the Enlightenment values of liberalism, equity, and science that have underwritten 80 years of unprecedented progress in our country.
The NEJM article also resonated personally. It brought back powerful memories of my father’s experience of a similar attack on his loyalty to our country. It began in 1947 and lasted a decade, during a time when my father, Elvin A. Kabat, was an assistant professor of microbiology at Columbia University and was already well-known for his work on antibody specificity, blood group substances, and a test to diagnose multiple sclerosis in cerebrospinal fluid.
He had grown up in the 1920s in New York City in very straitened circumstances. After graduating from City College during the Depression, he obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology with Michael Heidelberger, known as the father of quantitative immunochemistry, at Columbia University in 1938, joining the faculty in 1941.
In that year, he and a colleague had written a literature review on biological warfare, and, during the war, he had done work at Fort Detrick to anticipate the use of biological weapons by Germany. When the report was finally published in 1947, it created a minor sensation, including an article in Time magazine, and the FBI was assigned to investigate him and his co-author. This was to have far-reaching consequences for his career.
Beginning in 1947, my father had started working as a part-time consultant on a project at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital. In the postwar period, especially after the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb in 1949, there was increasing anxiety about the Soviet threat as well as a threat posed by left-wing politics. These currents culminated in the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R, WI.), who came to national prominence in 1950, claiming that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Soviet agents. Already by March 21, 1947, the fear of communist subversion was so widespread that President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835 mandating a loyalty oath and investigation regime for all Federal workers.
In the 1940s, my father was brought before the loyalty review board of the Bronx V.A. The government had two witnesses who testified that, during his year in Uppsala, Sweden, as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the laboratory of The Svedberg in 1937, he had voiced pro-Communist sentiments and that he had been a member of several organizations that promoted Soviet-American cooperation in the medical and scientific field. My father made clear in his hearing that during his twenties he had been influenced by enthusiasm for socialism and the Soviet experiment. However, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1939, he quickly became disillusioned with communism.
He appealed to the Presidential Loyalty Review Board and conducted his own defense, and in July 1950, he was cleared and restored to his position. However, political interference in research was becoming stronger, and he decided to resign from the V.A., giving up his work on the histochemical localization of enzymes in tissues.
The FBI had informed the Passport Office at the Department of State of my father’s questionable loyalty. As a result, even though he was cleared by the loyalty review board, it was not until 1955 that his passport was restored, and he was able to attend international conferences and travel abroad. My father only learned in 1981, through the Freedom of Information Act, that the Criminal Investigation Division of the Department of Justice had placed him on its Security Index “list for the apprehension and detention of prominent individuals considered dangerous to the security of the United States.”
Following the loss of his V.A. consultancy in 1953, the U.S. Public Health Service (which at the time oversaw NIH) canceled my father’s grants, which supported his work on an animal model for multiple sclerosis as well as on blood group substances. He was told that the funds could be given to Columbia for his use if another investigator was substituted as the Principal Investigator. My father rejected this offer and boycotted the Public Health Service for a number of years. In addition, he vowed that no one accepting PHS funding could come to work in his lab. The loss of his grants could have destroyed his career. In fact, he had colleagues whose careers were disastrously affected by the cutoff of funding due to allegations of disloyalty.
Fortunately, he had very good relationships with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the National Science Foundation, whose program officers were eager to fund high-caliber research in immunology. In 1952, Congress appropriated $100,000 for research in immunochemistry in the budget of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Soon after, two officers came to Columbia to meet with about a dozen researchers, who presented their ideas. My father tells how, as the meeting was ending, Robert Consolazio of the ONR, whom my father didn’t know, said to him:
“‘You are staying here,’ and then he asked, ‘To whom would you give money on the basis of the suggestions?’ I outlined the programs I thought should be supported. He then said, ‘You have to take some money.’ I responded, ‘I don’t need any money, I’m loaded with money.’ He gave me a yellow pad, saying ‘You are not leaving here until you write out a proposal. You can hold on to the money and you can activate the contract any time within the next five years.’ I wrote out a title, ‘Immunochemical Criteria of Purity of Proteins and Polysaccharides,’ my name, the University’s name and the address, a short abstract, and a budget that provided for a postdoctoral fellow and supplies. … My stock at Columbia rose enormously. I only activated the contract a year later when the Public Health Service cancelled my grants at the height of the McCarthy period. It was like having money in the bank. ONR supported me for 17 years.”
My father was fortunate to have colleagues and institutions that supported his standing as a scientist and a loyal American citizen. At Columbia, the chair of the department of microbiology and immunology; the chairman of the department of neurology; and the dean of the College of Physicians and Surgeons all gave him unwavering support. Michael Heidelberger, with whom my father continued to have a close relationship, was active in the Ethical Culture Society and was an outspoken critic of political interference in the conduct of scientific research. He was also the two-time president of the American Association of Immunologists, which, as early as 1948, had taken a strong stand against loyalty oaths and the blacklisting of scientists, including the physicist Edward U. Condon, Linus Pauling, Elvin Kabat, and John Peters.
My father went on to have a fulfilling life and a productive career. In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, an honor that he regarded as recognition of his treatment during the McCarthy period. It is striking that both Stamler and Hall and Elvin Kabat showed, each in their own way, a remarkable adaptability in rising to the defense of their work and their principles, making use of academic and professional institutions and the law. In their battles against political interference in the exercise of the right of free speech and in the conduct of government-sponsored research, they brought to bear their considerable intellectual powers. Above all, they stood up to defend the First Amendment and the principle that scientific investigation should be free from tests of political loyalty.
As the NEJM article emphasizes, these stories, from what now seems like the distant past, are crucial reminders of how scientists have stood up and actively fought against the impingement of politics on science and managed to continue to advance their fields under the most adverse conditions. What feels so unsettling today is the recognition that ideological litmus tests in science policy are not an artifact of history. They return in a new language, through new institutions, and with new targets.
Geoffrey C. Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist and the author of Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. Find him on his website geoffreykabat.com