My Father and Public Science

Support for vaccines runs deep in my family

I may have something useful to add to our conversations about vaccines.  As some of you know, my father, Franklin Church Bing, was a biochemist with a life-long career in the areas of food safety and nutrition.  After an academic career, he worked for the AMA as the founding head of their Council on Foods and Nutrition and afterwards worked as a private citizen and consultant for many years in the borderland between science, government and private industry.   

I grew up in a household strong concerned with medical and nutrition fraud, food and drug science. I was taught the importance of science education and the value of scientific knowledge for the public good. 

The development and application of vaccines to human wellbeing is one of the great stories of human progress, even if, from colonial times in America to the present, fringe groups have opposed their use. We have never, however, seen the issue politicized as it is today. 

The record of course is clear.  Vaccines have played a large part in the advance of modern medicine, ridding or reducing the scourge of childhood and adult disease, limiting untimely death and alleviating suffering.  In my lifetime no discovery in science was more celebrated than an effective vaccine against polio. 

During this period the scientific community and public authorities managed to live with, and work alongside, the ignorance, or perhaps to be kind, misunderstandings of science, in the areas of health and medicine.  Consider the opposition over the years to fluoridation of water, iodination of salt, and vitamin enrichment of bread and milk.

Our society rightly provides Constitutional guarantees of free expression and action. As a result we must accept criticisms, irresponsible and responsible, of applied science. Ignorance and fear can be met with sympathy and kindness. But politically motivated ignorance, fed by media exploiting the public’s appetite for sensationalism, is a threat we must confront. Rejection of science has never been an intrinsic part of one of our two main political parties.  Until now.

Has it indeed come to this?  Need it be so? This is extremism gone too far. It is a bell ringing in the night. And it is an opportunity.

This crisis, this preventable deaths of tens of thousands, offers support for wiser and more responsible leaders of the Republican party to part company with the cult-like following of former President Donald Trump and the “leaders” who are exploiting this voting bloc for their own gain. 

It is not too late.  For many the GOP is still the Grand Old Party—the party of Lincoln, of Teddy Roosevelt of Eisenhower and Vandenberg.  I add Vandenberg to this list as he is perhaps more than the others a “man for these times.”

“The idea that a Senator—Republican or Democrat—would put the greater good of the country ahead of party seems nearly impossible to imagine in our current climate of gridlock and divisiveness. But this hasn’t always been the case. Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884–1951), Republican from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the model of a consensus builder, and the coalitions he spearheaded continue to form the foundation of American foreign and domestic policy today. Edward R. Murrow called him “the central pivot of the entire era….”– Hendrik Meijer, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo25248451.htm

My father also, by the way, was a Republican.