Last week, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. As a conflict-averse, pathological people pleaser, I anxiously accepted an invitation to be an opening speaker at a debate. Not just any debate— one about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s leadership of our nation's health agencies, hosted by Braver Angels, an incredible organization leading the nation's largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.
At 8 PM, around the time I'm typically peeling contact lenses off my eyeballs and slipping into my fuzzy robe, I logged into Zoom with sweaty palms and a racing heart, not knowing what to expect. The event brought together people from across the country, from all walks of life, to debate the resolution: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will advance the health of the American people." I was responding in the negative.
Each speaker had four minutes to present their case. Then the floor opened for participants to ask one-minute questions of curiosity and offer one-minute rebuttals. I was the fourth speaker, and usually, anxiety would take the wheel, making it difficult to focus on what others were saying while I nervously practiced my speech in my head. But this was different. The speakers had my full attention.
And to be honest, it wasn't easy to hear all that was being said. But I listened. And here's what I heard that stood out...
What Americans Are Feeling
First, Americans are desperate for change. Over and over again, speakers cited obesity rates, chronic disease statistics, and a general sense that our health system is failing. The overall message was clear: something is broken and needs fixing. Many who spoke in favor of Kennedy admitted they aren't sure if he's doing good things—only that he's doing something different, and that stands out to them. One speaker, a “holistic physician”, praised him for "finally addressing the root causes of chronic illness" and "asking difficult questions that challenge the status quo." This framing is seductive because it positions Kennedy's approach as more comprehensive and courageous than conventional medicine, even when his actual policies ignore the real root causes, like poverty and access to care.
This desperation for change is real and valid. When people feel abandoned by traditional institutions, they'll embrace anyone promising transformation, even if that transformation is destructive. Kennedy's appeal isn't primarily about his specific policies; it's about being the alternative to a system many Americans believe has failed them.
It reminds me of when I broke up with my first boyfriend. Heartbroken and hopeless, I gave myself bangs (mysteriously, there's a dearth of photos of me sporting this look). In the moment, it felt revolutionary; a dramatic declaration of independence. But when I woke up the next morning, the fleeting hit of dopamine had passed, and I was left with a bad haircut that would take months to grow out. When people feel hurt or abandoned, we make choices that feel transformative but may leave us worse off.
Second, the pandemic had a profound impact on trust in scientific institutions. And it's more than just the COVID-19 vaccines, which do seem to elicit a special type of vitriol (many people said they aren't "anti-vax" except when it comes to this specific vaccine, citing a "lack of data" and "untested technology." Trust me, it was difficult to bite my tongue). It was more about how Americans felt they were treated during the pandemic— the restrictions, mandates, and policies that affected their daily lives.
Public health officials faced an impossible situation: making urgent policy decisions with incomplete information while under intense scrutiny. But some decisions, and the ways those decisions were communicated, had lasting consequences (as I’ve written about previously). The phrase "follow the science," as Aaron Carroll recently argued in The Washington Post, backfired because it presented evolving scientific understanding as rigid certainty and inadvertently dismissed legitimate policy questions as anti-science heresy.
When officials declared specific guidelines like six feet of social distancing without fully acknowledging the uncertainty behind such recommendations, it created vulnerability when people discovered the evidence was limited. The challenge wasn't the policies themselves; it was communicating the inherent uncertainty of making decisions during a novel pandemic while maintaining public confidence. We forgot that science explains facts while policy involves balancing trade-offs, and when reality proved messier than our messaging suggested, healthy skepticism transformed into angry defiance.
And people are very angry.
Third, there's a staggering amount of misinformation circulating, and credentialed sources make it exponentially worse. Fighting misinformation feels like trying to put out a house fire with a squirt gun; when people with MDs and PhDs spread falsehoods, it's like someone poured gasoline on the fire. It was particularly painful hearing vaccine pseudoscience and defenses of Andrew Wakefield from physicians who celebrate Kennedy as a brave whistleblower speaking truth to power.
I'm not entirely sure why this happens, but it's important to remember that MDs and PhDs are humans, too, susceptible to the same biases as anyone else. This is precisely why scientific consensus matters; it's not about trusting individual experts, but about the overwhelming weight and totality of evidence.
This presents an almost impossible challenge: How do we address dangerous misinformation without appearing to silence legitimate scientific debate? How do we explain that having an MD doesn't make someone an expert in epidemiology, immunology, or public health policy? When a cardiologist spreads vaccine misinformation, people don't see "doctor speaking outside their expertise"— they see "doctor risking their career to tell the truth."
Kennedy makes this problem exponentially worse by actively vilifying healthcare providers. His recent tweet claiming that "doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical giants profit by keeping Americans sick" exemplifies this destructive pattern. A few weeks back, a Senate hearing focused on "voices of the vaccine injured," painted pediatricians as profit-driven conspirators pushing harmful products on children. This isn't just wrong, it's the systematic dismantling of some of our last remaining trusted messengers. It's one of the thorniest problems in science communication, and I honestly don't have a good solution.
Finding the Real Story
Originally, I planned to focus my speech on vaccine policy, the obvious target given Kennedy's history. But the morning of the debate, I scrapped everything and rewrote from scratch in a caffeine-fueled frenzy. I realized that if I dove straight into vaccines, I'd lose half the audience before I even started. Some people joining that call genuinely believed vaccines were harmful based on information they'd encountered, and no amount of data was going to change that in four minutes.
More importantly, I realized vaccines were just the symptom, not the disease. Kennedy's real threat isn't any single policy position; it's his systematic approach to governing: tear down expertise, offer simple solutions to complex problems, and promise dramatic change while delivering theatrical performance.
So instead of defending specific immunization schedules or arguing about autism studies, I focused on Kennedy's pattern across all areas of health policy. While he declares war on food dyes and pressures companies to switch from corn syrup to cane sugar, cosmetic changes that research shows will have zero impact on health outcomes, he systematically ignores what decades of evidence tell us drives health: poverty, housing quality, access to healthcare, food security, social connection, and environmental factors.
This wasn't just a strategic choice; it felt more honest. Rather than asking people to trust me about vaccines, I could point to something everyone could see: Kennedy is offering band-aids for bullet wounds while dismantling the emergency room. He's giving us the political equivalent of post-breakup bangs—dramatic, satisfying in the moment, and ultimately destructive.
The Power of Respectful Discourse
What surprised me most was discovering that people can have respectful discourse even on deeply polarizing topics. The Braver Angels moderators deserve immense credit for creating space where everyone could speak without interruption or immediate rebuttal. We desperately need more of this. While some speeches focused on specific statistics and facts (some incorrect), the majority conveyed emotional responses, and those emotions were treated as valid parts of the conversation.
I know I'll get pushback for this— for appearing to create false equivalence between science and pseudoscience, for giving conspiracy theorists too much credit, for validating feelings over evidence. But we need to start realizing that shouting statistics, no matter how clear a story they paint in our eyes, will not get us on the same page. Validating emotion doesn’t mean endorsing misinformation.
I didn't cite a single statistic in my speech—tough for a data person like me. When I finished speaking and looked up at the screen, I saw the speaker who had spoken before me, a man with an American flag behind his head and the words "We the People" scrawled across it. He didn't say anything, but his expression was so heartening. He tilted his head and furrowed his brow in a pensive way that indicated I'd gotten through to him somehow. I wasn't speaking in stats— I was speaking his language. He heard me.
That moment reinforced something crucial: facts alone will not change minds. We have to listen first, lead with empathy, and meet people where they are. The most effective part of my speech wasn't the litany of Kennedy's failures— it was acknowledging that Americans' frustration with our health system is completely valid.
What This Means for Moving Forward
This experience taught me that our communication strategies in public health need fundamental restructuring. We can't keep approaching skeptics as if they're stupid or evil. We need to start with radical empathy, understanding why people are attracted to figures like Kennedy in the first place.
People don't support Kennedy primarily because they've analyzed his policy positions. They support him because he validates their frustration with institutions that seem disconnected from their lived experiences. He offers simple explanations for complex problems and promises dramatic action when they feel nothing else has worked.
Our response can't be to simply defend those same institutions or dismiss people's concerns. We need to acknowledge the legitimate failures that created space for Kennedy's rise while clearly explaining why his solutions will make things worse, not better.
The challenge is rebuilding trust while holding the line on evidence-based policy. That means being honest about our mistakes, getting comfortable with uncertainty and complexity, and being humble about the limits of what science alone can tell us. Instead of presenting scientific evidence as rigid rules, we should explain it as our best current understanding while acknowledging gaps and disagreements. It means separating our role as scientists from our role as advocates, and being clear about when we're speaking from evidence versus values. When we pretend science offers simple answers to complex policy questions, we set ourselves up for backlash when reality proves messier.
Most importantly, it means remembering that the people most vulnerable to conspiracy theories and false solutions aren't our enemies— they're our neighbors, and they deserve better than what figures like Kennedy are offering them.
I signed off around 9:30 PM, before the debate officially ended. My daughter came out of her room, confused why I hadn’t read her favorite book for the 1000th time, and my adrenaline was wearing off. But I stayed awake thinking about those conversations long after closing my laptop. Maybe that's what real democracy looks like: not the performance of certainty, but the hard work of listening, learning, and trying to find truth together across our deepest disagreements, one uncomfortable conversation at a time…
Stay Curious,
Unbiased Science
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Great stuff. Your approach should be widely shared because it appears to have some success against the most dangerous man in the world RFK Jr. Many are working to push back on the MAHA dangerous nonsense, but I have found it nearly impossible to debate anti-vaxers. Your approach should be widely shared because it appears to have some success against the most dangerous man in the world RFK Jr.
As a writer, I would be delighted to work with you to develop rhetoric that can help disabuse people of these dangerous notions before it’s too late for them to have to learn the hard way.
My personal view is not the most dangerous part of his deceit is anti-VAX and I would be willing to accept a compromise whereby he confines chimself to the “F” in FDA, because how much harm can it really do to replace corn syrup with cane sugar, for example, whereas the anti-VAX movement to me is an existential global crisis.
Dr. Steir, this is well written and thought provoking. Have you read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt? He shares the science behind much of what you said about why people act and think the way they do. I am a nurse who is working on my masters in nursing education, and I am increasingly passionate about making a difference in policy and politics. Nurses are the biggest part of the health profession and I don't hear our voices much. I want to change that. Thank you for this, I plan on referring back to it when I need a reminder of how to approach scientific debate.