--- title: The USSR’s Cautionary Tale of Letting Politics Rewrite Science description: To understand our future under RFK Jr.’s policies, look to the past, writes Dr. Morgan Goheen. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/rfk-jr-vaccines-ussr-science/ author: Morgan Goheen article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-03-19T18:53:17.548Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-19T18:53:18.109Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The USSR’s Cautionary Tale of Letting Politics Rewrite Science og:description: To understand our future under RFK Jr.’s policies, look to the past, writes Dr. Morgan Goheen. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/rfk-jr-vaccines-ussr-science/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6da1f82a42e58fb4/69bc42b357de7c743f17f87b/rfk-jr-vaccine-policies.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: rfk-jr-vaccine-policies.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The USSR’s Cautionary Tale of Letting Politics Rewrite Science twitter:description: To understand our future under RFK Jr.’s policies, look to the past, writes Dr. Morgan Goheen. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6da1f82a42e58fb4/69bc42b357de7c743f17f87b/rfk-jr-vaccine-policies.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  IDEAS Time ideas # The USSR’s Cautionary Tale of Letting Politics Rewrite Science > Sponsored content. 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Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. by [Morgan Goheen](https://time.com/author/morgan-goheen/) ## Morgan Goheen Dr. Morgan Goheen is a research scientist and board certified Infectious Diseases physician at Yale School of Medicine. Mar 19, 2026 6:53 PM UTC  U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Sept. 4, 2025. U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Sept. 4, 2025. Kayla Bartkowski—Bloomberg via Getty Images by [Morgan Goheen](https://time.com/author/morgan-goheen/) ## Morgan Goheen Dr. Morgan Goheen is a research scientist and board certified Infectious Diseases physician at Yale School of Medicine. Mar 19, 2026 6:53 PM UTC Imagine a global superpower led by someone who rose to power on a wave of populism and a cult of personality, someone who demands undying loyalty, punishes enemies, disregards institutions, and constantly spreads disinformation. Another individual with strongly held, highly counter-factual beliefs wins the ear of said strongman and is appointed to a high-level scientific policy position. The dear leader likes his pedigree, critique of academia, conviction, and muscle. Despite vast evidence in support of advances that benefit humankind and lengthen lives, the powers that be double down on their pseudoscience. Scientific debate is hijacked to serve political and ideological gains, and the beliefs of the so-called “scientific leader” are made law of the land. Experts who call out the expected human cost of these new state policies are denounced as adversarial “bourgeois” scientists, targeted, threatened, and silenced. Fast forward a few decades. Not surprisingly, mother nature’s molecular rulebook prevails against those who wanted to create their own scientific truths. Millions of deaths are linked to the pseudoscientist’s falsehoods, while the rest of the world moves on and benefits from consensus-based, research-driven advances in biology. (Also, the state collapses, becomes an international pariah, and takes years to rebuild … but that is another allegory for another day.) Those who study history might recognize the tale of [Trofim Lysenko](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/), an agriculturalist and high-ranking science administrator in Stalin’s USSR. While other countries around the world employed [Mendelian genetics](https://time.com/archive/6697860/science-1971-the-promise-of-new-genetics/) to increase agricultural yields, Lysenko touted a debunked dogma based on theories of inheritance of acquired traits. His views, which became Soviet policy, are now believed to have significantly contributed to widespread crop failures and famines. But if your mind jumped to RFK Jr.’s [anti-vaccine](https://time.com/article/2026/03/17/america-vaccine-policy-is-a-national-security-risk/) [agenda](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/us/politics/rfk-vaccines-hhs-trump.html) and President Donald Trump’s [anti-science](https://time.com/7382995/science-scientific-method-us/) policies in the U.S., well, that was the point. The parallels are obvious and frightening. We are setting ourselves up for a tragic repeat of what can go wrong when science is politicized. History can help us avoid past mistakes. It should also remind us what we’re up against. For millennia, infectious diseases wreaked havoc on humanity. Until the last century, they were the [leading causes of death](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm) in the U.S. Today, when we mostly die of [chronic diseases](https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html), it’s all too easy to forget that vaccines are the single [greatest contribution to infant survival](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2824%2900850-X/fulltext) in the past 50 years, saving an estimated 154 million lives globally. The U.S. is not immune to these benefits: from 1993 to 2023, routine [childhood vaccines averted](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7331a2.htm) an estimated 508 million illnesses, 32 million hospitalizations, and over 1 million deaths, saving $540 billion in direct costs and $2.7 trillion in societal costs in the U.S. alone. Yet since becoming [secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services](https://time.com/collections/time100-health-2026/7362481/robert-f-kennedy-jr-health/) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has [dismantled](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/health/rfk-jr-cdc-vaccine-panel.html) the respected panel of experts that set CDC vaccine guidelines, politicized the committee with unprecedented [hand-picked appointees](https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/15/nx-s1-5542390/cdc-vaccine-advisers-committee), and attempted to [change CDC recommendations](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/health/children-vaccines-cdc-kennedy.html) for routine childhood vaccines, scaling back the number of targeted diseases [from 17 to 11](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/well/childhood-vaccine-schedule-cdc-changes.html). His new vaccine advisory panel chair recently spoke about wanting to [make vaccines optional](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/health/milhoan-vaccines-optional-polio.html) for students, emphasizing personal preference over proven risks. This ignores the demonstrated societal benefits of [herd immunity](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22599-herd-immunity), particularly for vaccine-ineligible infants and the immunocompromised. Science is not about abrupt change. It’s built on years of incremental learning, judgement, and consensus from platforms where data is laid bare and widely scrutinized. Like other vaccines before them, COVID mRNA vaccines [did not come out of nowhere](https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/decades-making-mrna-covid-19-vaccines). They were decades in the making. Nor is science about an individual, particularly not one who seeks a following. Vaccine uptake was already changing drastically in the U.S. In the past 15 years, non-medical exemptions for routine childhood vaccines [increased five-fold](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2843870), accelerated significantly in the [most recent years](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-vaccines/rising-us-nonmedical-childhood-vaccination-exemption-rates-may-portend-disease). Modeling predicts that current shifts in U.S. vaccination rates could cause measles to become [endemic within 20 years](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2833361). But vaccine hesitancy isn’t just a problem for diseases of the past. It’s estimated that [at least 232,000 COVID deaths](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123459/) occurred simply because so many Americans failed to get the vaccine. Sadly, the [political divide](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta) is stark. Those living in 2020 Trump-voting counties were nearly [three times more likely to die](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate) of COVID than those who voted for Biden. But data, whether predictive or materialized, don’t always change minds. Too often, people literally chose political loyalty over their lives. Our understanding of microbial pathogenesis and immune system basics have allowed us to advance in unparalleled ways as a species. Yet our country is seemingly willing to throw that all away for egotists with agendas and a political platform. Politics has infiltrated the process by which new vaccines are [reviewed at the Food and Drug Administration](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/health/fda-moderna-flu-vaccine-mrna.html), scaring off the [vaccine development industry](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/health/rfk-vaccine-manufacturers.html). And this all comes just when human population expansion, climate change, and global movement makes us ripe for another new pathogen to wreak pandemic-level havoc. Did we all just sleepwalk through COVID? Of course, humans don’t always get science right at any given time—think of [bloodletting](https://www.britannica.com/science/bloodletting), [eugenics](https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism), or, more recently, advice on [avoiding peanut allergies](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/well/peanut-allergy-drop.html). Some would argue vaccines should be added to that list. People are right to demand rigorous data and to inform themselves about infectious disease epidemiology, vaccine mechanisms, and risk-benefit analyses. But cherry-picking anecdotes and flawed, [invalidated studies](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/health/research/03lancet.html) with the goal of fueling a movement is different from relying on a consistent body of evidence that adheres to core scientific principles. (Incidentally, global consensus continues to [refute any vaccine links to autism](https://www.who.int/news/item/11-12-2025-who-expert-group-s-new-analysis-reaffirms-there-is-no-link-between-vaccines-and-autism).) We may be starting to see some pushback. Just this week, a [federal judge temporarily paused](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/health/childhood-vaccines-lawsuit-kennedy.html) RFK Jr.’s radical changes to the childhood vaccine schedule and questioned the legitimacy of the new hand-picked committee that endorsed the changes. Among other reasons, he criticized the move for disregarding scientific methods and evidence and the panel for lacking adequate expertise. The judge may have understood that history repeats itself—or at least, rhymes. Someday, our grandchildren will read about how a political superpower with the world’s best academic institutions and most advanced biomedical research pipeline turned its back on scientific principles to follow those who wished to mold science for their own gain. They will learn why letting individuals motivated by politics undo an immense body of modern science ended badly for the entire public. The Trump administration has said it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling. The future of vaccines in the U.S. remains uncertain. If anti-science developments continue on their current trajectory, I fear our choices will seem obvious, tragic, and delusional to future generations who live to tell the tale. [TIME Ideas](https://www.time.com/ideas) hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. 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