As the descendant of Latter-day Saint pioneers and Jewish refugees, my relationship with America is rooted in survival. I am a family physician and a student of our history. Because I love this nation — and see how easily we can lose what makes us strong — I am stepping forward. My recent appointment to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Vaccine Science Fellowship has inspired me to speak plain truths that our profession knows to be absolute.
We are currently celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet our leaders recently had to relearn a lethal lesson the hard way. On a U.S. military base earlier this year, officials chose to waive the standard influenza vaccine mandate. The virus, caring nothing for politics, immediately tore through the base, forcing leadership to abruptly reinstate the mandate to restore military readiness.
This mirrors our Revolutionary origins. During the 1775 Canadian campaign, the Continental Congress banned smallpox inoculations, fearing side effects would weaken the front lines. The result was catastrophic: over 3,000 soldiers died without ever facing a British musket. It was only when George Washington mandated mass inoculation for the Continental Army in 1777 that he secured our victory. Washington recognized that an invisible virus was far more dangerous than the sword of the enemy. Today, our modern military base walked directly into that same ancient trap.
Our civilian priorities suffer from a tragic contradiction. As schools reopen, we spend millions on advanced security systems and armed guards to protect children from violence. Yet, we passively allow highly contagious diseases to run rampant through those same classrooms. We are locking the front door against a human threat while leaving the windows open for viral executioners.
We often repeat that “freedom isn’t free.” If we agree that dying in defense of our country is honorable, why do we struggle with the minor inconvenience of an injection? True liberty is not the license to put others in danger.
The choice to vaccinate is an insurance policy for freedom. Our founders understood that to preserve a free society, we must collectively invest in its defense. How free is a person paralyzed by polio, or left with chronic disease by a preventable case of measles?
Right now, the most patriotic thing you can do is to get vaccinated. Foreign adversaries want us divided and weakened by illness; they fill social media with medical lies to achieve this. Behind them stand domestic conmen who sow distrust in science solely to sell unverified snake oil.
Do not let them win. Compare those online grifters with your local physician. We sacrificed years in training to look you in the eye and say: “You can trust me. I am your personal expert, and I care about your family.” Physicians’ children have the highest vaccination rates in the country; we give our own babies the exact same armor we recommend for yours.
Ignoring science is also bad business. A single measles outbreak costs an average of $53,000 per patient in public health containment and lost wages. Even the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptics have been forced to bow to reality. In a recent interview, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted that parents should immediately vaccinate their children against measles to halt the current record-breaking domestic outbreaks.
It is time to let competent, honest scientists back into the driver’s seat at the CDC and FDA.
The Declaration of Independence intentionally lists life before liberty, and liberty before the pursuit of happiness. That order is not an accident of grammar. It is a hierarchy of human reality: to be happy, you must first be free; and to be free, you must stay alive and healthy. As this school year begins, let us choose life. Let us choose one another. Protect your children, protect your neighbors, and protect the republic. Go get vaccinated.