There is a stark difference between holding a private irrational belief and possessing the power to make others act on that belief, even when they know how unmoored it is from reality.
I recently had the opportunity to see Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in Central Park and that is the crisis that sets the story in motion. King Leontes, infected with a fixed, wrong idea, goes about implementing it with the instruments of state he commands, including many of the officials subordinate to him — who, critically, know how wrong the ideas that they are implementing are yet still, in the end, carry out their orders fully cognizant of the consequences of their evil action.
Three Roles at Court
While watching the play, I was — not surprisingly — drawing parallels to the current chaos engulfing vaccine policy in which RFK Jr.’s fixed irrational ideas —some of which he shares with the president — are trickling through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) he was appointed and Senate-confirmed to lead. One of those who reported to him heroically refused his nihilistic actions (Dr. Susan Monarez) just as Camillo refused King Leontes. Others, on the other hand, implement them fully knowing the consequences (Antigonus) while one heroic individual reminds the king of his evil (Paulina) akin to those who rightly quit the CDC in solidarity with Dr. Monarez and speak of how RFK Jr.’s ideas are inimical to any rational goal (Demetre Daskalakis, Debra Houry, and Dan Jernigan).
Silence is a Role
Camillo refuses. Paulina confronts. Antigonus objects but ultimately obeys. That is the question before Erica Schwartz, the newly confirmed CDC director. What role will she play? Her public silence in the wake of the vaccine executive order, which codified RFK Jr.’s disinformation into policy, is telling. That she has also refrained from publicly commenting on the spectacle surrounding its announcement, where RFK Jr. flanked the president as he invoked feeling, falsely compared the volume of vaccines children receive to a soda bottle’s volume, and brazenly asserted ‘lethal’ effects of the MMR vaccine in defiance of even the semblance of a need to supply evidence — tells me she will not, unlike her predecessor, be the heroine of this tale.