Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to halt its “Wild to Mild” campaign promoting the flu vaccine. Kennedy wants future vaccine communications to focus on “informed consent,” by which he means giving people information about the adverse events associated with vaccines. That’s a distorted view, one that demonstrates broader confusion about informed consent and the goals of public health. True informed consent requires an understanding of how people process information about risks, and public health must promote collective benefits rather than focus entirely on individual autonomy.
Promoting greater “informed consent” sounds uncontroversial. … But mere information — especially about frightening possibilities — tends not to make us better informed. … [G]iving people an uncontextualized list of possible vaccine side effects is not the kind of “informed consent” worth promoting. It is more like handing someone a list of everything that could go wrong on an airplane without mentioning that flying is far safer than driving.
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