A few days ago, I saw a fake book cover online that was so ridiculous I laughed out loud. It was beautifully designed: deep red. Ornate gold lettering. The kind of cover that looks as though it belongs in a medieval monastery, chained to a wooden desk while a monk copies its contents by candlelight.

The title? How to Avoid Vaccines & Die Like a Medieval Peasant. The author? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I laughed. Then I laughed again. Because sometimes satire does what a thousand policy papers cannot. It takes a complicated cultural moment and reduces it to one absurd image.

Of course, Kennedy did not write this book. The cover is satire. He is, however, the current U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, and vaccine policy under his leadership has undergone significant changes. In June 2025, HHS removed all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Two months later, HHS announced that BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) would wind down 22 mRNA vaccine-development investments. HHS described these changes as efforts to improve scientific rigor, transparency, safety, and public trust.

Kennedy has also stated during a measles outbreak that the MMR vaccine is crucial to preventing a potentially deadly disease. That matters too. If we are going to talk about science, we should be honest enough to acknowledge facts that complicate our argument.

But that ridiculous book cover stayed with me because the joke points to something much bigger than one politician. We are living through one of the strangest periods in modern history.

Humanity has accumulated more scientific knowledge than any civilization before us. We have conquered diseases that once terrified entire populations. We can replace organs, sequence genomes, perform complex surgery, land spacecraft, communicate across continents instantly, and build artificial intelligence capable of processing information at an extraordinary scale. And yet we increasingly distrust the very systems of knowledge that made these things possible.

Questioning science is not anti-science. Questioning science is science. Evidence should be challenged. Researchers should be questioned. Conflicts of interest should be exposed. Institutions should be held accountable.

What concerns me is something else: our growing willingness to deny, distort, defund, or discard inconvenient evidence when it conflicts with our politics, ideology, financial interests, or preferred version of reality.

Vaccines are suspicious. Climate science is debatable. Experts are elitists. Physicians are pharmaceutical shills. Meanwhile, the person selling a detox tincture, a parasite cleanse, a hormone reset, and a monthly wellness subscription somehow becomes the trusted authority.

Welcome, everyone. Grab your cloak. Tether the horse outside. We are going back.

Welcome to the year 1326

Imagine waking up tomorrow in medieval Europe. There is no family physician. No emergency department. No pediatric intensive care unit. No antibiotics. No CT scanner. No MRI. No ventilator. No blood bank.

Nobody is ordering a CBC and chest X-ray before lunch. Your medical team might consist of a barber, a priest, your grandmother, and a gentleman who is extremely confident that your fever represents an imbalance of bodily humors.

Fortunately, the treatment options are simple. You can be bled. You can be purged. You can pray. Sometimes all three.

If you survive, excellent. If you do not, there is no quality-improvement meeting afterward to discuss what went wrong. Infectious disease, meanwhile, is having an extraordinary century.

Childhood, now available in survival mode

One of the greatest luxuries of modern life is that we have begun to think of children surviving childhood as the natural order of things. Historically, it was not. Parents buried babies. Children died from infections. Women died during childbirth. Communities were devastated by diseases that moved from household to household with terrifying speed.

Measles. Polio. Diphtheria. Pertussis. Tetanus. Smallpox. Today, some of those names sound almost quaint. That is not because human biology changed. Medicine did.

Vaccines transformed childhood. Antibiotics transformed infection. Modern obstetrics transformed childbirth. Intensive care transformed how we understand what happens when the human body begins to fail.

And that creates one of the strangest paradoxes in public health. When prevention works extraordinarily well, people eventually forget what was being prevented. The success becomes invisible. Then the prevention itself starts looking unnecessary.

Canada has already volunteered for the historical reenactment

We do not have to speculate about what happens when vaccination coverage falls enough for highly contagious diseases to find susceptible populations. Canada has given us a demonstration. Canada achieved measles elimination in 1998. From 1998 through 2024, the country averaged about 91 reported measles cases annually.

Then came 2025. More than 5,000 cases were reported, and after sustained transmission of the same measles virus strain for more than a year, Canada lost its measles elimination status. Federal public-health officials reported that transmission occurred largely among unvaccinated and undervaccinated communities.

We accomplished something. We maintained it for more than a quarter century. Then we lost it.

That matters because we often talk about scientific and public-health progress as though it were permanent. It is not. Progress requires maintenance. Population immunity requires participation. Public health requires investment. Trust requires institutions that deserve it. None of these things maintains itself.

Congratulations. You have never seen polio.

Most people in Canada today have never watched a previously healthy child become paralyzed by poliomyelitis. Wonderful. Unfortunately, that is terrible marketing for the polio vaccine. Eventually, someone asks, “Do we really need this anymore?”

Yes. Polio did not become embarrassed about what it had done and quietly retired. Vaccination changed its epidemiology. When the Global Polio Eradication Initiative began in 1988, wild poliovirus was causing an estimated 350,000 cases annually across more than 125 endemic countries. Wild polio cases have since fallen by more than 99 percent.

Vaccination happened. Surveillance happened. Public health happened. Science happened. No detoxification protocol was involved.

Smallpox would also like another opportunity

While we are restoring historical authenticity, perhaps smallpox deserves another chance. For thousands of years, smallpox killed and disfigured human beings. Then humanity did something extraordinary. We eradicated it. Not managed. Not reduced. Eradicated.

The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980 following an international vaccination effort that remains one of the great achievements in public health. Think about what that means. Human beings took a disease that had terrorized our species for millennia and said, essentially, no more. And within a few generations, some of us became suspicious of the very idea of vaccination. Our ancestors would probably find that difficult to understand.

Don’t worry. We have influencers now.

Of course, this distrust is not limited to vaccines. We are also having a fascinating cultural conversation about education.

Universities? Who needs them? Degrees? Overrated. Professional training? Gatekeeping. Expertise? Elitism. Apparently, everyone can simply educate themselves online. Excellent.

Why spend years studying anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, microbiology, immunology, epidemiology, and statistics when someone with a ring light can explain the immune system in 47 seconds? And she has a discount code. Checkmate, doctors.

We have somehow reached a cultural moment where spending 10 or 15 years becoming an expert on something can make you less credible to certain audiences than someone who discovered the subject last Thursday. The physician says, “The available evidence suggests.” Boring.

The influencer leans toward the camera. “THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS.” Now we are talking. Cue ominous music. Add captions. Put the link in the bio. And do not forget the checkout button.

We didn’t eliminate the village potion salesman

We gave him Wi-Fi. The horse-drawn wagon became Instagram. The mysterious tonic became a detox. The elixir became a proprietary supplement blend.

Now we have powders, drops, cleanses, tinctures, hormone resets, parasite protocols, courses, subscriptions, membership communities, and $497 masterclasses explaining the information your physician is supposedly hiding from you. And somehow, the person selling these products is considered free from financial motivation.

Apparently, only pharmaceutical companies make money. The person selling an $89 bottle of powdered shrubbery through an affiliate link is merely pursuing truth. Very different. Please do not ask questions.

Meanwhile, physicians are obviously all in on it

Yes, apparently, we have all been bought. Every one of us. Somewhere between anatomy lab and residency, physicians apparently take a second oath: “I solemnly swear allegiance to Big Pharma and promise to suppress the healing powers of turmeric until death do us part.” I must have missed that afternoon. Perhaps I was on call.

The theory requires an impressive degree of international cooperation. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, epidemiologists, scientists, and researchers across different countries, health systems, political parties, universities, and institutions would all have to participate in the same deception. Have you ever attended a medical committee meeting? We can spend 45 minutes arguing about one sentence. Yet apparently, we coordinated the greatest global conspiracy in human history without someone accidentally hitting Reply All. Impressive.

But medicine absolutely should be questioned

Here is where I stop joking. Patients should question physicians. Medicine has made mistakes. Doctors have harmed patients. Pharmaceutical companies have behaved badly. Academic institutions have conflicts of interest. Governments have failed people. Public-health organizations have sometimes communicated poorly, paternalistically, or defensively.

There are legitimate reasons trust has been damaged. We should examine them rather than dismissing everyone who asks uncomfortable questions. Vaccines have risks and contraindications. Every medical intervention does. Safety surveillance matters. Informed consent matters. Transparency matters.

But skepticism requires intellectual consistency. If we are following the money, then let us follow all of it. Pharmaceutical profits deserve scrutiny. So do supplement companies, wellness empires, social-media platforms that profit from outrage and fear, politicians who benefit from keeping people frightened, and industries that would rather dispute inconvenient science than change profitable behavior. There is nothing scientific about deciding in advance whose financial interests count and whose do not.

We should demand evidence from everyone. That is what real skepticism looks like.

We are doing this with the planet, too

This is where the medieval peasant joke stops being only about medicine. We are playing a similar game with climate science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that human influence has unequivocally warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and that human-caused climate change is already affecting weather and climate extremes across every region.

We can debate policy. We can debate carbon taxes, nuclear power, regulation, subsidies, transition timelines, and who should bear the costs. Those are legitimate political questions. But repeatedly relitigating whether humans influence the climate because we dislike the implications is something else.

Reality does not negotiate. Viruses do not care how we voted. Carbon dioxide does not have a political affiliation. Physics does not check Twitter before deciding how heat behaves.

Then there is AI

And yes, I appreciate the irony of discussing artificial intelligence in an article that may be summarized by artificial intelligence five minutes after publication. AI has enormous potential. Medicine, science, and education will benefit from it.

But AI is not floating around in a magical cloud. The cloud has buildings. Large ones. Those buildings contain servers that require electricity, produce heat, and require cooling. The International Energy Agency projects global data-center electricity consumption will roughly double by 2030 to about 945 terawatt-hours, with AI the largest driver of that growth. In the United States, data centers could account for nearly half of electricity-demand growth through 2030.

Water matters too. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that worldwide annual water consumption associated with data centers and AI could reach 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027. That is not anti-AI. That is arithmetic. AI can be transformative while still having environmental costs. Scientific progress does not require pretending those costs do not exist.

Science is wonderful until it becomes inconvenient

Perhaps this is the real problem. We love science when it gives us something: smartphones, MRIs, GPS, antibiotics, anesthesia, cancer treatments, air conditioning, and AI assistants. But when science tells us something we do not want to hear, suddenly everyone is Galileo.

Vaccines prevent disease? Follow the money. Is human activity warming the planet? Political agenda. Does AI require enormous amounts of electricity and water? Do not stifle innovation. Does the evidence threaten a profitable industry? We need more research.

Interesting how often “We need more research” really means: “Please do not make us change anything yet.”

Degrees are useless until your child cannot breathe

There is another inconsistency worth examining. Formal education is apparently meaningless until something goes terribly wrong. If my airplane loses an engine at 30,000 feet, I am not going to stand up and ask whether somebody in economy has done independent research on aerodynamics. I want the pilot.

If my house is collapsing, I want a structural engineer. If my electrical panel catches fire, I want an electrician. If I am accused of a serious crime, I want a lawyer. If someone is cutting into my brain, “board-certified neurosurgeon” suddenly sounds considerably more reassuring than “independent thinker with 2.4 million followers.”

And when your premature baby deteriorates in the NICU? Nobody asks for the influencer. You want the neonatologist. The respiratory therapist. The neonatal nurse. The pharmacist is calculating a medication dose for a body that weighs less than some people’s handbags.

Suddenly, education matters. Training matters. Competence matters. Funny how quickly expertise becomes fashionable when somebody you love is dying.

And please don’t call the heretics

Maybe society really does not need us. Maybe universities are a sham. Maybe professional degrees are unnecessary. Maybe physicians have wasted our time. Years of university. Medical school. Residency. Sometimes fellowship. Licensing examinations. Certification. Continuing medical education. Conferences. Journal articles. Practice audits. New guidelines. Learning that something we were taught 10 years ago has changed, and changing our practice accordingly.

Then doing it again. Because medical education does not end when someone hands you a degree. It cannot. People place their lives in our hands. We have an ethical responsibility to keep sharpening our skills.

So if all of that is meaningless, fine. Do not call the heretics. Call the influencer. Perhaps the ring light has an oxygen setting. Maybe the detox tea treats respiratory failure. Perhaps the algorithm can intubate. Maybe the premium subscription includes an ICU bed.

Of course, I do not mean that. Because when someone gets sick, we will still show up. That is our job. We will treat the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. We will care for the person who trusts physicians and the person who called us corrupt yesterday. We will care for their children. We will sit with their frightened families. We will keep learning. We will keep trying. Our obligation to care for another human being does not disappear when that human being stops believing in us. But society should understand the bargain it is making.

The medieval peasant didn’t have a choice

This may be the most important difference. The medieval mother who watched her child die from infection did not reject antibiotics. They did not exist. She did not reject vaccination. She did not have it. She did not dismiss germ theory. Nobody had discovered it. She did not choose the village apothecary over the pediatric intensivist. There was no pediatric intensivist.

Imagine telling that mother that one day humanity would understand disease well enough to prevent illnesses that once killed the children around her. That we would develop vaccines, antibiotics, blood transfusions, modern obstetrics, intensive care, and ventilators. Imagine telling her that children who once would have died would instead grow up, go to school, fall in love, build careers, and have children of their own. She might think our world miraculous.

Then imagine finishing the story. “Eventually, we became so accustomed to these miracles that some of us decided the people maintaining them were probably lying.” I wonder what she would say.

Progress is not permanent

We tend to imagine human progress as a staircase. We discover something. We climb a step. We stay there forever. History does not work that way. Knowledge can be forgotten. Institutions can deteriorate. Education can become inaccessible. Trust can collapse. Infrastructure can fail. Diseases can return. Scientific institutions can be weakened. Political systems can decide that inconvenient evidence is easier to attack than inconvenient problems are to solve.

Clean water requires maintenance. Electricity grids require maintenance. Universities require investment. Hospitals require investment. Public health requires investment. Medical education requires investment. The environment requires stewardship. Population immunity requires participation. Trust requires institutions worthy of it. None of this is automatic.

And that may be the part we forget most easily. The achievements of modern medicine are not permanent trophies sitting safely on a shelf. They are systems we have to keep building, funding, questioning, improving, and protecting.

This is the dumpster fire

That silly fake Robert F. Kennedy Jr. book cover made me laugh because it condensed an enormous cultural contradiction into one ridiculous image. How to Avoid Vaccines & Die Like a Medieval Peasant. Funny.

Except that Canada lost the measles elimination status it had maintained since 1998. Funny.

Except for the thousands of measles cases reported in a single year. Funny.

Except we continue debating established climate science while evidence of human influence on the climate has become overwhelming. Funny.

Except we are racing to build the infrastructure for an AI revolution while simultaneously trying to determine where the electricity will come from, how our grids will accommodate it, and what its water demands will mean in communities where water is already contested. Funny.

Except we increasingly tell young people that education is worthless while depending every day on people whose education keeps airplanes in the sky, bridges standing, electrical grids functioning, medications safe, and human beings alive. At some point, the joke becomes a warning.

We should question science. We should challenge scientists. We should expose conflicts of interest. We should demand better evidence. We should demand transparency from governments, universities, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and technology companies. That is not anti-science. That is how science gets better.

But rejecting evidence because it interferes with ideology, profit, or political convenience is not skepticism. It is denial. And denial does not change physical reality. The virus still spreads. The planet still warms. The server still consumes electricity. The cooling system still needs water. The critically ill child still needs somebody who knows what they are doing.

The Middle Ages aren’t coming. We’re inviting them.

Our ancestors suffered because they did not know better. That distinction matters. They were waiting for knowledge humanity had not yet acquired. We have that knowledge. We have universities, physicians, engineers, epidemiologists, climate scientists, researchers, technologists, laboratories, data, and tools our ancestors could never have imagined. We have access to more accumulated human knowledge than any previous generation.

And somehow, we are flirting with the idea that knowledge itself is suspicious. That may be the most absurd part of this entire dumpster fire. The medieval peasant did not choose ignorance. They did not have another option. We do. That is the difference.

We can demand accountability without abandoning evidence. We can criticize institutions without throwing away expertise. We can acknowledge medicine’s failures without pretending medicine has accomplished nothing. We can scrutinize pharmaceutical companies without assuming the supplement industry is automatically virtuous. We can debate climate policy without pretending physics is partisan. We can embrace AI while honestly examining its costs. We do not have to choose between blind trust and total distrust. We can choose something harder. Discernment.

That requires humility because sometimes the expert is wrong. It also requires humility because sometimes the person shouting online is wrong. The answer is not to make every opinion equal. The answer is to learn how to weigh evidence. That is what science gives us. Not certainty. A method for getting closer to the truth.

So yes, laugh at the fake medieval book cover. I did. But remember why the joke was funny. We have spent centuries learning how to keep people alive. We built vaccines because children were dying. We developed antibiotics because infections killed people. We built intensive care because sometimes human beings need machines to survive while their bodies recover. We created public-health systems because one person’s illness can become a community’s crisis. We built universities because knowledge must be preserved, challenged, taught, and passed forward. None of that happened by accident. And none of it is guaranteed to last.

The medieval peasant lacked science. We do. The question is what we will do with it. If we decide evidence is trustworthy only when it tells us what we already want to hear, we are not protecting freedom. We are abandoning one of humanity’s greatest achievements: our ability to learn from reality. And reality has an inconvenient habit of winning.

The Middle Ages are not coming back because history has a sense of humor. They will come back only if we stop defending the knowledge that helped us leave them behind. This time, we cannot say we did not know better because we know better and were warned.

Tomi Mitchell is a board-certified family physician and certified health and wellness coach with extensive experience in clinical practice and holistic well-being. She is also an acclaimed international keynote speaker and a passionate advocate for mental health and physician well-being. She leverages over a decade of private practice experience to drive meaningful change.

Dr. Mitchell is the founder of Holistic Wellness Strategies, where she empowers individuals through comprehensive, evidence-based approaches to well-being. Her career is dedicated to transforming lives by addressing personal challenges and enhancing relationships with practical, holistic strategies.

Her commitment to mental health and burnout prevention is evident through her role as the host of The Mental Health & Wellness Show podcast. Through her podcast, Dr. Mitchell explores topics related to mental fitness and stress reduction, helping audiences achieve sustainable productivity while avoiding burnout.

Dr. Mitchell is also an author. Her book, The Soul-Sucking, Energy-Draining Life of a Physician: How to Live a Life of Service Without Losing Yourself, addresses the unique challenges faced by health care professionals and provides actionable solutions for maintaining personal well-being in demanding careers.

Dr. Mitchell’s expertise and advocacy have been recognized in her role as an executive contributor to USA Today, Thrive Global magazine, KevinMD, OK! Magazine, and Brainz Magazine, as well as across various television and radio platforms, where she continues to champion holistic wellness and mental health on a global scale.

Connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and book a discovery call to explore how she can support your wellness journey. For those interested in purchasing her book, please click here for the payment link. Check out her YouTube channel for more insights and valuable content on mental health and well-being.