罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr. 认为 RSV 起源于一项政府科学实验。
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that RSV originated in a government science experiment.
作者：汤姆·巴特利特 你几乎肯定曾感染过 RSV。我们大多数人在两岁之前就会感染它。通常它感觉就像感冒：流鼻涕、咳嗽，也许还有发烧。但 RSV（即“呼吸道合胞病毒”的简称）也可能变得危险。在美国，它导致住院的婴儿比其他任何病毒都多，每年还造成数千名老人死亡。病例数往往随着天气转凉而上升——所以，现在正是这个时候。
By Tom Bartlett You’ve almost certainly had RSV. Most of us catch it before we turn 2. Usually it feels like a cold: runny nose, cough, maybe a fever. But RSV (short for “respiratory syncytial virus”) can take a dangerous turn. In the United States, it puts more babies in the hospital than any other virus and kills thousands of seniors each year. Cases tend to climb as the weather cools—so, right about now.
卫生部长罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr. 似乎有意传播关于 RSV 的信息：他在八月接受 CNN 和 福克斯新闻 两家媒体的采访时都提到了这种病毒。他本来可以借此机会提醒观众注意 RSV 疫苗，该疫苗于 2023 年首次获得 FDA 批准，CDC 建议老年人以及秋冬季怀孕后期的女性接种。但肯尼迪却说了两句假话。首先，在 CNN 上，他称 RSV 是“如今这个国家杀死儿童的头号凶手”。
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to be intent on spreading the word about RSV: He brought up the virus during interviews on both CNN and Fox News in August. He could have used those appearances to remind viewers about the RSV vaccine, which the FDA first approved in 2023 and the CDC recommends for older adults and for women in the later stages of pregnancy during the fall and winter. Instead, Kennedy made two false statements. First, on CNN, he called RSV “the biggest killer of kids in this country today.” (According to the CDC, it isn’t; cancer claims more children’s lives.)
（根据 CDC 的数据，事实并非如此；癌症夺走的儿童生命更多。）他的另一个离谱说法更奇怪：在这两次采访中，他都把 RSV 归咎于一次出错的科学实验，在福克斯新闻上他说它“来自实验室”，在 CNN 上则说它源于增益功能实验，或类似的东西。
His other whopper was weirder: In both appearances, he blamed RSV on a scientific experiment gone wrong, saying on Fox that it “came from a laboratory” and on CNN that it came from gain-of-function experiments, or something like them.
要说明的是，RSV并非从实验室泄漏。但肯尼迪多年来一直在播客上重复这一虚构说法，并将其收录在他的2021年著作中。即使在那本充斥着可疑且已被驳斥的断言的汇编中，肯尼迪关于RSV的理论——涉及非人类灵长类动物、一家军事研究设施，当然还有疫苗——也格外突出。这堪称一个案例，展示了作为反疫苗活动家，他如何传播半真半假的说法和不成熟的叙事，以及他如何依赖强化其信念的忠实追随者，而非能够挑战他的专家。
To be clear, RSV did not leak from a lab. But Kennedy has been repeating this fiction on podcasts for years, and he included it in his 2021 book, . Even in that compendium of dubious and debunked assertions, Kennedy’s theory about RSV—which involves nonhuman primates, a military research facility, and, of course, vaccines—stands out. It’s a case study in how, as an anti-vaccine activist, he has trafficked in half truths and half-baked narratives, and how he relies on loyalists who reinforce his beliefs rather than experts who can challenge them.
肯尼迪本可以轻易查阅历史记录或联系相关领域专家。相反地，正如他在担任卫生部长近两年期间频繁所做的那样，他照搬了一位活动家盟友有缺陷的研究。
Kennedy could easily have consulted the historical record or reached out to subject-matter experts. Instead, as he’s done frequently during his nearly two years as health secretary, he parroted the flawed research of an activist ally.
肯尼迪声称RSV起源于圈养黑猩猩，随后传播给人类。在2023年的一档播客中，他说科学家故意将病毒感染给一名实验室工作人员。在（）中，他支持另一种理论，写道该病毒“于1955年进入沃尔特里德医院实验室的脊髓灰质炎疫苗”，并引发了一场“毁灭性大流行”。这是他荒谬论点的一部分，即脊髓灰质炎疫苗造成的危害大于这种可能导致瘫痪的疾病本身。
Kennedy claims RSV originated in captive chimpanzees, and then spread to humans. On a 2023 podcast, he said scientists deliberately infected a lab worker with the virus. In , he endorses a different theory, writing that the virus “entered polio vaccines at the Walter Reed Hospital laboratories in 1955” and caused a “devastating pandemic.”It’s part of his absurd argument that polio vaccines caused more harm than the potentially paralytic disease itself.
事实上，RSV的发现确实始于实验室，当时黑猩猩出现了感冒症状。1955年10月，马里兰州银泉市沃尔特里德陆军研究所附属机构中饲养的14只黑猩猩全部患上了看似感冒的疾病。科学家开始查明是什么让它们生病，对它们进行咽喉拭子检查并采集血液样本。研究人员分离出了病毒，并故意将其感染给另一组黑猩猩。1956年2月，一名与第二组黑猩猩有接触的实验室工作人员生病了。检测表明，该工作人员和黑猩猩感染的是同一种病毒。
In fact, RSV’s discovery did begin in a laboratory, with chimpanzees getting the sniffles. In October 1955, 14 chimps housed at an annex of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, all came down with what seemed like a cold. Scientists set about determining what made them sick, swabbing their throats and taking blood samples. Researchers isolated the virus and intentionally infected another group of chimps. In February 1956, a lab worker who had contact with the second group of chimps fell ill. Tests indicated that the worker and the chimps had the same virus.
如果你只知道这些，你可能会认为肯尼迪发现了什么：黑猩猩生病了，一名实验室工作人员被感染，于是一种新型病原体就这样被释放到了人类社会。这是一个引人入胜的故事，它支持肯尼迪的论点——科学家们不是在认真寻找治愈我们疾病的方法，而是通过鲁莽的实验在招致灾难。
If that were all you knew, you might think Kennedy was onto something: Chimps get sick, a lab worker catches it, and a novel pathogen is thereby unleashed on humanity. It’s a compelling story and one that supports Kennedy’s thesis that scientists, rather than diligently searching for the cures to what ails us, are courting disaster with their reckless experiments.
但真相并未止步于此。很快就有证据表明，RSV早在被沃尔特·里德发现之前就已经在人类中广泛传播。1957年，约翰霍普金斯大学的研究人员报告称，他们在巴尔的摩测试的儿童中，有80%在4岁之前就已对该病毒产生抗体。俄亥俄州一所联邦监狱的囚犯也检测出了抗体。这些发现强烈表明，这是一种广泛存在且长期流行于人类中的感染，而非病毒突然从黑猩猩群体中逃逸。
But the real story doesn’t end there. Evidence soon emerged that RSV had been circulating in humans long before it was found at Walter Reed. In 1957, researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that 80 percent of the children they had tested in Baltimore had antibodies to the virus by age 4. Inmates at a federal prison in Ohio had antibodies too. Those findings strongly suggested widespread, long-standing human infection rather than a virus suddenly escaping from a chimp colony.
约翰霍普金斯大学的科学家推测，这种病毒可能起源于人类，并被“引入了对其易感的黑猩猩种群”。这一假设在数十年后得到了更为确凿的证据支持。2007年发表的一项研究在一名1931年去世的儿童的保存肺组织中检测到了RSV蛋白质——这比黑猩猩爆发早了近四分之一世纪。研究作者称这是“有史以来首次被确认的RSV感染病例”。
The Johns Hopkins scientists surmised that the virus might be of human origin and had been “introduced into a susceptible population of chimpanzees.”More solid proof of that hypothesis came decades later. A study published in 2007 detected RSV proteins in preserved lung tissue from a child who died in 1931, nearly a quarter century before the chimp outbreak. The authors called it “the earliest confirmed case of RSV infection ever reported.”
其他证据则指向更早的时期。研究人员认为可能是RSV的疾病描述可以在19世纪的记载中找到。1819年的一篇论文提到一种“急性阻塞性卡他”——也就是粘液的厚积聚——这与RSV的典型症状相符。对RSV基因变化的近期分析估计，如今病毒的祖先已经在人类中流传了数百年。
Other evidence points back even earlier. Descriptions of an illness researchers believe was likely RSV can be found in accounts from the 19th century. An 1819 treatise refers to an “acute suffocative catarrh”—that is, a thick buildup of mucus—that matches RSV’s characteristic symptoms. A recent analysis of genetic changes in RSV estimated that ancestors of today’s virus have been circulating for hundreds of years.
我采访了几位RSV研究者，讨论肯尼迪的理论。他们都不相信这个理论，其中包括菲利普·罗恩，他在20世纪50年代中期曾是约翰霍普金斯大学的技术员，并帮助在儿童中鉴定了这种病毒。（罗恩现在98岁，是霍华德大学的微生物学教授，虽然他在1957年的论文中未获得正式署名，但主要作者曾送给他一盒巧克力和一瓶苏格兰威士忌。）
I spoke with several RSV researchers about Kennedy’s theory. None of them gave it any credence, including Philip Roane, who was a technician at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1950s and helped identify the virus in children. (Roane, who is now 98 and a microbiology professor at Howard University, wasn’t given formal credit on the 1957 paper, but he received a box of chocolates and a bottle of scotch from the lead author.)
当我告诉埃默里大学传染病学荣休教授、长期从事RSV研究的拉里·安德森肯尼迪说了什么时，我不得不等他笑完才能得到他的回答。我采访的研究者——其中一些人已经花了数十年研究RSV——都不认真对待这个理论。
When I told Larry Anderson, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at Emory University and a longtime RSV researcher, what Kennedy had said, I had to wait until he stopped laughing to get his answer. This isn’t a theory that researchers I spoke with—some of whom have spent decades studying RSV—take seriously.
但肯尼迪还是必须从某处得到这个理论，对吧？在，肯尼迪引用了一篇2021年的文章：《从黑猩猩到儿童：RSV的起源》，作者是林·雷德伍德。肯尼迪与雷德伍德的关系可以追溯到2005年：雷德伍德是一名护士执业者和反疫苗活动人士，她认为自己儿子的自闭症是由疫苗中的汞基防腐剂引起的，她曾是一群希望招募知名人士支持其事业的活动人士之一。肯尼迪称雷德伍德帮助说服他关注疫苗安全问题。
But Kennedy still had to get that theory from somewhere, right? In , Kennedy cites a 2021 article, “From Chimpanzees to Children: The Origins of RSV,” by Lyn Redwood. The relationship between Kennedy and Redwood, a nurse practitioner and anti-vaccine activist, goes back to 2005: Redwood, who believes that her son’s autism was caused by exposure to a mercury-based preservative in vaccines, was among a group of activists looking to recruit prominent figures to support their cause. Kennedy credits her with helping persuade him to take on the issue of vaccine safety.
在她的文章中，现任卫生部长高级顾问的雷德伍德（Redwood）指出，来自沃尔特·里德（Walter Reed）黑猩猩的RSV感染细胞可能以某种方式进入了脊髓灰质炎疫苗。受污染的疫苗随后可能感染了在1950年代接种疫苗的数百万儿童。但这种推测建立在一个明显的错误之上：用于生产早期脊髓灰质炎疫苗的肾细胞来自猴子，而非黑猩猩。
In her article, Redwood, who is now a senior adviser to the health secretary, suggests that RSV-infected cells from Walter Reed chimpanzees might somehow have made it into the polio vaccine. The tainted vaccine, in turn, could have infected millions of children who received it in the 1950s. But that speculation rests on an obvious error: The kidney cells used to produce early polio vaccines came from monkeys, not chimpanzees.
雷德伍德在文章中将两者混为一谈，称沃尔特·里德的黑猩猩为“生病的猴子”。当我最近联系雷德伍德时，她为自己的文章辩护，称她不相信RSV在1956年之前就在人类中传播的证据，即使在我把关于1931年组织样本的论文发给她之后也是如此。（她没有回复指出猴子错误的那封邮件。）至于RSV是否进入了脊髓灰质炎疫苗，她告诉我她“只是提出了问题”，而任何声称相反的人都会“歪曲我的文章”。
Redwood conflates the two in her article, referring to the chimps at Walter Reed as “sick monkeys.”When I contacted Redwood recently, she defended her article, saying she did not believe the evidence that RSV had been circulating among humans before 1956, even after I sent her the paper about the 1931 tissue sample. (She didn’t respond to an email noting the monkey mistake.) As for whether RSV made it into the polio vaccine, she told me that she “just posed the question” and that anyone who claimed otherwise would be “misrepresenting my article.”
在他的书中，肯尼迪（Kennedy）正是如此：他在写道病毒通过脊髓灰质炎疫苗传播时引用了她的文章。雷德伍德最初的困惑猜测被肯尼迪重新包装成了简单的事实。
In his book, Kennedy does precisely that: He cites her article when he writes that the virus spread via polio vaccines. What began as confused conjecture by Redwood was repackaged by Kennedy as simple fact.
当我向卫生与公众服务部（HHS）询问肯尼迪的观点时，一位发言人在一封邮件中告诉我，RSV“起源于一群感染的黑猩猩”，并且病毒“传播给了实验室工作人员，然后传播给了公众，但不是通过疫苗”。这些说法全都不正确——而且与肯尼迪书中（同样错误）的说法相矛盾。在重写医学史的问题上，卫生部长甚至连自己的虚构都说不清楚。
When I asked HHS for clarification on Kennedy’s views, a spokesperson told me in an email that RSV “originated from a troop of infected chimpanzees,” and that the virus “spread to lab workers and then to the public but not through vaccination.”None of that is true—and it contradicts the (also false) account in Kennedy’s book. When it comes to rewriting medical history, the health secretary can’t even keep his fictions straight.