When I was younger, maybe ten or eleven, we were in Florida visiting my dad’s mother. As I recall it, my dad suddenly developed fevers and chills and ended up in the emergency department dehydrated from vomiting. He returned to my grandmother’s apartment with a urinary catheter. The next morning, as he lay on the plastic-covered couch shivering, my mother followed her nose to the kitchen to find Nana frying up lox and onions. My mom said, “Rose, what are you doing?!?”

“Well,” she said matter-of-factly in her Yiddish accent, “he’s gotta eat!”

I didn’t really know what was going on, other than our trip to Disney World was definitely canceled. And I hated lox and onions.

Many years and many infections later, my dad was diagnosed with “common variable immune deficiency (CVID)”. He was very susceptible to serious infections such as pneumonia and urinary tract infections. Before the 1980s, people with CVID lived, on average, about 15 years. Thanks to the introduction of immunotherapy, my dad is about to turn 100. My dad is alive in part because he “borrows” other people’s immunity. If these donors weren’t immune to, say, pneumonia, my dad wouldn’t be either.

Immunotherapy means a lot of things. In my dad’s case, it means getting a monthly IV of immunoglobulin. Immunoglobulin infusions are made by collecting blood plasma from donors and pooling it together to get the antibodies each of them may have floating around. These are antibodies my dad can’t make, antibodies to fight off all sorts of infections. These antibodies were created when people either encountered bacteria and viruses in their environment or were vaccinated against them. It’s a pretty non-specific way to do this, in a sense. Basically, you hope that if you mix the antibodies up from enough donors, you’ll cover the most important infections.

Vaccines are a much more specific type of immunotherapy. Rather than simply infusing antibodies from other people into the blood stream, you show the immune system a little bit of the organism you want your body to recognize and fight off.

I was thinking about all of this because of a story I ran into the other day. Apparently patients in need of blood transfusions are starting to ask for blood from “unvaccinated” donors. This resonates with the practices of the mid-20th century when blood donation was segregated by race.

In the 1940s, racial segregation of blood wasn’t due as much to white patients clamoring for “white blood” as it was to military leaders and politicians who were making assumptions about what people wanted, and were using racism to increase their own power and influence. While modern politicians would have a harder time building support by demanding racial segregation, they have made some serious bank with their anti-science and anti-vaccine rhetoric. Before Robert Kennedy, Jr. entered the presidential race, he was being paid $20,000 a week by his antivaccine group Children’s Health Defense. And he was able to leverage his “fame” to become the head of Health and Human Services where the damage he has inflicted will take decades to repair.

The demand for segregated and “unvaccinated” blood share one important feature—neither is scientific. Both ideas are unscientific and ridiculous. Dr. Charles Drew was an African American surgeon and pioneer in the science of blood transfusion whose work has saved countless lives. In 1942 he resigned as director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank due to their racist and unscientific policies of blood segregation. Today the very idea of segregating blood by race sounds ridiculous. Segregating it by vaccination status of the donor is almost as crazy.

Aside from the lack of any possible benefit, there are practical concerns. Take for instance covid vaccination. It you want blood from an unvaccinated donor, how could we even track that? If someone says they’re not vaccinated we’d have to simply believe it because most Americans at this point have antibodies to covid due to either vaccination, infection, or both. Some people apparently want to do “directed donations”, where they pick a donor who they believe to be unvaccinated but this unleashes a host of problems. Imagine getting into an accident and refusing blood products until you find someone you trust is unvaccinated and happens to have your blood type.

I doubt this desire for “unvaccinated” blood will become particularly widespread, but like the demand for segregated blood, it will no doubt be used by, for example, the anti-vaccine movement to increase their reach and power. There are also some disturbing ideas in common here such as a desire for “blood purity”, a concept exploited disastrously by eugenicists and fascists.

Our lives would look much different if RFK and his allies had gained power in, say, the 1940’s. We would likely live in a country where parents still lived in fear of their children being paralyzed by polio, where millions of children never had the chance to grow up. By the CDC’s own count, “among the approximately 117 million children born in the U.S. during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 1,129,000 deaths.” And my dad would certainly have died decades ago.

Science isn’t an unmitigated good. It’s not bad either. In fact “good” and “bad” don’t even make sense here because science is simply a way of understanding. It’s a way of making guesses, testing them, and trying to make predictions. It’s the reason we can fly safely across the country; it’s the reason so many of our children don’t die of infectious diseases; it’s the reason we can blow up an entire city with a single bomb. It’s not moral, it’s not immoral—it’s amoral. It is our actions that determine our fate, not the tools we use. And if we reject the tool of science altogether, or worse, weaponize it to achieve immoral ends, that’s on us.

When you see someone like RFK or a social media influencer claiming to know better than the majority of experts, they are using science as a weapon to achieve their own ends, whether it’s fame, money, or a twisted ideology.

“Unvaccinated blood” is nonsense. But it’s dangerous nonsense and emblematic of the destruction of our public health infrastructure, where inconvenient facts our outlawed or ignored. It is fundamentally unscientific and it is fundamentally immoral.