Politicized 'Common Sense' Hyperbole Puts the Public’s Health at Risk

It is getting harder to ignore what happens when public health gets demonized and dismantled. Measles cases are surging to levels we haven’t seen in decades. Outbreaks of foodborne illnesses and extreme heat are taking lives across the country.

These aren’t random, unlucky breaks. They are the predictable result of breaking the systems designed to keep us safe.

Photo by Clark Douglas on Unsplash

Yet federal officials say little these days about how federal policy and institutions can actively create conditions for widespread health. Instead, they shift focus to personal choices—encouraging parents to be skeptical of vaccines, suggesting that “real food” is the cure for almost anything that ails us, and issuing dramatic warnings against everyday medications like acetaminophen and antidepressants.

In some cases, official statements demonstrate a cavalier disregard for both the truth and consequences. Take Monday’s press conference about an executive order on childhood vaccines. Although there are exactly zero cases of death associated with the combination vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella when given to healthy children, the president called it “lethal” and “explosive.” This fact-free fearmongering is especially reckless in a record-breaking year for measles, with dangerous outbreaks across 46 states.

Public health experts often seem bewildered that some version of the administration’s ideas on health resonates with about 4 in 10 Americans. As a sociolinguist who studies how language and culture interact, I can see why the rhetoric is working — and how we can counter it.

Mindsets research helps explain why lies can sound true

FrameWorks research helps explain why false claims resonate. Mindsets — our deep-seated assumptions about how the world works — shape public thinking. The administration’s rhetoric encounters too little friction because it follows these well-worn grooves in public thinking. They offer ideas that sound consistent with “common sense,” regardless of whether they align with scientific evidence or good governance.

On health, they leverage these mindsets to their advantage:

• Health = Healthy Lifestyle. Americans assume diet and exercise drive health. While personal habits matter, the resources and conditions where we live have a far greater impact, not to mention genetics. Scolding people to “eat better” works within a common mindset. That’s much easier than talking about or tackling more complex issues.

• Natural Is Better: Most people hold an implicit belief that health means keeping the body free of artificial contaminants. On its face, this mindset isn’t “wrong” or harmful; it’s smart to avoid exposure to toxic substances. But rather than building on this intuition to promote environmental protections, the administration taps into it in ways that cast doubt on safe, proven medical advancements, from Tylenol to combination vaccines.

• Threat of Modernity. This model involves a suspicion that human inventions and technology come with hidden threats. Vague warnings about “unknown environmental exposures” or ableist mischaracterizations of an “autism epidemic” tap into this assumption. Once people come to view modernity itself as an invisible enemy, it becomes easy to treat innovations — even time-tested ones like pasteurization or vaccines — not as protective, but as dangerous.

Because mindsets are deep and durable, messages that line up with them feel credible. This dynamic allows shaky and risky claims to gain far more traction than they deserve,

Hyperbole works as an escalation engine

When messaging aligns with implicit beliefs, our brains enter “agree mode,” making us highly vulnerable to hyperbole. Once a claim connects with a deep-seated mindset, exaggeration — or even outright falsehood — becomes harder for people to spot or reject. At a gut level, the core premise already “rings true.”

When this administration talks about health, it uses hyperbole and hyper-emotional language to move people from a tacit preference to active vigilance. Take these examples:

• In talking about food dyes, the secretary of Health and Human Services exaggerates the health risks. Framing ingredients as “poisons” responsible for everything from loneliness to cancer shifts the conversation from nutrition to contamination. It inflates an everyday intuition about purity into a fight for our lives in the grocery aisles.

• In describing the pace and timing of recommended childhood vaccinations, the president warns parents against “pumping babies full of vaccines” that are “lethal.” Depicting proven pediatric care with violent imagery raises the stakes for parents and policymakers, triggers an instinct to defend a child from bodily harm, and short-circuits critical thinking.

Tapping Into Productive Mindsets

We can shift the dialogue by leaning into three very different mindsets that Americans also hold:

• Government as Protector: Americans expect government to protect its people from harm. We can activate this by framing food safety policies, food quality regulations, and environmental monitoring as a collective shield that protects our kitchens and communities. When opponents call it red tape, we can call it what it is: government running on a thoughtful process, not personal whims.

• What Surrounds Us Shapes Us: While the “Health = Healthy Lifestyle” mindset puts all the burden on the individual, we can pivot to the understanding that our environment shapes our health. By highlighting how safe food supply chains, clean air, and school vaccine requirements are prerequisites for health, we move the focus from personal habit to structural responsibility.

• Interconnection: We can counter the hyper-individualistic “medical freedom” narrative by reminding people of our shared fate. Widespread immunizations are a common defense system; the health impacts of a disrupted climate system threaten us all. The smartest response is a collective one.

The Architecture of Real Safety

Individual choices cannot shield us from structural threats. No amount of “clean living” can insulate a family from extreme heat, an unsafe food supply, or preventable disease outbreaks in shared spaces.

True public health depends on robust institutions and rational, evidence-based policy. That’s harder for people to grapple with, harder to message, and harder to do. But we can do hard things – and research into mindsets and framing can help make it easier. By fostering public understanding and will, we can secure the systems that provide real safety for everyone.

Julie Sweetland, PhD, is a sociolinguist and a senior advisor at the FrameWorks Institute.

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