One of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s top attorneys helping him craft America’s public health policy previously tried to push the government to scrap the polio vaccine.
Aaron Siri, a key legal adviser helping Kennedy select federal health officials for the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2022 filed a petition to force the Food and Drug Administration to end the approval and “pause distribution” of 13 vaccines, reported The New York Times. Those included vaccines that have effectively vanquished lethal illnesses from public life, including polio, tetanus, diphtheria, and hepatitis A.
Siri reportedly called for a randomized, double-blind clinical trial of the polio vaccine before allowing the FDA to re-approve it (the polio vaccine has already been subjected to 300 studies that took place before and after its approval in 1955). That would mean giving half of the children involved in the study the actual polio vaccine and providing the other half with a placebo, allowing half of the study participants to unknowingly be exposed to a deadly disease that causes organ failure and paralysis.
In private conversations, Kennedy has expressed that he’d like to see Siri serve as HHS’s general counsel, the agency’s top legal position, according to the Times.
Earlier this week, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates. (The researcher that sparked the myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and the jab, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.)
Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe that AIDS is caused by HIV, insists that WiFi causes cancer, and has shared he had a brain-eating worm in his head—has promised to completely reshape America’s approach to public health.
Under Trump’s helm, Kennedy has sworn to remove fluoride from all public water systems—a 1945 public health decision that has reduced cavities and tooth decay in adults and children by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association.
During the “plandemic”, Kennedy likened 2020 vaccination efforts to the Nazi testing on “Gypsies and Jews,” referring to the jab as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” In the immediate wake of Trump’s November win, Kennedy swore that he had no intentions of taking vaccines away from the American public, claiming that he was on the side of vaccine “freedom.” But other Trump allies—even prior to Kennedy’s nomination to front the HHS—have envisioned a future where vaccines new and old are stripped from the market, threatening America’s public health in the process.
Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vaxx hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60-70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.
Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.
