Ever since Trump tapped bona fide conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. to serve as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and pledged to let him “go wild” on public health, a palpable sense of dread has loomed large. And it’s only getting worse: On Friday, the New York Times reported that Kennedy’s even more aggressively anti-vaxx lawyer, Aaron Siri — a man who has petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine — is apparently helping him pick out federal health officials for the incoming administration.
Who is Siri anyway, besides a man making FDR turn in his grave? A close adviser to Kennedy who represented him during his presidential campaign, Siri is a partner at the New York–based law firm Siri & Glimstad, where he oversees roughly 40 professionals working on vaccine policy and regularly rails against “industry misconduct and government overreach.” His résumé includes helping clients skirt vaccination requirements and convincing a California judge to rule against a COVID-vaccine mandate in San Diego public schools. In 2022, Siri filed a petition targeting the polio vaccine on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, a nonprofit that bills itself as a proponent of “medical freedom.” In his petition, Siri argued that the FDA has not conducted sufficient safety studies on the vaccine, which has protected Americans from a virus that can cause lifelong paralysis, since a nationwide immunization campaign in the 1950s. Siri has also filed to revoke FDA approval of the hepatitis B vaccine and has petitioned to “pause distribution” of 13 other critical inoculations, including those that protect against tetanus, diphtheria, and hepatitis A, demanding that their manufacturers disclose details about the risks of the ingredient aluminum, which researchers have linked to a tiny uptick in asthma. (Never mind the potentially fatal risk of, say, actually contracting diphtheria.)
Though Kennedy and Siri have independently stated that they don’t plan to strip away vaccine access (“You want to get the vaccine — it’s America, a free country,” Siri testified before the Arizona state legislature last spring), the Times reports that Siri has joined him at the Trump transition headquarters in Florida, where the duo have asked the candidates they’re interviewing for major health-policy positions about their views on vaccines. The Times also reports that Kennedy has “privately expressed interest” in making Siri general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy said in a November podcast episode hosted by Del Bigtree, ICAN’s founder and the former communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical-freedom movement than him.”
If all this weren’t frightening enough, Trump, in his “Person of the Year” interview with Time magazine this week, promised to do “very serious testing” on vaccines and says he will eliminate those he thinks “are not beneficial.” What could possibly go wrong?
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