A Republican senator launched into an anti-vaccine rant Tuesday when reporters asked about confirming noted health conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be President-elect Donald Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy was forced to backtrack this week following reports that one of his key aides tried to get the polio vaccine certification revoked in the United States.
"What I was excited to hear him about was getting away from guessing, into facts. Do science, get behind the science, stay with it, don't be guessing. That's a lot of what these vaccines have done," said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). "They haven't been 100 percent proven. If you look at the number of vaccines young babies get over a short period of time, it's dozens and dozens of them. And he's totally against that, he wants to make sure that parents understand the good and the bad and the ugly, instead of just forcing parents to give vaccines to their kids."
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"You know, he and I both grew up and we had three vaccines: tuberculosis, polio, and I think smallpox. And that's how much it's grown. Now we give dozens and dozens," he continued.
Vaccines are exhaustively tested for safety, even those approved on an emergency basis such as COVID-19 shots. There is no evidence that the modern vaccine schedule "overwhelms" or "overloads" a baby's immune system. While children are vaccinated against more diseases today than decades ago, vaccines today contain far fewer antigens than they used to and rely less on live viruses that carry a risk of accidental infection.
The senator then went on to baselessly suggest that "everybody" in the room probably knew someone who died from a COVID-19 vaccine injury.
"At the end of the day he believes that we don't all need to be guinea pigs," Tuberville said, adding of the COVID vaccine, "Everybody in this group has lost somebody ... possibly from the vaccine that were perfectly healthy."
Notably, Tuberville urged all his constituents in 2021 in Alabama to get vaccinated for COVID-19.
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