They’re Coming for Vaccines

Trump’s recent interview in Time, paired with plans by RFK, Jr’s top allies in the anti-vax movement, are a five alarm fire for vaccines and our nation’s health system.

Image courtesy of the BBC / Getty Images

During his interview with Time Magazine, which once again named him “Person of the Year,” Donald Trump unsurprisingly said many startling things between his usual ramblings. Today I want to focus on one of them in particular: vaccines.

Trump declared he is “going to do what’s good for the country.” When asked whether that includes getting rid of some vaccinations, Trump responded, “It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial,” but then added, “I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.”

This is a stark departure from earlier assurances by anti-vax nut job RFK, Jr., who promised earlier that he would not take vaccines away from anyone who wants them. Now it seems the team he hopes to gather at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will propose a review of vaccine safety and, depending on the results, could possibly pull some critical ones from the market.

But could and would they really do something so crazy as ban life-saving shots like the Hepatitis B, measles mumps and rubella, and polio vaccines?

Trump’s interview set off alarms among health experts, especially epidemiologists. And it raises many questions, not the least of which is exactly how vaccines might be reviewed by the government to confirm if they are “dangerous” or “not beneficial,” if and when RFK, Jr. is confirmed as head of HHS.

Adding fuel to this dumpster fire is a report out this morning by the New York Times that RFK, Jr.’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, is an anti-vax crusader who has previously petitioned the FDA to revoke approval for polio and other vaccines.

Trump’s statements imply that he really meant what he said on the campaign trail about letting RFK, Jr. go “wild on health.” And with zealots like Siri helping to shape national health policy, we are dangerously close to returning to an era where childhood diseases, once considered largely eradicated, could make a deadly comeback.

The Trump Interview is a preview of where we’re headed

Trump’s words are often empty and garbled, but they do sometimes shed important light into his psyche and, importantly, how much latitude he will give some of his top people. This is a critically important question when it comes to RFK, Jr. and whether he should be confirmed to head up our entire national health system.

Here is the relevant section of the Time Magazine interview. Trump was asked whether he would honor the Senate’s authority to reject or confirm his nominees, and there was a follow-up discussion on vaccines:

One of them who is controversial, who I just want to ask you a quick question about, RFK Jr, who is a noted vaccine skeptic. If he moves to end childhood vaccination programs, would you sign off on that?

We’re going to have a big discussion. The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.

Do you think it’s linked to vaccines?

No, I’m going to be listening to Bobby, who I’ve really gotten along with great and I have a lot of respect for having to do with food, having to do with vaccinations. He does not disagree with vaccinations, all vaccinations. He disagrees probably with some. But we’ll have it. We’re going to do what's good for the country.

So that could include getting rid of some vaccinations?

It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.

Do you agree with him about the connection between vaccines and autism?

I want to see the numbers. It’s going to be the numbers. We will be able to do—I think you’re going to feel very good about it at the end. We’re going to be able to do very serious testing, and we’ll see the numbers. A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good.

Anyone familiar with the way anti-vax groups regularly challenge FDA approvals, Covid mandates, scientists and drug manufacturers likely feels a rock in their gut reading this.

First, it appears that Trump has taken up a dangerous and false claim that purports to link childhood vaccinations to autism. That theory has been widely debunked, but it has managed to produce mass hysteria for two decades. And now it has the bully pulpit of the Oval Office behind it. The fact that the president-elect agrees with this discredited theory, and is appointing someone to head HHS who actively pushes it, is troubling in the extreme.

As CNN’s Kate Bolduan said yesterday, blasting this statement by Trump that he was “going to listen to Bobby”:

“Bobby, who listened to Andrew Wakefield, the doctor, non-doctor who came up with this damaging theory, faked a study, had to have it retracted, I believe, lost his license then and had created havoc in its wake. There is no link between vaccines and autism, but he’s still saying that it’s a possibility.”

Bolduan’s critique is well founded. Ten of Wakefield’s original co-authors issued a statement admitting their data were “insufficient” to prove that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Then Wakefield admitted he had not properly disclosed that he was a paid adviser in lawsuits brought by families allegeding vaccines had harmed their children.

That’s a huge and fatal conflict of interest.

In 2010, more than a decade after Wakefield’s shady paper was published, The Lancet officially retracted it. The journal’s editor told reporters that the study’s conclusions were “utterly false.” The same year, Wakefield lost his U.K. medical license, with regulators saying he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in his research.

And yet here we are, 14 years later, and the president-elect is still spouting conspiratorial nonsense from “Bobby.”

Second, Trump’s response implies that under RFK, Jr., the White House is going after the research and studies underpinning decades of successful vaccines and intends to revisit them from scratch. Trump stated so much, in that they’re going to “do very serious testing” and “we’ll see the numbers” because “a lot of people think a lot of different things” and “we’re going all out” to see “what’s good and what’s not good.”

There is absolutely no need for any of this. Vaccine studies are already extensive and thorough, and we have decades of real world data. No credible scientist disputes any of it. But one obvious outgrowth of such a fruitless exercise will be to increase vaccine skepticism and hesitancy. And ultimately such “studies” could provide a pretext for the FDA to withdraw approval of life-saving vaccines.

As I’ll discuss below, RFK Jr.’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, is already stacking the deck against confirming the efficacy and safety of vaccines by vetting and appointing vaccine skeptics to important positions within the Department. Through this process, he could set up an anti-vax agenda from top to bottom at HHS.

An anti-vax zealot gets his shot

Aaron Siri probably can’t believe his good fortune. He has made his legal career out of representing anti-vax clients, including a group called the Informed Consent Action Network, an organization whose founder is also a close Kennedy ally. In that capacity, as the Times reports, as recently as 2022 Siri petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.

That’s right, he wants to see the polio vaccine withdrawn, even though it has saved countless children from death or lifetime disability.

Siri has gone after 13 other vaccines, too, including the Hepatitis B vaccine, and has crusaded around the country to lift Covid mandates. His tactic is to impugn the integrity of the scientists responsible for developing the vaccines and poke as many holes as he can into their product development, safety studies and approvals. He does this by playing on the preconceptions and fears of the conspiracy-minded, making otherwise harmless errors or oversights appear as massive and even intentional frauds upon the public.

One critic of Siri’s crusades is Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the inventor of the vaccine that eliminated rubella in the 1960s. Before the vaccine, it was a disease that killed thousands of newborns. Siri deposed Plotkin in a lawsuit Siri had brought. After spending nine hours being grilled by Siri, Dr. Plotkin believes that putting Siri in any position of influence “would be a disaster.” Dr. Plotkin added, “I find him laughable in many ways — except, of course, that he’s a danger to public health.”

Siri still managed to put a target on Dr. Plotkin, however, by publishing snippets of that deposition online, along with those of one Dr. Kathryn Edwards, another noted inventor of vaccines. Siri had the help of an anti-vax documentary maker and podcaster, Del Bigtree—who is also RFK, Jr.’s former campaign communications director and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network. As a result, Drs. Plotkin and Edwards have been vilified by anti-vaxxers instead of celebrated for their stunning accomplishments.

“You’re taking the leaders in vaccinology,” Dr. Edwards told the Times, “the people that have spent their whole lives studying these vaccines and seeing their impact, you’re marginalizing and making them look like they are prostitutes of pharma.”

Of great concern is how Siri is now working with RFK, Jr. to actively vet candidates for top positions at HHS. According to the Times, Siri has asked candidates about their view on vaccines, potentially setting up HHS to have a uniformly anti-vax agenda.

RFK, Jr. and his advisors, like Siri and Bigtree, could succeed in having vaccines actually pulled from the market based on the “studies” they are demanding, the conclusions of which we can assume are pre-ordained. But even short of actually yanking important vaccines, the platforming of anti-vax conspiracies and disinformation will create widespread vaccine hesitancy, which could result in serious and deadly outbreaks.

History could repeat on a huge scale

We need only look at what RFK, Jr. did in Samoa to understand the extent of the damage and even death his views can cause. In 2019, the small island nation experienced a deadly outbreak of measles, with 5,700 infections out of a population of 200,000. Hospitals were full, and the country was in a state of emergency. In the end, 83 people died, most of them young children.

But what had caused this outbreak? Childhood measles vaccinations rates plummeted from 90 percent in 2013 to just a third of all infants by 2019 due to a health scandal where nurses had improperly mixed the measles vaccine with the wrong liquid, resulting in two deaths. That incident opened the floodgates for vaccine misinformation driven by RFK, Jr. and his anti-vaccine non-profit, the Children’s Health Defense.

At one point RFK, Jr. even sent the Samoan prime minister a letter suggesting the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak. He falsely asserted that it had “failed to produce antibodies” in mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and even that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children.

As the Washington Post reported, Samoan officials have been warning the world ever since.

Experts from Samoa have been particularly vocal in sounding the alarm, citing the destructive impact of Kennedy’s rhetoric on the tiny Polynesian island nation.

Warning that Kennedy will empower the global anti-vaccine movement and may advocate for reduced funding for international agencies, Professor Aiono Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for Samoa’s Health Ministry told The Washington Post that Kennedy “will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant.”

“I don’t think it’s a legacy that should be associated with the Kennedy name,” Ekeroma said in an email Friday.

With Trump’s hot air now filling RFK, Jr.’s deadly sails, the entire U.S. could become the next country to suffer from the spread of his dangerous anti-vax falsehoods.

There is still an opportunity to stop RFK’s confirmation, if the GOP-controlled Senate finds enough backbone and common sense. But time is running out to change minds and stand up to Trump. Meanwhile, RFK Jr.’s allies in the anti-vax movement, like Siri and Bigtree, are gearing up to unleash a true nightmare upon our health system.