Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies might be the most dangerous threat to public health since polio itself.
In a post on X, conservative Never-Trumper group Republicans Against Trump shared a photo of the president-elect standing next to his Health Department Chair choice Robert F. Kennedy Jr, with the words "Make Polio great again" summarizing the caption. According to the post, one of RFK Jr.'s allies once petitioned the government to revoke the polio vaccine. Aaron Siri, a lawyer who worked for Kennedy while he was running for president, has petitioned the F.D.A. dozens of times to revoke the approval for numerous vaccines, including one for hepatitis B.
The request to curb polio vaccination from an ally of RFK Jr. shouldn't come as a shock. RFK Jr. is the brains behind many of America's whackiest public health conspiracies. He believes that U.S. tap water turns kids gay (it doesn't). He believes milk is at its healthiest when raw (it's a Petri dish). He believes that Covid "ethnically targeted" Black and white people while sparing Chinese people and Jews (it didn't). And he's a proponent of the thoroughly debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. If that wasn't enough of a resume, he also reportedly cut the head off of a dead beached whale and once deposited a dead bear cub in Central Park.
As one X (formerly Twitter) put it, "This cannot be reality."
Despite the polio vaccine's success since 1955, Siri has taken after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to spread doubt about its safety and efficacy. Speaking of safety and efficacy, the widespread use of the vaccine has caused polio -- once a death sentence or close to it -- to be effectively wiped out in the United States since 1979.
Despite the near-global elimination of naturally transmitted or "wild" polio, the disease is making a comeback. A strain of polio known as "vaccine-derived polio" is causing harm in unvaccinated populations around the globe. Vaccine-derived polio comes from the orally administered polio vaccine, which contains trace amounts of the still-living, albeit weakened virus. While the orally administered vaccine is entirely safe and much more cost-effective than the inactivated vaccine, trace amounts of the virus can, in exceedingly rare cases, be excreted in the stool of a vaccinated person. If the vaccine is administered in places that struggle with water treatment, then unvaccinated people can contract the disease from contaminated water. Vaccine-derived polio is currently on the rise in Gaza due to the near-total collapse of infrastructure from which the area is currently suffering due to the ongoing conflict. The virus has also sprung up in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- wastewater again was to blame.
Polio vaccine efficacy in the United States is another matter entirely. Since 2000, the inactivated polio vaccine has been the only polio inoculation administered in the United States. The polio sample within this vaccine is dead and poses zero risk of infection. Despite the safety of the polio vaccine and vaccines like it, Robert F Kennedy Jr. and his allies have eroded public trust in the practice of inoculation. It was this same vaccine skepticism that led in part to the preventable deaths of at least 232,000 Americans due to complications from COVID-19. If RJK Jr. and his ilk are successfully able to convince more Americans, or worse the government itself, to forgo vaccination, more death is in store for the nation.
Despite RFK Jr.'s assurance that he wants to "Make America Healthy Again," his and his allies' stance on vaccines alone proves he is dedicated to doing anything but.