Trump nominee's top ally calls for polio vaccines to be pulled from market: report

A lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick his public health team for the incoming Donald Trump administration has asked the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, according to a new report.

Kennedy ally Aaron Siri, who represented him during his failed presidential bid, has also filed a petition on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network asking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines and challenged Covid vaccine mandates, demanding millions of pages in documents from the Food and Drug Administration, reported the New York Times.

“This is a way to hobble a public health agency like the F.D.A. — you can just drown them in paperwork so they can’t do their work,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, an expert in public health law at Georgetown University.

ALSO READ: The reckoning: Plenty of hurts coming for the people who didn't care about their country

Kennedy, who Trump has nominated for health secretary, insists he does not want to prohibit access to any vaccines, but a source familiar with the discussions say that Siri has been helping him interview candidates for top health positions, and they have asked them about their views on vaccines.

“I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy told podcaster Del Bigtree, his former campaign communications director and the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”

He has also privately expressed interest in having Siri serve as the Health and Human Services Department’s general counsel, but Siri has said that he might have more influence outside the administration.

“Somebody on the outside needs to be petitioning them,” Siri said last month on a podcast.

The polio vaccine has been widely used in North America and Europe and studied extensively since its development in 1977, according to its manufacturer, and more than 280 million people have received it worldwide, but Siri has called for the shots to be pulled from the market until they can be tested against placebos in randomized, double-blind clinical trials.

“You’re substituting a theoretical risk for a real risk,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. ”The real risks are the diseases.”