Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is voicing his support for the polio vaccine as he tries to tamp down backlash over his longtime adviser’s efforts to roll back access to the lifesaving vaccine and win over GOP senators whose votes he will need to be confirmed as health secretary.
“I’m all for the polio vaccine,” Kennedy told reporters Monday as he walked into the Capitol to meet with Republicans.
Later, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said Kennedy had reassured him. “He said, ‘I 100% support polio vaccination,’” Mullin told reporters after the meeting.
The New York Times reported last week that Aaron Siri, a lawyer helping Kennedy vet potential health officials for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term, asked the federal government two years ago to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. Siri has a history of anti-vaccine efforts, the Times reported, including advocacy against the distribution of more than a dozen vaccines.
Kennedy’s seeming support for the polio vaccine now does not square with his history of expressing skepticism and spreading falsehoods about the vaccine — as well as the efficacy of vaccines in general. Just last year, for example, Kennedy suggested on a podcast that the polio vaccine may have caused cancers that “killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did,” saying the vaccine contains simian virus 40, or SV40.
According to the then-Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine, SV40 was found to have contaminated some polio vaccines administered from 1955 to 1963 and the virus was subsequently eliminated. “Although SV40 has biological properties consistent with a cancer-causing virus, it has not been conclusively established whether it might have caused cancer in humans,” the institute’s Immunization Safety Review Committee wrote in 2002. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine positions have alarmed Democrats, but they may ultimately prove less of an issue for Republicans. At a news conference Monday, Trump tried to assuage concerns about Kennedy. “I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think — I think he’s got a very open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there,” Trump told reporters.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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