A lawyer who advises Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week denounced a New York Times report alleging that Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary wanted to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the polio vaccine.
“Contrary to hysterical media reports that the petition was intended to ensure that polio vaccines would not be available, the scope of the petition was quite limited,” Aaron Siri, a close RFK Jr. advisor and partner, told me at Siri & Glimstad LLP, to Fox News. Digital. “It simply asked the FDA to require a proper trial before pediatric licensing of a new polio vaccine.”
The New York Times reported on Friday that Siri is “waging a war” against all vaccines, but Siri said the report “falsely claimed that the petition aimed to eliminate the polio vaccine,” as if there was only one, and that our client was trying to give Americans the choice to eliminate polio vaccine. get vaccinated against polio.”
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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. which supported former President Donald Trump, sparked a wave of intense backlash from the mainstream media. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
“In reality, the petition was intended to ensure the safety of one of the six existing approved polio vaccines that we inject into our children three times before their first birthday,” he said.
The report came just days before RFK Jr. left Capitol Hill this week to meet with senators seeking support for his HHS confirmation.
The petition, filed in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and not as an individual action by Siri, urged the FDA to suspend the polio vaccine IPOL for infants and children. ICAN’s request stems from concerns that IPOL, which was approved by Sanofi in 1990, was approved on the basis of pediatric studies that, according to the FDAassessed safety just three days after injection.
This is not the traditional polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk or Albert Sabin that many people are familiar with, Siri added. Instead, it is a product that uses a different technology, in which the polio virus is grown on monkey kidney cells that have been genetically modified to multiply indefinitely, similar to cancer cells. Traces of these cells are present in each vaccine dose.
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Nurse Lydia Fulton prepares to administer the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and a vaccine used to help prevent the diseases diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio at the Children’s Primary Care Clinic in Minneapolis, MN , Friday, April 28, 2017. (Courtney Perry/For the Washington Post)
Another petition filed on behalf of ICAN in 2021 concerns 13 childhood vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants. According to the petition, a peer-reviewed study found discrepancies between the aluminum levels in these vaccines and the amounts listed on their FDA-approved labels. The petition calls on the FDA to verify and publicly release documentation proving the accuracy of the aluminum content, or halt distribution until it is resolved – an issue that critics say should not be controversial for products injected into infants .
“Currently, political labeling (pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine) is inadequate to capture the realities of medical ethics, regulation, and the influence of corporate money on health policy,” Siri said. “We need to be able to ask valid questions about vaccine safety, efficacy and policy without fear that any deviation from the ‘safe and effective’ mantra will be smeared with invective and outrage.”
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U.S. Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a listening session on youth vaping of electronic cigarettes on November 22, 2019 in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
In the days since the media reported on Siri’s petition, both Trump and RFK Jr. have said they support the polio vaccine, without specifying which one. RFK Jr. has expressed skepticism about some vaccines, while supporting the use of others, in interviews during his 2024 presidential campaign, as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) slogan.
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“Mr. Kennedy believes that the polio vaccine should be available to the public and should be thoroughly and well studied,” Katie Miller, Kennedy’s transition spokeswoman, said in response.
Meanwhile, Trump said during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago Monday morning that “everything has to be looked at,” adding that he is “strongly in favor of the polio vaccine.”
Fox News Digital reached out to The New York Times for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
