Questions for RFK Jr.’s Senate Confirmation: Part I

RFK Jr. will soon be asked questions about heading the Department of Health and Human Services. Here are some suggestions.

Mr. Kennedy, you have been nominated to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest department in the United States government. HHS has an annual budget of $1.85 trillion and supervises 80,000 employees. I have some concerns about your appointment:

Question #1: On July 6, 2023, while appearing on a popular podcast, you said “no vaccine is safe and effective.” However, CDC has estimated that between 1994 and 2023, childhood vaccines in the United States have prevented 1.1 million deaths, 508 million illnesses, and 32 million hospitalizations.

Do you disagree with the CDC’s assessment? And, if so, why?

Question #2: On that same podcast, when asked about the polio vaccine, you said, “The polio vaccine contained a virus called SV40. It’s one of the most carcinogenic viruses known to man…98 million people who got that vaccine in my generation now have this explosion in soft tissue cancers [that] kill many, many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” This concern has now been examined in more than a dozen studies. Researchers compared cancer rates in children who had received SV40-contaminated polio vaccines with unvaccinated children. Eight years after receiving the tainted vaccines, the cancer incidence was identical in both groups. The same was true fifteen and thirty-five years later. And it was true for children who received SV40-contaminated vaccines in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. By the mid-1990s public-health officials were confident that the inadvertent contamination of several lots of polio vaccines with SV40 in the early 1960s hadn’t caused cancer. Further, the CDC has estimated that in 1952, three years before Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was available, 21,000 people were paralyzed by the virus and 1800 killed. In 1960, five years after the vaccine was licensed, 2,525 cases were reported: in 1965, 61 cases. By 1979, paralytic polio was eliminated from the United States.

Do you still believe that the polio vaccine caused “many many more deaths” than it prevented? And, if so, on what do you base that statement?

Question #3: You have said that the Covid-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” despite evidence that it is both safe and highly effective, estimated to have saved at least 3 million American lives.

On what do you base your statement? And, if you had been the head of HHS at the start of the pandemic, knowing what you know now, would you have recommended against authorizing Covid-19 vaccines?

Question #4: On the “Health Freedom for Humanity” podcast in 2021, when asked how parents should respond to the CDC’s immunization schedule, you encouraged people to join you in telling strangers not to vaccinate their babies. You said, “When I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, maybe he will save that child.”

If you were the parent of young children today, would you vaccinate them according to the routine CDC immunization schedule? And, if not, which vaccines would you avoid and why?