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RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines (part 7): What, me worry (about polio and HPV)?
Last week was a hellscape for vaccines, with a RICO lawsuit against the AAP and the newly antivax CDC coming for your HPV and polio vaccines.
The post RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines (part 7): What, me worry (about polio and HPV)? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”
Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part 3
This is one of those weeks when I feel obligated once again to begin my post with this little clip from The Godfather, Part 3, in which Michael Corleone laments:
I totally felt this as I sat down to write this week’s post. After having just last week posted the sixth part of my series, RFK Jr. Is Definitely Coming for Your Vaccines, I had been hoping to go at least a few weeks—or even a couple of months!—without succumbing to feeling the horrible, irresistible need to write a seventh segment in the series, but, damn, the Trump administration and its Secretary of Health and Human Services, antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just couldn’t let me go anywhere near that long. As much as I tried to force myself to write about the shitstorm that the NIH has become in light of a recent story in Nature (maybe next week or as an inaugural post to resurrect my not-so-secret other blog, as I’ve been hoping to do early in 2026), I kept coming back to this story in STAT News last week:
There is SO MUCH STUFF to dissect in this article.
Discuss.
www.statnews.com/2026/01/22/v…
— Megan Ranney MD MPH (@meganranney.bsky.social) January 23, 2026 at 8:57 AM
And then there was this story published in the New York Times on Friday: Rejecting Decades of Science, Vaccine Panel Chair Says Polio and Other Shots Should Be Optional. Suffice to say, I succumbed and let the darkness flow over me and in me. I had to write about this again, and what better way to do it than as part seven of this series?
And, yes, I know that it is the Trump administration that is behind all this and that there would be an attack on public health and science no matter who was in charge of HHS. However, once again I will argue that, absent RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary, there would not be this monomaniacal focus on eliminating as many vaccines as rapidly as possible and reducing and destroying access to as many vaccines as possible as rapidly as possible. The reason? Anyone else appointed to be HHS Secretary would enthusiastically attack science and public health, but every candidate I’ve looked at who might plausibly have been appointed to helm HHS (or might be appointed to replace RFK Jr., should he finally flame out by annoying Trump too much) is not a fanatical antivaxxer who has been working to undermine confidence in vaccines and eliminate vaccines for over two decades. For any other HHS Secretary under Trump, the antivax would be just subsumed into the broader anti-science and anti-public health portfolio that the administration wants, just one part of many, rather than the primary focus.
Moving on, though, that’s not all there is to cover in RFK Jr.’s ongoing quest to eliminate vaccines. Over at The Defender, the “news” part of Children’s Health Defense, the antivax organization founded by RFK Jr. and whose leadership RFK Jr. only left after he had decided to run for President, which led to him eventually bending the knee to then-candidate Donald Trump in return for the power to destroy public health in this country as President Trump’s instrument, antivaxxers are exulting, Children’s Health Defense Hits AAP With RICO Suit Over Fraudulent Vaccine Safety Claims.
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