A co-chairman of Donald Trump’s transition team said Trump supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants access to federal health data so he can show the vaccines are unsafe and lead to them being pulled from the market in a timely manner. second Trump administration.
Howard Lutnick echoed several debunked Kennedy anti-vaccine talking points in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, including falsehoods about the vaccine schedule and the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. Trump has often spoken about how Kennedy, who suspended his own presidential bid and endorsed him in August, will have an important role to play if the former president returns to the White House.
While Lutnick said Kennedy would not be elected secretary of Health and Human Services, he was not specific about what Kennedy’s role might be. Lutnick made the comments on the same day Kennedy told NewsNation that Trump asked him to “reorganize” agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food Administration and Drugs and some agencies dependent on the Department of Agriculture.
Lutnick’s comments raised immediate concerns among public health experts that giving influence to one of the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists could have what one said would be “serious health consequences” for Americans, especially children. They occur a few days before the November 5 elections and while Trump, the Republican and the Democrat Kamala Harris compete to sway late-deciding voters to their side.
Lutnick, CEO of financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald, told CNN that Kennedy wants access to the data “so he can say these things are not safe” and that will stop sales.
“He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I will take it and prove that it is not safe. And then if you remove product liability, companies will take these vaccines off the market. That’s his point,” Lutnick said.
It was unclear what data Lutnick was referring to, as extensive data and research on vaccine safety is publicly available.
The World Health Organization has estimated that global immunization efforts have saved at least 154 million lives over the past 50 years.
In recent days, Trump has said he would let Kennedy “go crazy” on health, food and medicine. Kennedy has repeatedly said he plans to exert influence over a wide range of policies if Trump wins and said Trump had promised him control over health agencies and told him he wanted him to reorganize them.
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When asked about Kennedy’s comments and his role in the Trump administration, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign, said the only thing Trump and his campaign are focused on is winning on November 5.
“Everything after that is after that, and President Trump has made it clear that Bobby Kennedy will play an important role,” Miller wrote.
It would be “extremely dangerous” to put Kennedy in a position of power where he could make decisions or have the ability to change regulatory policy, said Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean of public health practice at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“Removing vaccines from the market would have serious consequences for the health of the United States,” said Sharfstein, a former deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. “In the United States we go about our daily lives without worrying about many preventable diseases like measles because of the protection provided by vaccines. But if there were a systematic effort to use the federal government’s tools to undermine vaccination, children would not be safe. Final point.”
Even if Kennedy is given a smaller role in which he provides input and feedback but has no control over policy, he could still be disruptive, according to people who have held public health roles in the government.
“Advisers like Scott Atlas have demonstrated the significant influence they can wield without congressional oversight, raising fears of misinformation and harm,” Trump’s own surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, wrote in an email, referring to the former Trump advisor on the COVID-19 pandemic. a radiologist with no experience in infectious diseases, who advocated the widely discredited herd immunity strategy.
Adams said he believed it was unlikely that Kennedy could be appointed to lead a major health agency because he has no medical experience, would likely find it difficult to pass a background check for a top-secret clearance and would likely lack support from Congress, although Trump bypassed the background check system during his first administration and filled his Cabinet with sitting officials who had not received congressional approval.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization has a pending lawsuit against news organizations, including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking steps to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy is on leave from the group but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
Republican lawmakers have long enjoyed (and reciprocated) support from pharmaceutical companies, and have even vowed to dismantle a law signed by Democratic President Joe Biden that allows the government to negotiate the price of prescription drugs for Medicare enrollees. Republicans have argued that the law will hurt businesses and stifle innovation in the industry. But vaccine skepticism, growing across the country, has grown deeper among conservatives.
In addition to people’s health and well-being, the possibility that Kennedy’s influence would result in discredited ideas such as a vaccine’s link to autism being brought to light again and wasted time, energy and money disheartened advocates. of public health.
“Trump helped bring the vaccine to market and took it. … I don’t know why you’re giving this person this spokesperson,” said Amy Pisani, executive director of Vaccinate Your Family, noting that Trump’s Operation Warp Speed helped bring the COVID-19 vaccine to market, although Kennedy has attacked relentlessly.
Vaccinate Your Family is a nonpartisan group co-founded by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter and former Arkansas First Lady Betty Bumpers that has worked on vaccine programs with Republican and Democratic presidential administrations for the past 30 years.
“I don’t want to go back to fighting the anti-vaccine movement 30 years ago,” Pisani said. “Going back in time and wasting millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on this witch hunt again is simply unsustainable.”
© 2024 The Canadian Press
