One of RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisers recently floated the idea of stopping vaccination against the virus. It would be catastrophic.
In the United States, polio is a memory, and a fading one at that. The last major outbreak here happened in 1952; the virus was declared eliminated in 1979. With all of that behind us, you can see how someone—say, Kirk Milhoan, the chair of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee—might wonder whether giving the polio vaccine to American kids still makes sense. “We need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now,” Milhoan said on the podcast Why Should I Trust You? last week.
To be fair, Milhoan didn’t endorse yanking the polio vaccine from the CDC’s childhood-immunization schedule, as other vaccines were earlier this month. But he didn’t rule it out. And right now, when it comes to vaccines in America, anything seems possible. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, and with the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee stacked with his allies, every inoculation—no matter how well studied or successful—seems to be under new scrutiny, and at least potentially on the chopping block. Next on the committee’s agenda is looking into the safety of aluminum salts, which are used in numerous vaccines to boost the recipient’s immune response. For the record, a study of more than 1 million Danish children, published last July, found no statistically significant evidence linking aluminum in vaccines to asthma, autoimmune conditions, or neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.
