Mr. Kennedy filed a petition with the F.D.A. in May 2021 demanding that officials rescind authorization for the shots and refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future.The petition received little notice when it was filed. Mr. Kennedy was then on the fringes of the public health establishment, and the agency denied it within months. Public health experts told about the filing said it was shocking.
Whooping cough, or pertussis, is just the most stark example of what happens when vaccination rates decline. But it is far from the only one. .p> It might take a year or two, but there’s no question,” said Pejman Rohani, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Georgia.
It’s not just the unvaccinated who will have to worry. Even adults who were vaccinated decades ago may find themselves vulnerable to what are now considered childhood diseases.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who may become the secretary of health and human services, has said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a mythology.”
My mother had polio. We thought it was gone for good.
As the years passed, the numbers of polio victims kept rising, and by the middle of the 20th century, the disease was paralyzing or killing more than half a million people a year worldwide. The victims were mostly children younger than 5 years old. Some died outright, some were unable to breathe without the aid of iron lung machines, some were paralyzed for life. Some recovered partially but with permanently withered or deformed limbs. These children would spend the rest of their years struggling with crutches, metal leg braces or wheelchairs. The images are difficult to contemplate: small, brave figures with heavy braces, ungainly gaits, their lives stretching before them. My mother, despite her slowly worsening condition, had been lucky.
As recently as 2023, he said batches of an early version of the polio vaccine, contaminated with a virus, caused cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” The contamination was real, but research never bore out a link to cancer.
RFK Jr. said: 'We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on Jan. 20 so that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH [the National Institutes of Health], and 600 people are going to leave.'NIH has proven to be a good investment from an economic perspective as well. The money it used to fund research generated over $95 billion in economic growth in 2022. New treatments for addiction that NIH has helped move into the real world saved lives, and have potential returns of $58 for every dollar spent.
He's expressed a range of other conspiracy-laden ideas about health: He says fluoride is industrial waste linked to a range of diseases, and suggested it should be removed from all US water systems. He has speculated that gender dysphoria may result from herbicide exposure and implied mass shootings are linked to antidepressants.
There is a more realistic move Kennedy could take to address his concern about vaccine side effects: He could resuscitate the National Vaccine Program Office, which monitored vaccine safety with particular rigor but was shuttered under the first 'Old Donald' presidency.
Gallup found that 26 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners believe it is extremely important for parents to vaccinate their children. That is half as many than believed so in 2019.
However, when asked if there were any safe and effective vaccines on the market, Kennedy told podcaster Lex Fridman "no."
Republican lawmakers introduced a bill to ban solar geoengineering — putting aerosols into the atmosphere to block some of the radiation from the sun. As climate change drives up temperatures on Earth, there is growing interest in geoengineering as a way to cool the planet. But it’s still largely theoretical, with no evidence that anyone in Tennessee is planning to try it.Yet the ban sailed through the legislature. Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, signed it, making Tennessee the first state to outlaw geoengineering.
Behind the scenes, the bill was the result of lobbying by activists known in Republican circles from their efforts fighting vaccine mandates.
“We used the connections and the rapport that we had built over the last couple of years in medical freedom,” Danielle Goodrich of East Tennessee Freedom, which calls itself a “group of Patriots, Momma Bears, Conservative Christians,” explained on a podcast.
Those who have been vaccinated against mpox in the past might only need one-top up dose, rather than two shots.
ECDC says the risk of it spreading everywhere is low, despite the World Health Organization recently declaring the mpox situation a global emergency.
The disease - formally known as monkeypox - can be passed on by close contact with anyone with the infection.
"I don't know what's going on in his head but it's not good," Fauci added. The nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, and son of former Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy Sr. has long been vocal in his criticism of some vaccines, even before the COVID-19 vaccine existed.I look at some of my friends that I've made over time, who have children who are affected children who, you know, were perfectly healthy kids, who exceeded all their milestones. They lost everything," Kennedy Jr. said.
"I will not give ONE PENNY to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate."
Anticipating new fall vaccines, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has asked vaccine manufacturers to target a newer COVID variant called KP.2.
'Old Donald', of course, goes on the attack.
And, being 'Old Donald', he tries to flip the script. The former president, who once hailed the COVID-19 vaccines he ordered into existence as the height of American achievement, now attacks the country's best-known vaccine critic as … not hating vaccines enough.
The 62-year-old man came to researchers’ attention when German prosecutors opened up a fraud investigation, gathering evidence that he had obtained 130 coronavirus shots in a nine-month period — far more than recommended by health authorities.Going into the study, the researchers had speculated that having so many shots could cause his immune system to become fatigued. Vaccines create immune memory cells that are on standby, ready to rapidly activate the body’s defenses in the event of an infection.
But in fact, the researchers found that the man had more of these immune cells — known as T-cells — than a control group that had received the standard three-dose vaccine regimen. They also did not detect any fatigue in these cells, which they said were just as effective as those of people who had received a typical number of coronavirus shots.
The researchers made it clear that despite their findings, they “do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity.”
