Robert F Kennedy Jr reportedly sought to block the historic and pioneering new Covid-19 vaccinations in 2021, six months after they began being rolled out at the height of the pandemic when many thousands of people were dying of the virus.
In a petition filed with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May 2021, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the $1.8tn Department of Health and Human Services – who was not an elected politician or public official at that time – called on health officials to rescind emergency government authorization for the shots and to refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future, the New York Times reported on Friday.
The petition, the newspaper reported, was filed on behalf of Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization that Kennedy, now 71, led and had founded.
It argued that what Kennedy claimed to be the risks of the vaccines outweighed the benefits. He also said that they were not necessary because there were alternative treatments for Covid-19 already available, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, both of which had been promoted by Donald Trump, then the US president. However, such alternative treatments were found by public health experts to be ineffective, while the ground-breaking vaccines dramatically reduced both the lethality and severity of the coronavirus and ultimately helped to save millions of lives in the US and across the world.
Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna led the charge in the US to develop groundbreaking vaccines using new technology in record time, also heavily backed by the Trump administration at a time when a terrified public was desperate to resist the virus, to which humans did not have immunity.
Kennedy’s petition came five months after Trump announced that the FDA’s green light for the vaccine was imminent under a $20bn program he had dubbed Operation Warp Speed and described as “a monumental national achievement”.
Kennedy will face pressure during confirmation hearings in the US Senate next week over his anti-vaccine stance and pushing of debunked theories, such as a link between the increase in childhood vaccine schedules and a rise in autism rates. Trump has said he supports an investigation into the issue, despite outcry from leading voices in the public health sphere who have long seen Kennedy’s views and outsize influence as dangerous but are now acutely alarmed as he stands on the brink of becoming US health secretary.
But there may be some distance between Trump and Kennedy on the issue of Covid vaccines and the wider issue of inoculation and research into new vaccines. Studies have found a link between mRNA Covid-19 vaccines and an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis – heart and heart- muscle inflammation – but deemed the risk low.
Meanwhile, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, pro-vaccine tech leader and philanthropist Bill Gates, the former chief executive of Microsoft, said he had a three-hour dinner with Trump and found the president-elect to be receptive to vaccinations and vaccine development.
Gates described their discussion as “quite wide-ranging”, and said the two men talked about global health issues – a focus of the $75bn Gates Foundation – and the development of a cure for HIV.
“He, in the Covid days, accelerated the vaccine innovation,” Gates told the Journal. “So I was asking him if maybe the same kind of thing could be done here, and we both got, I think, pretty excited about that.”
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The dining partners also discussed efforts to combat polio around the world, which the World Health Organization had recently warned was at “high risk” of spreading in the decimated Palestinian territory of Gaza amid the military onslaught by Israel.
Gates added that he felt Trump “was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation. I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up.”
Kennedy told reporters that he was “all for” the polio vaccine – hours after Trump said Americans are “not going to lose the polio vaccine”.
