Oh, boy, here we go with the Trump lie-o-rama on vaccines and healthcare. The New York Times reported this morning that Aaron Siri, identified as “Kennedy’s lawyer” has petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio and Hepatitis B vaccines. Siri is further identified as helping Kennedy “pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration.” In that capacity, Siri has been interviewing prospective hires by asking them their opinions on vaccines. Kennedy is said to want Siri to serve as the Health and Human Services Department general counsel, the top lawyer for the agency. Siri has sued to stop a requirement for children to get flu vaccines in New York City schools. He sued the state of Mississippi successfully to get a religious exemption from the state requirement that children be vaccinated to attend school. He sued in multiple states to stop requirements for the COVID vaccine.
So, the guy who has filed repeated lawsuits to have vaccines withdrawn from use, and to stop requirements that vaccines be administered for school children, will be in charge of defending the FDA and HHS against such lawsuits in the future. That’s like inviting the fox inside the chicken house and providing the fox with a file with which to sharpen his teeth while he guards the chickens.
You see, after nearly seven decades of saving lives and preventing paralysis with the polio vaccine alone, not to mention saving the lives of countless babies with the rubella vaccine and other vaccines regularly given infants, it will now be the correct thing in the Department of Health and Human Services to question whether vaccines have been effective in saving the lives of children.
Because, of course, opinions are equal to facts and evidence in the utterly upside-down scientific world of the new Trump administration. Siri has filed petitions and lawsuits on behalf of a group of vaccine skeptics called the Informed Consent Action Network, which believes in something called “medical freedom.” “I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy said recently on a podcast hosted by yet another vaccine skeptic. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”
Siri has either sued or filed petitions with the FDA to stop or suspend the use of 13 vaccines regularly given to children including vaccines that prevent tetanus, diphtheria, polio and hepatitis A, according to the Times.
Trump, in his recent interview with Time Magazine for its cover story, said he wants Kennedy to “do some very serious testing” of vaccines. It goes without saying that all vaccines in use in the United States today have been tested again and again for safety and efficacy. “We’ll see the numbers,” Trump told Time, speaking of the prospective testing he wants Kennedy to do on vaccines. “A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good.”
Trump was asked by Time if his administration could cancel some vaccines. Here is the sum total of his response: “It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.”
So, there it is, folks. Donald Trump is going to cut through all controversy that doesn’t exist in the medical community about vaccines that have been tested and proven safe, because he alone will make all future scientific medical determinations about what should be used and what shouldn’t. The standard for the FDA and the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services will be what Donald Trump himself thinks is “good,” or “not good.”
Allow me to interject some personal experience here as a kind of reality check. I recently went to the Gagnon Cardiac Institute of the Morristown, New Jersey hospital to have a stent inserted in one of the veins of my heart. This is not the first time I have undergone serious medical procedures. I had a heart bypass in 2010 and a spinal fusion in 1999.
All those procedures had one thing in common: when you walk through the doors of an American hospital for surgery or for any other serious medical procedures or care, that is it. You’re in there to be treated with whatever they’ve got. You had the choice of which doctor to treat you and which hospital you want the procedure done, but after that, inside the hospital, you’re going to get whatever they’ve got. You don’t choose the drug to relax you. You don’t choose which needle to use for your drip. You don’t choose the equipment they will use, which probe they’re going to send up your femoral artery or which scalpel will cut into the muscles of your back or which clamp they’ll use to shut off the blood flow where they’re working. If you need something to speed up or slow down your metabolism during surgery, you don’t choose that drug. You don’t even choose the brand of the blood pressure cuff that’s on your arm or the method by which they monitor your heart rhythms and breathing.
A hospital is not a marketplace. They don’t have racks of medical equipment like products in a Target store when you go into surgery. They don’t wake you up to ask you whether you’d like this anti-Afib drug or that one if your heart rhythm goes haywire.
This whole thing of “medical freedom” is a fiction that ends when you get out of your car and walk into a hospital and ask the people in an emergency room to save your life. If you fucked up and listened to Bobby Kennedy and Aaron Siri or Donald Trump and decided not to get a COVID shot, and you’re in a critical care unit and you’re being hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs have ceased to function, they don’t ask you why you neglected to get vaccinated. They just treat you. They don’t ask you which heart drugs you want them to inject into your IV connection, or what brand of tube you want them to insert through your chest to drain your chest cavity of fluids. They just do it, and if you survive and several days later can walk out of the hospital, you thank them, you don’t argue with them about which drugs or procedures or equipment they used to save your life.
We live in a country with the most expensive health care in the world, but because our federal government requires everything to be tested before it’s used, whatever they put into your body is safe. The FDA tests vaccines and drugs and medical equipment like ventilators and surgical gear like heart probes and whatever they shove up your ass to look around in your colon to make sure you don’t have cancer. The government has requirements that the hospitals you use meet certain cleanliness standards. That’s why the floors you’re pushed down on a gurney are shiny, and there isn’t any dust or germs that can blow up onto your body and get into your surgical suite and infect you when they open you up or stick a probe into you.
We should be thanking our lucky stars that we have a Department of Health and Human Services and an FDA to keep us safe, and the National Institutes of Health to study diseases and cures and preventatives for disease.
Donald Trump is appointing a person who has, during his lifetime, and during the lifetimes of his wives and his children, made use of our excellent hospitals and their excellent standards of care. He has benefitted from the vaccines that he was given after he was born and as a child when they were required for him to attend grade school and high school and college. To my knowledge, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not suffer from polio or hepatitis, despite the fact that he was a heroin user for 14 years of his life, a common vector for Hepatitis and other infections.
Vaccines probably saved Kennedy’s life, but because he’s a privileged, narcissistic monster who, the evidence tells us, cares for himself but not for others who would benefit from the same vaccines that probably saved his life, this country is likely to enter a new level of the spread of disease and infection that could be avoided if the people of this country had not elected an equally privileged and narcissistic monster as their president.
These monsters have already caused the deaths of women from bans on emergency care for problem pregnancies and other healthcare denials related to bans on abortion, all of which was done in the face of medical evidence of their necessity to save lives of women and newborns. Now Trump and his chosen crew of quacks will be in charge of the very federal departments that have successfully, until now at least, ensured the safety and efficacy of vaccines, drugs, medical equipment and hospitals, and they are set to drive our entire medical system into the same ditch they drove women’s reproductive healthcare.
We have done this to ourselves. God help us.
