A Cluster of Health Crazies Imperils Us All

It’s not only Trump’s nominations that may be dangerous, it’s also the secondary people loyal to his picks. A primer on how and why a Kennedy sidekick's attack on the polio vaccine is so threatening.

Bigtree, Kennedy & Siri at a strategy session; an iron lung & braces

Sometimes in life it’s not the initial crackpot who is most dangerous. It’s how their lies, distortions, conspiracy theories and baseless claims prod others to act in screwball ways, creating crazed clusters of folks that give these ludicrous ideas undue weight.

On Friday, we learned from The New York Times that Aaron Siri — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s right-hand man in selecting who he’ll hire if he gets to lead America’s health team — filed suit against the FDA just two years ago to stop use of the polio vaccine in the U.S..

The POLIO vaccine!

It’s bad enough that Donald Trump is putting people into incredibly powerful positions in the Justice Department and the FBI whose main goal is to keep his political enemies in check, and possibly jail them. But this displays how secondary people loyal to his picks may make his choices for key White House jobs even more dangerous.

Siri, a lawyer who was often by Kennedy Jr.’s side during his brief presidential run, has filed myriad legal actions against vaccines designed to return Americans to the early 1900s, when any number of killer illnesses surged. I’ve written extensively about the "wild" health theories Kennedy Jr. so adores and his personal issues in the past, as have many others.

Siri has largely remained out of the headlines until now. Much of his work -- not only against polio, but also other vaccines, including hepatitis B -- has been on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network founded by Del Matthew Bigtree, another close ally to Kennedy Jr.

On Facebook, you’ll find Kennedy Jr., Bigtree and Siri proudly photographed, together at “a strategy session at my home on Cape Cod,” Kennedy writes. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, meanwhile, lists both Bigtree and Kennedy Jr. as members of what they label the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group responsible for 65% of the anti-vaccine misinformation online.

You have to wonder how many of Kennedy’s and Bigtree’s anti-vaccine storm troopers are going to end up at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) overviewing the “safety” studies on vaccines that Donald Trump said in his Time magazine interview will be done by Kennedy Jr., who isn’t a scientist or a doctor. You think studies that designed from the onset to prove a link between vaccines & autism won’t be leaned in that direction?

The words “disinformation dozen” don’t do Kennedy Jr., Bigstreet and Siri justice. I prefer the words “crazed cluster,” if we’re determined to fall back on alliteration to describe them.

Jonas Salk, who developed the first successful polio vaccine, must be turning over in his grave right now. On that note, let’s take a little side trip through history. Given that many Americans aren’t all that familiar with the effects of polio anymore, here’s a quickie primer.

In 1952, the year I was born, around 60,000 Americans suffered with paralytic polio, and it killed about a third of those infected. Salk created the first vaccine three years later. By the time I turned 13, when a visit to the local pool could well have given me the virus if I wasn’t vaccinated, only 61 cases were recorded.

In 1979, when I was 27 with a 2-year-old son and a pregnant wife, polio was eliminated in the U.S.

How bad was polio? Beyond being deadly, survivors could face lifelong consequences that include paralysis, deformed limbs and partially or permanently paralyzed chest muscles that forced victims to be encased — for weeks for some, a lifetime for others — in “iron lungs,” large, airtight metal boxes that used bellows and vacuum cleaners to mimic breathing.

Siri has been working as a “top adviser” for Kennedy as he builds out his staffing and plans for his proposed job as chief of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, according to The Washington Post, whose reporting followed the Times’s initial story on Siri.

How did Trump’s transition team respond to questions about Siri?

He “has never had a conversation about these petitions with Mr. Kennedy or any of the HHS nominees at any point,” Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for Kennedy, said in an interview with the Post. The vaccine “should be investigated and studied appropriately. We should be as transparent as possible, as it relates to vaccines, but it should be available to the public.”

Never had any conversations? Does she think Kennedy is unaware that these suits occurred ? Check the photograph at the top here; these guys are close. Studied appropriately? The vaccine has been studied for decades at a deep level, and real life has displayed both its safety and effectiveness

Salk tested his experimental killed-virus vaccine on himself and his family in 1953, and a year later on 1.6 million children in Canada, Finland and the US. The results were announced on April 12, 1955, and Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) was licensed on the same day.

Think about that number: 1.6 million. Trials were also carried out in the Soviet Union, on 20,000 children in 1958 and 10 million children in 1959, and in Czechoslovakia, on over 110,000 children from 1958 to 1959. All proved the vaccine safe and effective as have the almost 70 years it’s been in use since.

One of Kennedy’s long-time conspiracy theories is that vaccines have caused the rise of autism among American children.

Experts in the disease, however, say the numbers have risen because more people have sought evaluation and diagnoses as the amount of public education, media representation and advocacy, leading to greater recognition of symptoms and behaviors. At the same time, they point out that the diagnosis of autism has been broadened by the inclusion of a wide range of symptoms within an "autism spectrum.”

If a singular vaccine is indeed found to be safe, the conspiracy theorists say maybe the problem is the pure number of vaccines for kids is overtaxing children’s immune systems, leading to autism. But vaccines today contain far fewer stimulants to the immune system, by orders of magnitude, than in days of yore.

What’s more, the immune reactions produced by vaccines are “minuscule” compared with those children normally experience in their day-to-day lives, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford University, said in today’s New York Times.

So is there a compelling reason to study autism on its own, forgetting about the bogus vaccine link? There is, since we’re not sure whether there are environmental factors, like exposure to air pollution or pesticides, issues with maternal obesity and age, or even genetics that are at the base of the virus. But do you think Kennedy Jr. and his ilk will do this, or focus every gun they have at the baseless link they’ve been misinforming people about for decades?

Right.

Kennedy Jr. has said he won’t take vaccines away from people, but in the past he’s suggested that families should have a choice on whether their children get them, that they shouldn’t be mandated. But that can cause bigger problems, allowing the polio virus to adjust and get stronger in the unvaccinated to the point where the vaccines now made no longer work.

And then, my friends, we’re back to square one.

“People forget that a president of the United States was paralyzed by polio. FDR struggled to use his legs for the rest of his life,” Richard Hughes IV, who teaches vaccine policy at the George Washington Law School, is quoted by the Post as saying. “Every summer, mothers were afraid. They lived in fear of letting their children go off to the swimming pool.”

Want to know another politician who has suffered as a result of the virus, and who may be able to control Kennedy’s nomination? It’s Mitch McConnell, a hard-baked Republican who has feuded with Trump in the past. He suffered with polio as a child a decade before the vaccine was widely available.

When his left leg was paralyzed, McConnell’s mother took him for treatment in Warm Springs, Ga., at the same treatment center frequented by Roosevelt. Although McConnell mostly recovered, the disease left him with a wobbly, uneven gait as an adult. He has spoken often of the experience.

Yesterday, McConnell called efforts to undermine public confidence in proven preventatives “dangerous," adding that “anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts." He didn’t name Kennedy Jr., Siri or Trump, but hey you know who he’s addressing.

I honestly never thought I’d say this, but “Go Mitch go!” Hopefully, he can persuade other Senators to the danger inherent in Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to lead an agency that has a direct hand in the health of all Americans, no matter what political party they belong to. What do you think?