RFK Jr reportedly sought to block Covid-19 vaccinations at height of pandemic
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Trump’s pick to lead US health policy lobbied to rescind 2021 authorization and to deny any future vaccine. 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.
