The co-chair of Donald Trump's would-be transition team said that if the former president is given a second term in office, his administration will work to pull vaccines off the market.
Howard Lutnick made the comment during a Wednesday night appearance on CNN, where he was asked whether Trump will appoint anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the country’s public health agencies.
Lutnick said Kennedy won’t get the position as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, but rather that Trump will give Kennedy access to data to help him go after vaccines.
“He wants the data, so he can say, ‘These things are unsafe,’” Lutnick told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off, off of the market.’”
Lutnick also described a conversation he had with Kennedy, in which Kennedy spread the widely debunked hoax that vaccines cause autism.
“What [Kennedy] explained was, when he was born, we had three vaccines and autism was 1 in 10,000. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines … and autism is 1 in 34,” Lutnick said.
Vaccinations do not cause autism, full stop. The rise in autism diagnoses is because doctors better understand the neurological disorder and now have better criteria to diagnose it, as NBC News and many others have reported.
Kennedy, who suspended his independent presidential bid to endorse Trump, said on Monday that Trump promised him “control of the public health agencies.”
"The key, which President Trump has promised me, is control of the public health agencies, which is HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others. And also the USDA, which is, you know, key to making America healthy, because we've got to get off of seed oils and we've got to get off of pesticides … and we need to make that transition to regenerative agriculture," Kennedy said, according to ABC News.
Trump also said at his racist MSG rally that he'd let Kennedy "go wild on health" and "the medicines."
The role of Kennedy in a future Trump administration has doctors and scientists terrified. Further eroding Americans' trust in vaccines could lead to the rise of deadly diseases that vaccines have helped eradicate, such as polio.
“I can’t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told CNN.
Polling shows that trust in vaccines is on the decline. Just 40% of Americans say it's “extremely important” to vaccinate their kids, according to a recent Gallup poll. And that’s a stark decline since 2001, when 64% said it was extremely important.
The decline in vaccine trust comes as Republicans have made anti-vaccine rhetoric part of their stump speeches. And it’s already caused harm to Republican voters, who died at greater rates than Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many GOP voters refused to get vaccinated against the deadly virus.
“Make sure you tell the undecided voters you speak to that Trump is gonna let RFK Jr. try to yank vaccines from the market that prevent our kids from getting measles and other diseases,” Jon Favreau, former speechwriter for then-President Barack Obama and current host of the popular podcast “Pod Save America,” wrote in a post on X.
Correction: A previous version of this story described autism as a disease. Per the CDC, it’s a neurological/development disorder.
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