Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s health services, formally asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of all vaccines during a deadly phase of the pandemic when thousands of Americans he was still dying every week.
Mr. Kennedy filed a petition with the FDA in May 2021 demanding that officials withdraw approval for the shots and refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future.
Just six months earlier, Mr. Trump had declared the Covid vaccines a miracle. While Mr. Kennedy filed the petition, half of American adults were getting their shots. Schools were reopening and churches were filling up.
Estimates were beginning to show that the rapid release of Covid vaccines had already saved about 140,000 lives in the United States.
The petition was filed on behalf of the non-profit organization founded and led by Mr. Kennedy, Children’s Health Defense. He argued that the risks of vaccines outweighed the benefits and that vaccines were not necessary because there were good treatments, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which had already been found to be ineffective against the virus.
The petition received little notice when it was filed. Mr. Kennedy was then on the fringes of the public health establishment, and the agency disproved it within months. Public health experts said the filing was shocking.
John Moore, a professor of immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, called Mr. Kennedy to FDA ‘a horrible error of judgement’. Greg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, likened that Mr. Kennedy leads the federal health services by “putting a flat earther in charge of NASA”.
Dr. Robert Califf, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, described Mr. Kennedy to stop use of Covid vaccines as ‘massive mistake’.
The representative of the transition of Mr. Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment, but said recently that he does not want to remove the vaccines.
Asked in November by an NBC reporter about his general opposition to Covid vaccines — and whether he would have halted approval — Mr. Kennedy said he is concerned that the vaccines have not stopped the transmission of the virus.
“I wouldn’t have blocked it outright,” he said. “I would have made sure we had the best science and there was no attempt to do that at the time.”
The early opposition of Mr. Kennedy on Covid vaccines has alarmed public health experts, many of whom argue he should be barred from overseeing health agencies empowered to authorize, monitor and fund millions of vaccines each year.
They also worry about how a potential bird flu pandemic could be handled, which could require the rapid development of vaccines.
As Mr. As Kennedy prepares for his confirmation hearings before two Senate committees, he and his allies have insisted they are not anti-vaccine.
In fact, in mid-2023, he told a House panel that he had gotten all the recommended vaccines — except for the Covid shot.
In his confirmation hearings, he will likely face scrutiny of his broader statements on vaccines, including that the polio vaccine cost more lives than it saved.
Mr. Trump has stepped up in recent weeks to defend Mr. Kennedy, after the New York Times reported that one of Mr. Kennedy’s lawyers Kennedy had previously asked the FDA to withdraw approval or stop distribution of several polio vaccines for safety reasons.
“I think he will be a lot less radical than you would think,” said Mr. Trump last month.
After the Times report, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy expressed their support for the polio vaccine.
If confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Kennedy will oversee $8 billion in funding for the Vaccines for Children program and have the authority to appoint new members to a committee that makes important vaccine recommendations to states.
At the time when Mr. Kennedy has questioned Covid vaccines, some of his objections to broader concerns about their rapid development. Emergency use authorization — a preliminary form of approval — for vaccinations was unusual. Others argued that a public health emergency dictated a quicker disposition.
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health, said it would be reasonable to debate whether Covid vaccines should have undergone additional study.
However, he strongly disagreed with the views of Mr. Kennedy, saying that “the idea that in early 2021 you could be saying that people over the age of 65 don’t need Covid vaccines – that’s just nuts.”
Vaccines have rare side effects and there have been cases of injury from Covid vaccines. Government officials are weighing the damage against the potential to save lives. An estimate published in early 2024 found that vaccines and Covid mitigation measures saved about 800,000 lives in the United States.
Another study found that in late 2021 and 2022, Covid death rates among the unvaccinated were 14 times the rates of those who had received a Covid booster. The researchers also estimated that from May 2021 to September 2022, more than 230,000 deaths could have been avoided among people who refused the initial Covid vaccination.
Since the beginning of the campaign for Covid vaccines, the view of Mr. Kennedy that Covid vaccines were dangerous put him at odds with Mr. Trump, whose vaccine development Operation Warp Speed ​​was one of his policy triumphs. And Mr. Kennedy launched a concerted anti-vaccine campaign.
Mr. Kennedy told Louisiana lawmakers in late 2021 that the Covid vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever.”
He remained a plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Biden and others, challenging efforts by government officials to limit his ability to suggest on social media that Covid vaccines were unsafe.
In January 2021, Mr. Kennedy suggested on Facebook that the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron, 86, was related to a Covid vaccine he had received 17 days earlier. They were “part of a wave of suspicious deaths” after the Covid vaccines, he claimed. A doctor who was vaccinated along with Mr. Aaron and the county coroner dismissed the claim.
In May, when Mr. Kennedy called on the FDA to “immediately withdraw Covid vaccines from the market,” joined by Dr. Meryl Nash, a member of the Children’s Health Science Board and a physician in Maine.
Her medical license was initially suspended on an emergency basis in early 2022 for prescribing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to patients with severe Covid cases, including one intubated, Maine medical board records show.
She later sued the board, claiming it retaliated against her for exercising her right to free speech. The case is pending.
In 2022, Mr. Kennedy and others filed a lawsuit against the FDA on behalf of Children’s Health Defense and parents who said they were concerned their children would receive Covid vaccines without their knowledge or consent. The amended lawsuit, filed in July 2022, sought a court order asking the agency to review the licensing of Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid vaccines for children.
A Texas appeals court dismissed the case in early 2024, agreeing with a lower court that the plaintiffs did not face a “concrete or imminent” risk of harm. In June, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.
Mr. Kennedy also sent letters to the FDA threatening legal action if children’s vaccines were licensed.
Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid vaccines for infants and children aged 6 months to 11 years are still being used under emergency approval, FDA spokespeople for Pfizer and Moderna said the companies are seeking full approval for all the ages.
Mr. Kennedy argued in the censorship case that top Biden administration officials had forced social media platforms to silence him, mostly during the summer of 2021. At that time, vaccine rates were halted. People who had not been vaccinated began to die at higher rates. Some who died were young. Loved ones said they were confused by conflicting messages on social media — or regretted not getting the shot.
The lawsuit’s filings describe a briefing that summer with Jen Psaki, then the White House press secretary, and Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, who criticized social media companies for allowing the spread of misinformation that affected them. people. against vaccination.
“And we cannot wait any longer for them to take aggressive action because it is costing people their lives,” Dr Murthy said on July 15, 2021.
Mr. Biden expressed his anger the next day, telling reporters that social media companies hosting vaccine misinformation were “killing people.”
In legal filings, Mr. Kennedy said he had been named one of the “Disinformation Dozens” by a prominent advocacy group — and that he was one of the people targeted by the White House. Exhibits in the lawsuit show that White House officials relied on social media companies to stamp out misinformation.
Within a month, a senior Facebook executive reported to Dr. Murthy that he had removed certain pages or groups, including Mr. Kennedy, court records show.
The Supreme Court dismissed a related case last summer, and an appeals court dismissed Mr. Kennedy late last year. The lawyers representing Mr. Kennedy and others are still working to obtain depositions from about 30 people, mostly Biden administration officials.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.
