Forget Bird Flu! Polio Is The Latest Craze!
Marco! Polio!
Good news for anyone with a death wish!
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick out health officials is one Aaron Siri — who, you will be shocked to discover, has a whole history of ridiculous anti-vaccine lawsuits, including one against the polio vaccine. You know, the vaccine that prevents us from getting polio, getting paralyzed from polio, having to spend the rest of our lives in an iron lung because we have polio? That one!
The New York Times reports:
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.
Much of Mr. Siri’s work — including the polio petition filed in 2022 — has been on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit whose founder is a close ally of Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Siri also represented Mr. Kennedy during his presidential campaign.
That’s nice.
Specifically, ICAN claims that IPOL, the version of the inactivated polio vaccine we use, is different from the original Jonas Salk version because it was made using vero cells from monkey kidneys — which is also the way the Salk version was made — and that it was never tested properly in clinical trials.
That, unsurprisingly, is nonsense. What they actually mean is that the “new version” was tested against previous versions of the vaccine, rather than a placebo group that got no vaccine, because that would mean that the placebo group … didn’t get a polio vaccine, and therefore could have contracted polio. Not only would that be unethical, it would also be pretty tough to find parents (in the late 1980s when this happened) who would sign their kids up to not get a polio vaccine, for science.
As if that were not horrifying enough, in an interview published Thursday in Time magazine (which named him Person of the Year), Donald Trump was again asked if he would end childhood vaccinations if that were what Kennedy Jr. wanted, to which he responded that “we're going to have a big discussion. The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there's something causing it.”
Now, RFK Jr. claims that he’s not anti-vaccine, and that he just wants vaccines to be safe. He’s also said that he doesn’t “want to take away anybody’s vaccines,” he just wants people to be able to choose for their children not to get them and to then send those children to school with all of the other children.
This would be especially dangerous as far as polio is concerned, because we don’t actually know how long the polio vaccine actually protects us from polio. It’s been virtually eradicated in the United States since 1994 because of the vaccine and herd immunity — so, children getting the polio vaccine protects adults whose polio vaccines may no longer be super effective. Most of us only ever get the vaccine as babies, unless we travel to a country where polio is still a problem.
One would have to imagine that RFK Jr. would also want to find some way to ban mandatory vaccines for travel, so that, you know, if someone really wanted to, they could travel to countries like Pakistan, where polio is still endemic, and bring some back with them as a souvenir.
While anti-polio vaccine nonsense has never been especially popular in the United States — at least as long as there were still a lot of people who remembered what it was like before the vaccine — it’s quite popular in countries that do still have polio. There are lots of people out there claiming that it can cause HIV, cancer and other diseases. Were people to start getting weird about it here, it’s likely we’d see a lot of the same claims.
Now, to be fair, Mr. Siri is not the only way Kennedy is making important hiring decisions. He also has a 90-minute personality assessment, developed by none other than Jordan Peterson, in which people are asked about their sex lives and whether or not they are clairvoyant, that is helping him to select future HHS officials as well. Should you like to put yourself up for a job where you just might be able to contract polio, the measles, or whooping cough from one of your co-workers’ unvaccinated kids, you can take it right here.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
This is where I tell you that the reason I am in Bellingham is for a close relative of my BFF. He contracted polio in the 1950s and was one of the lucky ones: his core muscles were unaffected while only his limbs suffered partial paralysis and muscle wasting. And his legs more than his arms and hands.
He is a determined guy by nature and was able to not only learn to walk again, albeit with crutches, but to travel to Chile with the Peace Corps, hike some trails in the Andes, and frantically evacuate barely ahead of Pinochet's takeover and Allende's murder.
He's taught, sold his woodworking, and generally lived a full life even if it was marked by pain and weakness and joint problems in his arms and shoulders from bearing the weight they weren't designed to carry. He even kept hiking -- shorter distances, but long enough to get away from the roads and parking lots in the national parks he visited -- well into his 50s.
I repeat: he's one of the lucky ones. Most people who survive a significant case of polio lose part of their heart muscle and die early of heart attack or suffocation when their weakened diaphragms give out. Not this guy. He's done more and seen more in his life than most, polio or no.
And when he hears about people refusing to vaccinate, he rages. He doesn't want anyone to catch his "mild" case of extremity-paralyzing, muscle-weakening polio. He hasn't even been able to use crutches for a dozen years now: it's all wheelchair all the time, even short distances inside the house.
NO ONE WANTS THIS. VACCINATE ALL THE KIDS OR GTFO.
So when a Republican says we should avoid something like the plague, they mean... what, exactly?