Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade against the polio vaccine defies science

BALTIMORE – In his stupefying crusade against the polio vaccine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ought to imagine the ghostly figure of Robert Harris, who was one of the millions of children born – and departed – too soon to be saved.

But Kennedy’s head is somewhere else in the clouds, where the vision of Robert Harris has vanished. Kennedy imagines conspiracies that defy science. He’s Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and he has an attorney hustling the Food and Drug Administration to cancel approval of the polio vaccine, and never mind all those generations the vaccine has saved.

And never mind the memory of all those like Robert Harris.

Born in 1945, Robert pre-dated the miraculous scientific breakthrough, in 1955, by Dr. Jonas Salk and others, and the follow-up vaccine introduced in 1962 by the scientist Albert Sabin, that virtually wiped out polio.

By 1962, Robert had been marching about in leg irons his entire 17 years of life, a victim of polio at a time when that paralyzing disease was still panicking millions of families around the world, and still putting generations of children into so-called iron lungs or the leg braces that allowed Robert to struggle about.

I can picture him still. He was a classmate of mine at the Robert Eden Elementary School No. 20, in East Baltimore, a couple of years before the Salk vaccine breakthrough. I picture him on the school playground, just below North Avenue near Broadway, with hundreds of children racing about happily, full of eye-popping energy and the good health they took for granted.

And there was Robert, trying impossibly to keep up with the greyhounds, gingerly lifting each leg before taking a step, hoping not to fall on his face, and hoping to be included in our games so he could be a playmate and not a victim or a freak.

We had a playground game involving capturing classmates and locking them up in a little triangular area by a playground fence. That’s where you found Robert at recess. While all the others were running around, trying to capture or avoid capture, he became the guard at the cell. It meant he didn’t have to move around. And maybe he could feel included.

But he was part of the last generation infected with paralyzing polio before a cure was available to all.

As The New York Times reported last week, “On the day in 1955 that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was pronounced ’80 to 90 percent effective’ against the form of the disease that caused paralysis…pots clanged, horns honked, and factory whistles blew around the country.

“In the seven decades since polio – a disease that once killed or paralyzed more than half a million people around the world each year – has been vanquished in the United States.”

But now we have this lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee America’s health, including its children’s – asking the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the current vaccine.

Doctors around the world say the move would be disastrous. Polio has largely been eradicated. But the polio virus has not.

As The Times reported in September, “Vaccination has cut down the number of cases worldwide by more than 99.9 percent and is estimated to have prevented more than 20 million cases of paralysis.”

All of this is pretty impressive – except, apparently, to RFK Jr. and his attorney, Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits. Siri has petitioned the government to cancel its approval of the polio vaccine.

It’s what he does. He’s also trying to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines. He’s challenged COVID-19 vaccine mandates around the country.

I wish Siri, too, could picture the ghost of Robert Harris.

Last week, Kennedy’s crusade prompted an open letter to the U.S. Senate, from 75 Nobel Prize laureates, opposing Kennedy’s nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

“In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health or administration,” the laureates wrote, “Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDs and other diseases.

“The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve – not threaten – these important and highly respected institutions and their employees,” the laureates added.

What’s additionally galling about the Kennedy nomination is that it’s only one of the preposterous nominations by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the most important departments in the federal government.

If such comic nominations had been made by any previous president, there would already be talk of impeachment.

Robert Harris was lucky on a few counts. He didn’t wind up in an iron lung with millions of other polio victims. He didn’t have to hear the idiocy of those who would eliminate the polio vaccine today.

And he didn’t have to watch as the cowards on Capitol Hill prepare once more to do Donald Trump’s bidding, no matter how cruel and lunatic it is.