President-elect Donald Trump said during a press conference on Monday that his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will not take away vaccines like the polio vaccine.
Trump made the remarks after a report from The New York Times last week revealed that a lawyer who is helping Kennedy select federal health officials for the incoming administration had petitioned the federal government just two years ago to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.
A reporter at the press conference asked Trump if he wanted Kennedy to revoke any vaccines.
“No, I want him to come back with a report as to what he thinks,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out a lot. We’re doing two things. We’re going to have tremendous cost savings … that’s a minimum. And we’re also going to have, I think, very serious discussions about certain things, whether it’s pesticides or, you know, Europe doesn’t use pesticides, and yet they have a better mortality rate than we do. They don’t use pesticides. In fact, they use it as an excuse not to take our farm products.”
“We spend billions and billions of dollars on pesticides, and something bad is happening,” he continued. “Again, you take a look at autism today versus 20 or 25 years ago. It’s like not even believable. So we’re going to have reports. No, nothing’s going to happen very quickly. I think you’re going to find that Bobby is … he’s a very rational guy. I found him to be very rational.”
“You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine,” Trump added. “That’s not going to happen. I saw what happened with polio. I have friends that were very much affected by that. I have friends from many years ago, and they have … obviously, they’re still in not such good shape because of it. Now, that was … and many people died, and the moment they took that vaccine, it ended. Dr. Jonas Salk did a great job.”
He added that his administration was also going to figure out “why we are paying more than other countries” for the cost of medicines.
“We’re going to have a big conversation on price,” he said. “Why is it that Germany and the UK and other countries, [we] are paying so much more for the same box of medicine made in the same plant? Why is it that we’re paying many times more? And I know the answer — because our government didn’t do what they were supposed to do. And what I put in place was terminated unexpectedly by the Biden administration, and they shouldn’t have terminated it. It would have had a huge impact.”
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