ACIP Chair Wonders Aloud If We Should Really Be Vaccinating For Polio These Days

from the wut? dept

The travesty that is RFK Jr. in charge of American health and what he’s done to the CDC’s ACIP committee for vaccines continues to be visited upon all of us. It’s really important to keep in mind that during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy lied repeatedly about his stance on vaccines. Supposedly serious senators, like Bill Cassidy, claimed they extracted promises from Kennedy that he wouldn’t screw with vaccination programs and the like. These were all lies, designed to get him past those hearings and into the post, where the GOP would close ranks and refuse to do anything so crazy like impeach a charlatan from a cabinet position.

This iteration of ACIP is a disaster. It is full of anti-vaxxers who have already altered the guidance on vaccines for COVID, Hep B, and childhood vaccines more generally. And this is all happening in the context of a measles outbreak that is now in month 13 and getting worse, despite that disease having been officially declared eliminated over two decades ago.

Well, as you know, retro and nostalgia are all the rage these days, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that ACIP is pining for other eliminated diseases to come back. In this case we have the chair of ACIP wondering out loud on a podcast whether we should be vaccinating for polio any longer.

The conversation started off with this absolute banger.

Kirk Milhoan, who was named chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December, appeared on the aptly named podcast “Why Should I Trust You.” In the hour-long interview, Milhoan made a wide range of comments that have concerned medical experts and raised eyebrows.

Early into the discussion, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, declared, “I don’t like established science,” and that “science is what I observe.” He lambasted the evidence-based methodology that previous ACIP panels used to carefully and transparently craft vaccine policy.

I barely know what to say. “I don’t like established science” is the kind of quote I would expect in The Onion, not on Ars Technica. As for the follow up line of “Science is what I observe,” that is a gross misrepresentation of the scientific process. Observation is certainly a part of the method. But you have to couple that observation with tedious and silly things like generating a hypothesis based on those observations, and then testing that hypothesis through rigorous and skeptical methodologies, typically experimentation.

To instead state his stance as he did on this podcast is lunacy. Milhoan went on to claim that vaccines had caused all kinds poor health outcomes, such as asthma, eczema, and deaths. Going even further, he claimed that measles and polio vaccines didn’t actually curtail the spread of those diseases, which flatly flies in the face of basic statistical analysis, before making the following jaw-dropping statement.

“I think also as you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then,” he said, referring to the time before the first polio vaccines were developed in the 1950s. “Our sanitation is different. Our risk of disease is different. And so those all play into the evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk for a vaccine or not.”

Polio is no joke. While a large percentage of infections will present with little to no symptoms, it is an incredibly infectious virus. 6% of cases have more severe symptoms, including aseptic meningitis and paralysis. Infants infected can get encephalitis. It can result in horrific body deformations as well. The disease is so horrible that international health organizations created the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in the 80s.

And this assclown, hand-picked by RFK Jr., wants to use his position on ACIP to question the need to vaccinate against it?

In a statement, AMA Trustee Sandra Adamson Fryhofer blasted the question. “This is not a theoretical debate—it is a dangerous step backward,” she said. “Vaccines have saved millions of lives and virtually eliminated devastating diseases like polio in the United States. There is no cure for polio. When vaccination rates fall, paralysis, lifelong disability, and death return. The science on this is settled.”

Fryhofer also took aim at Milhoan’s repeated argument that the focus of vaccination policy should move from population-level health to individual autonomy. Moving away from routine immunizations, which include discussions between clinicians and patients, “does not increase freedom—it increases suffering,” she said, adding that the weakening of recommendations “will cost lives.”

Yes it will. Milhoan may not like established science, but that science is established for a reason. It’s also trivially easy to go look up case rates for polio and measles before and after mass vaccination programs were put in place and see the results.

Moving to curtail vaccinations of polio should be as clear a line in the sand as could possibly exist for those overseeing this fiasco in Congress. The anti-vaxxer stuff thus far has been bad enough to warrant impeachment hearings for Kennedy. This would be something completely different.

Filed Under: acip, anti-vaxxers, evidence, health & human services, kirk milhoan, polio, rfk jr., science, vaccines