President Donald Trump may soon be undoing one of his signature first-term achievements.
The Trump administration will pull the COVID vaccine off the market "within months," one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates told The Daily Beast.
“It could [happen] in a number of stages, including learning more about the data,” said Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who claims the vaccines are more dangerous than the coronavirus.
Malhotra told the website that Kennedy's position on the vaccines was shared by “influential” members of the Trump family, and he claims Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is reviewing so-called "vaccine injuries."
“Given the increased talk of vaccine injuries in the past few weeks among the administration," he said, "it could also come with one clean decision.”
The vaccine skeptic told The Daily Beast that Kennedy's closest advisers have said they "cannot understand" why the shots continue to be prescribed, and he said the Health and Human Services secretary would likely recommend removing it from the U.S. market even if the decision would likely cause "fear of chaos" and legal challenges.
Kennedy's skepticism about the shots is based on a 2022 paper that appeared in the journal Vaccine that found patients given the mRNA vaccines had a 16 percent higher risk of “excess serious adverse events” than those given a placebo, but that study has been widely dismissed within the medical community as underestimating the benefits and overstating risks due to biased data selection and other methodological flaws.
Malhotra did not take part in that study but presented its findings July 9 to controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which he said triggered a "holy s---" reaction among Kennedy's senior aides in attendance.
Kennedy has already canceled $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research, and Malhotra says he will meet next month with the president, who authorized the Operation Warp Speed public-private partnership in May 2020 to develop a vaccine to protect against SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think [Trump will] get it, because it’s in his interest to,” Malhotra said. “This information is only going in one direction, and there’s something really terribly wrong with the system. I think once [he] understands the situation... that will encourage him to act to change the system. He’s in a position to fix it. He can create a lasting legacy by doing so.”
More than 750 current and former staff members from the HHS, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) called out Kennedy last week for spreading disinformation about vaccines, saying his comments and actions undermined public health.
“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information," they wrote in a letter to Congress.
The Daily Beast contacted the White House, the HHS, Pfizer, and Moderna for comment on Malhotra claims about Kennedy's plans to pull the vaccine from the U.S. market, but only the White House responded.
“The Administration is relying on Gold Standard Science and is committed to radical transparency to make decisions that affect all Americans. Unless announced by the Administration, however, any discussion about HHS policy should be dismissed as baseless speculation," said White House spokesman Kush Desai.