What are the chances that the noted anti-vaxxers Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would make common cause to undermine Americans’ health in their pursuit for the presidency? It didn’t take much hindsight to say the answer is 100%. But there’s no need to speculate any longer — not since this weekend, when Trump and Kennedy both associated themselves with policies that would bring vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio back to the United States.
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded and chairs, last week platformed a fatuously inaccurate 2013 book claiming that polio isn’t caused by a virus and that the polio vaccine “doesn’t work.” The book was conclusively debunked long ago. But last Tuesday, the organization published an interview with its co-author Suzanne Humphries, in which she repeated her claim that polio is caused by toxins, not the virus.
