The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. select federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has a history of suing the government agencies that the cabinet pick will oversee — and recently challenged federal approval of polio vaccines.
Aaron Siri, who served as an attorney for Kennedy Jr.’s campaign, petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to get rid of its approval of the polio vaccine in 2022, the New York Times reported on Friday, through his work at the Informed Consent Action Network.
In his legal work for the nonprofit and others, Siri has filed more than a dozen suits to halt vaccine distribution and even helped eliminate some mandates for the COVID-19 jab, according to the outlet.
President-elect Donald Trump previously expressed no interest in rolling back polio immunizations — but in recent interviews noted that he was open to recalling some vaccines for children.
Informed Consent Action Network was founded by Del Bigtree, who served as RFK Jr.’s campaign spokesman and now runs the Make America Healthy Again Alliance super PAC. The organization bills itself as a “medical freedom” group that is “holding regulators accountable” and “eradicating man-made disease.”
“Using an unprecedented legal strategy, ICAN has successfully won lawsuits against Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration,” its website boasts, listing the head agency that the Kennedy scion would oversee in addition to several subagencies.
Siri was behind several ICAN petitions against the FDA to withdraw or suspend approvals for vaccines like hepatitis B — and to pause distribution of at least 13 other vaccines that have aluminum, which researchers have linked to asthma in some cases.
But he told the Times that those petitions were only filed on behalf of his clients and doesn’t want Americans barred from being immunized.
“You want to get the vaccine — it’s America, a free country,” Siri told Arizona legislators in a recent hearing.
Kennedy Jr., 70, has also insisted that he does not want to halt immunizations — despite claiming none of the 72 vaccines on the current US schedule “have ever been tested against a placebo,” citing his own past legal work as proof.
He currently serves as the founder and board chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which has advocated against the proliferation of vaccines for children and linked them to medical conditions such as autism.
Kennedy Jr.’s spokeswoman Katie Miller told the New York Times in a statement: “Mr. Kennedy has long said that he wants transparency in vaccines and to give people choice.”
Trump, 78, has expressed openness to having the heir to Democratic royalty, who shockingly abandoned his own independent bid in 2024 to endorse the Republican, air his views on childhood vaccine policy as the incoming Health and Human Services secretary.
“We’re going to have a big discussion,” he divulged to Time magazine in his 2024 “Person of the Year” interview published Thursday. “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.”
The incoming president said it “could” mean getting rid of some vaccinations if he thinks “it’s dangerous.”
“If I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end,” he added.
“I want to see the numbers. It’s going to be the numbers,” Trump went on. “We will be able to do — I think you’re going to feel very good about it at the end. We’re going to be able to do very serious testing, and we’ll see the numbers. A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good.”
In an interview earlier this week with NBC News, he cast doubt on polio vaccines being pulled.
“If someone told me get rid of the polio vaccine,” he told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, “they’re going to have to work really hard to convince me.”
Republican senators who hold the power to let Kennedy Jr. “go wild” in the food and health regulatory agencies, as Trump put it, have so far withheld their views on his nomination.
It would only take four GOPers joining with every Democrat and independent to tank the confirmation.
Kennedy’s spokesperson, Siri and the Trump transition team all did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Post.
