Robert F. Kennedy discussed the changes in childhood vaccination recommendations and how Big Pharma profits from patents on vaccines in an interview with FOX News host Laura Ingraham.

LAURA INGRAHAM: On another issue, Mr. Secretary, you made a lot of waves this week, and I wasn’t surprised by the announcement at all, but you reduced the childhood vaccination recommendations from 17 to 11. Here’s one of your friends. DR. SEAN O’LEARY, AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS: Yeah, you know, so HHS is really, you know, unfortunately some of what they’re doing has legal implications in terms of access and coverage and who stocks what vaccines, but in terms of, you know, being able to trust them, we can no longer trust our federal government for vaccine recommendations, and that’s a real tragedy. You know, fortunately, a lot of the professional societies are stepping forward, and we are making our own recommendations. INGRAHAM: Mr. Secretary, you are, according to him, American Academy of Pediatrics, endangering the public trust in public health. HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Yeah, the new recommendations don’t take vaccines away from anybody. All the vaccines under the old recommendation list will continue to be covered by insurance, the Vaccine for Children program. Everybody will have access to them. If you want them, through shared decision-making with your physician, you can get any of the vaccines on that schedule. All we did is we took the vaccines that are the vaccines that other countries give, our peer nations in Europe, where there’s great science, and a lot of our science is based upon their databases, and they’re the vaccines that they believe are important for children. One of the things that they’re convinced of from experience and science is that if you add too many vaccines to the schedule, the uptake goes down. And these are countries that don’t have mandates, but they have the same or greater vaccine compliance than we do. And we need the American people to trust us, to trust our recommendations. We need good science on these vaccines. INGRAHAM: Why are these health so-called experts, they’re just up in arms. They’re so angry. I think they’re upset that their influence maybe is waning. That’s what seems to be some of it. KENNEDY: I think, and you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that are being made. Vaccines are different than other medicines because every other medicine, your patent expires after 17 years. If you get a vaccine recommended, you have that forever. So it’s producing billions of dollars for you every year. And so the pharmaceutical companies really like vaccines. When I was a kid, we had three vaccines. Today, kids get 80 doses of 17 vaccines before they’re 18. That’s up from 23 doses of seven vaccines in 1980. And, you know, that was prompted because we gave immunity from liability in 1986 to the drug companies. And there was a gold rush because this is a product. Well, that should end. The Trump administration should end that.
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