Political Quotes

On the recordMay 1, 2025
yesterday, the Health Secretary, RFK, Jr., announced that the Department would subject all new vaccines--including vaccines for children and vaccines for well-researched diseases like measles and polio--to placebo testing. So what does that mean? It means that they would take a bunch of kids, divide them into two groups and give some of the kids the vaccine for rubella and mumps or polio; and then they would take the other half and give them a placebo--a dummy vaccine that doesn't work; it is not supposed to work; and then they would study how the kids fare, to let the disease process continue. Let me tell you something about my father. My father was the only doctor on the record for the first couple of years after the Tuskegee experiments on African-American men in which they withheld lifesaving medicine from hundreds of African-American men, believing that they were expendable, to ``observe the disease process.'' What they are contemplating--and I don't know how serious this is, but what they are contemplating is that at scale with children. I am hoping that the Department clarifies today that is not what they meant; that is fake news. But as of now, they are contemplating populationwide experiments on children to see how the disease process progresses. There should be 100 U.S. Senators opposed to that, and I pray that they back off of this by the end of the day. H.J. Res. 75 Mr.…
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Brian Schatz
Democratic · Hawaii

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