HHS settled the lawsuit with a stunning admission – on the record – that no such studies existed.
But I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that I had done my job and saved children.
For the next few years, I worked on a variety of policies I was really proud of (ending secret health care prices, lowering drug prices, combatting opioid addiction) and others that didn’t go quite as well (the doomed repeal-and-replace-Obamacare misadventure). The demands of working in the White House are brutal. While many of my colleagues had become like family, my real family could no longer pick me out of a line-up.
…..
If untrue, the claims in Kennedy’s book were so utterly defamatory that they should have spurred a parade of lawsuits. To my knowledge, no such lawsuits have ever been filed.
This cascade of eye-opening episodes eventually forced me to confront a painful reality: my 2017 take on Mr. Kennedy and his Vaccine Safety Commission had been a massive mistake.
What if there had been a Vaccine Safety Commission already in place during Operation Warp Speed? During the consideration of federal mandates by the Biden team? Adding COVID vaccines to the childhood schedule? What if Mr. Kennedy had been given regular access to President Trump in the first term?
Now, I’m not naive enough to think that a commission – any commission – would have had some immediate or obvious influence on vaccine policy. I know better than most how slowly government works. And no doubt Team Biden would have either immediately shut down the commission or replaced the commissioners with card-carrying members of the consensus class.