Kate Emery: Polio conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr is a danger to public health

If you feel your blood pressure spike when anti-vaxxers explain why they’re Team Polio, you might want to pop a quick ACE inhibitor right now. Just in case.

Because on Wednesday, US time, Robert F Kennedy Jr will appear before the Senate Finance Committee for the first of two confirmation hearings to see if he will be appointed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

And you know that Mr Kennedy is going to talk some absolute rot.

We know that because he’s been talking rot for years. The only difference this time is that there’s a chance this man could be driving public health policy in the US for the next four years.

And while that won’t have a direct or immediate effect on health policy in Australia, we all know that when the US sneezes, Australia catches a cold. Or, in this case: polio.

Take Mr Kennedy’s claim that the HPV vaccine causes cancer.

That’d be the same HPV vaccine that has Australia on-track to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035, thanks in large part to a free school vaccination program that has massively boosted vaccination rates.

Or his claim that putting fluoride in tap water also causes cancer.

That’d be the same fluoride that is estimated to have reduced rates of tooth decay in Australia by somewhere between 26 and 44 per cent since it was introduced.

In the US city of Buffalo, dental problems increased so much when officials removed fluoride from its water supply in 2015 that local parents sued the city for harming their kids.

Mr Kennedy is also a big fan of raw milk, arguing (correctly) that the pasteurisation process kills some good bacteria as well as bad bacteria.

Call me old fashioned but I’d still rather my morning Weet-Bix comes without a side of E.coli.

Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day and, along with the dumb ones, Mr Kennedy has some ideas that could be positive for US health.

He’s big on giving kids healthier school lunches. That might require bringing back Barrack Obama-era regulations that required more fruit and vegetable options for school kids — those were dumped under Mr Trump’s first term, by the way.

Reducing or removing certain food additives, some of which are banned in other countries, from processed food sounds reasonable.

And he’s not wrong when he suggests that America’s addiction to ultra-processed food is helping to fuel that country’s obesity epidemic.

Unfortunately none of those perfectly sane ideas are enough to counter the danger represented by Mr Kennedy’s fundamental misunderstanding of the value of vaccines.

(This seems like a good place to mention that Mr Kennedy earned $3.5 million from an anti-vaccine non-profit between 2017 and 2023, according to US media reports and tax filings, which I’m sure has absolutely no bearing on anything. Just thought I’d mention it.)

This is a man who once suggested — do I need to say incorrectly? — that the polio vaccine might have caused cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did”.

A willingness to spread misinformation about vaccines should — but alarmingly may not — disqualify Mr Kennedy from becoming health secretary.

Whichever way it goes, anyone with a basic understanding of science, health and/or human biology is going to be in for quite the ride if they care to pay attention to world events in the coming days.

Nobody would blame them if that ACE inhibitor came with a side of noise-cancelling headphones and a blindfold.