Tucker Carlson And Thomas Massie Accuse Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Of Bait And Switch On COVID Vaccines

After a succession of puzzling decisions by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services on mRNA vaccines, erstwhile supporters are going public with their objections.

In an open letter to Kennedy and President Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, former Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, and over 100 other journalists, activists, physicians and nurses expressed a sense of disillusionment with the alliance between the Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movements that help clinch the 2024 presidential election. Messenger RNA (mRNA) is the main technology platform behind Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines.

The letter provides the clearest signal yet that support of the Trump administration from the MAHA grassroots has frayed — but represents the culmination of months of quiet grumbling and speculation about whether Kennedy truly has control of his own health department. Prominent critics of the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic under the Biden administration like Robert Malone and Bret Weinstein also signed on.

“Millions of concerned citizens set aside partisan differences and identities to support the historic MAGA/MAHA alliance,” the letter reads. “Instead of decisive policy actions on these core issues, we see distractions, linguistic misdirections, and watered-down announcements that avoid serious action on the deadly mRNA injections.”

The letter explicitly refutes the argument of some senior administration officials that nutrition issues provide a more winning argument in the midterm elections.

“We did not fight to place you in positions of leadership so that our clearly stated policy goals would suffer a ‘bait and switch’ that rebranded the grassroots powerful objection to the damaging mRNA platform as a concern about coloring agents in Skittles,” it says.

Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio found that a bipartisan majority of voters do not trust the pharmaceutical industry (90%) and expressed concerns about vaccine mandates (73%) in a poll obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation but never released in full.

The letter was organized by Mary Talley Bowden, the president of Americans for Health Freedom, and an ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctor who faced retaliation from her employer and the Texas Medical Board for critical statements about the COVID vaccine and for prescribing ivermectin at the request of a patient’s family — leading to a protracted legal battle.

The letter lists a rash of new approvals and contracts for mRNA that have dismayed critics of the COVID vaccine:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 9.7% of children have received a COID vaccine this year. The overwhelming majority of that population, 9.2%, are not recorded as being at high risk of complications from COVID and thus are not eligible for COVID booster shots under Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules released under former commissioner Marty Makary. Makary resigned in May. An FDA assessment conducted before his departure found that 10 children’s deaths may be attributable to the COVID vaccine. FDA staff later revised that figure down using methods that a forensic pathologist who investigated two of the deaths said amounted to dishonest spin.
• The FDA in August authorized Moderna’s mRNA flu shot under “accelerated approval,” a pathway for drugs treating diseases with few other treatments, conditional on more testing in seniors. Just six months ago, in February, the FDA deemed the data so poor it swiftly returned the application to the drug company. Moderna had compared its new shot against a standard dose vaccine. But this is not the flu vaccine recommended for seniors, who are at highest risk of serious disease, for whom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a more powerful dose. It causes side effects at twice the rate of the traditional flu vaccine.
• A new indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract with Pfizer allowing HHS to purchase as much as $1.24 billion in mRNA shots for adults and children.
• The extension of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act declaration through December 31, 2029, granting COVID vaccine manufacturers liability protection.

“As influential leaders within the MAHA and health freedom movements, we are writing to object to policies under your oversight related to the mRNA platform, and to call you to act on our policy goals,” the letter states.