HHS To Invest $500 Million For "Universal Vaccines"

Can there ever be a truly "safe" vaccine?

On Friday the Department of Health and Human Services, now headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced plans to invest $500 million to develop so-called “universal” vaccines, using chemically inactivated whole viruses. The goal of the project, dubbed “Generation Gold Standard”, is to create vaccines which would provide protection against multiple strains of a virus such as the flu, so that it would be unnecessary to develop a new vaccine for each new strain of the virus.

Some reacted with surprise at the news, given Kennedy’s past remarks about vaccine safety and his advocacy for the many victims of vaccine injury and death. But nobody should be surprised, really. Kennedy has never been “anti-vaccine.” In fact, he has consistently advocated for the development of “safe” vaccines, while speaking out over the years about the lack of adequate safety testing for the vaccines currently available on the market. Indeed, just a day before this announcement, Kennedy announced that all new vaccines would now require testing against an inert placebo, a move that Kennedy spokesman Andrew Nixon termed “a radical departure from past practices.” Predictably, the mainstream media and their pillars of vaccine propaganda are pouncing, decrying this move as dangerous because it will delay the development of new vaccines, and erode vaccine confidence. An NPR article published last week, for instance, quoted notorious vaccine defender (and developer) Dr. Peter Hotez as characterizing what he calls Kennedy’s “full-on attack mode” against vaccines as “absolutely dangerous,” while also giving page space to another champion of mass vaccination, Dr. Paul Offit, who called Kennedy “a dangerous man.”

But some of Kennedy’s naysayers include his supporters (and former supporters) in the health freedom community, who do not believe that there is any such thing as a “safe” vaccine. Conspiracy theories abound, with some even suggesting that this is the reason he was “allowed” to be confirmed by the Senate, i.e., that there was an end game at play to create vaccines that even the staunchest opponents of vaccination would finally embrace, leading to a world in which almost nobody refuses vaccines.

I don’t have any evidence to support such a theory, so I’ll leave it at that. But this new push to develop universal and safe vaccines does raise an interesting question, one that I’d like to pose to my readers. Do you believe that there can ever be a safe vaccine? If Secretary Kennedy can produce evidence that a vaccine was subjected to rigorous placebo safety testing, with an actual control group, and that the results showed little risk of any serious adverse effects, would you take it? Would you give it to your children? In answering these questions, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the religious and ethical concerns regarding vaccine testing and development - such as the use of aborted fetal tissue - could also be removed. My questions are aimed primarily at the health and safety concerns surrounding vaccines.

Please drop your answers below in the comment section.