Rejecting Decades of Science, Vaccine Panel Chair Says Polio and Other Shots Should Be Optional

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: New York Times

Jan. 23, 2026, 11:51 a.m. ET


Offering a startlingly candid view into the philosophy guiding vaccine recommendations under the Trump administration, the leader of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans said shots against polio and measles — and perhaps all diseases — should be optional, offered only in consultation with a clinician.

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who is chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that he did have “concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed with polio as a result of a choice not to vaccinate. But, he said, “I also am saddened when people die of alcoholic diseases,” adding, “Freedom of choice and bad health outcomes.”

In the case of an infectious disease, a personal choice to decline a vaccine may also affect others, including infants who are too young to be vaccinated or people who are immunocompromised. But a person’s right to reject a vaccine supersedes those risks, Dr. Milhoan said. “If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” he said. “Without consent it is medical battery.”

The polio and measles vaccines are widely acknowledged as staggering successes in public health, credited with preventing disability and millions of deaths worldwide. The polio vaccine in particular has strong bipartisan support, including from President Trump and some Republican lawmakers, who have invoked the horrific time before the vaccine was available.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/health/milhoan-vaccines-optional-polio.html

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More "death panel" nonsense. Maybe Turtle should have a word with him.

[hlthe2b]

1. THE ONLY VACCINE THAT HAS PROVEN UNNECESSARY (since 1979) IS SMALLPOX!!!!!

The only vaccine-preventable disease to be eradicated because there were not pockets of humans or other species that remained susceptible with ongoing transmission. That is not the case with any others, although measles was (ONCE)amenable to ELIMINATION (NOT ERADICATION) through vaccination and strict public health surveillance/interventions.

[iemanja]

18. Smallpox killed 90% of the population of the Americas when Europeans first arrived

within a century. It's the deadliest disease of all.

[hlthe2b]

21. Yes and it was CDC with WHO who worked throughout the world to ERADICATE it

with an effective vaccine, but ALSO the massive public health work required to identify, isolate, and vaccinate until the virus itself had no one left to infect. Throughout the entire damned world!

William Foege--a former Director of CDC and then later on, went on with President Jimmy Carter to create and direct the Carter Center--is credited with "devising the global strategy that led to the eradication of smallpox in the late 1970s". From May 1977 to 1983. True heroes of the time and villainized today. We will (sadly) face tragedy again due to the ignorance of so many today.

[EarlG]

2. While this policy would affect people of all ages, a pundit on CNN last night said something that stuck with me...

He said that GOP policies are anti-child. It's short, to the point, and an easy case to make.

They don't care about providing lunches in school for children who can't afford to eat. They don't care about the slaughter of children in schools by mentally ill people with easy access to high powered weaponry. They don't care about children -- who were bought into the country legally -- being rounded up by masked men with guns and held in detention facilities. They don't care about children being teargassed on the way home from school, or even in school. They don't care about children dying of malnutrition after USAID was abolished. And they don't care about vaccinating children to prevent them from dying or being paralyzed by preventable diseases.

This new vaccine policy would directly cause the deaths of thousands of children -- that's why it's no surprise to hear it being proposed by the anti-child Republican Party.

[tanyev]

5. And yet many of them are obsessed with increasing the (white) birth rate.

They have to know lots of white children are also harmed by their anti-child policies. It’s bizarre.

[highplainsdem]

6. Exactly. It's anti-child, and it's horrifying.

[erronis]

26. I'll extend your viewpoint and say that the anti-child extends to all children - white or brown.

The plutocrats don't want to allow us to have a nanny state where poor families and their children can live and flourish.

The plutocrats believe that they are successful because they were super smart (just like trump) and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (with maybe a little help from rich parents.)

The plutocrats think that some must perish so the better endowed can succeed.

They are willing to see huge amounts of the world (and the US) population suffer and perish. They have lost "empathy" and are proud of it.

[bluestarone]

3. WOW! quite a bunch running our America today!

I guess if people are DUMB enough to destroy their children, what more can you do?

[Greybnk48]

4. unvaccinated children should not be permitted to attend public school. Period.

That's how it used to be, and it should be that way now. Your choice, but it'll cost you instead of costing the rest of us with our kids becoming sick or dying from your infected kids.

[BadgerKid]

8. I'd agree, but there will objectors due to their religions. n/t

[slightlv]

14. Then they can go to religious schools where

immunization choice and consequences are spelled out completely in their school policies, and given each year to the parents when they pay for the coming school year for their child. And I mean, spell it out completely... including that YOUR PARENTAL choice may cost YOUR child and other children in your child's classes their lives. If it's that important to that religion, then okay. But let them be segregated from the rest of us. And I would like to start seeing court filings by parents of children who got sick with unnecessary diseases because of unvaxed kids. Let those who made the unvax choice pay the price.. at least monetarily... of any doctor, medicine, and/or hospital costs they've engendered because of THEIR CHOICE.

And I just LOVE how THEY have the choice to kill their kids AND ours... but we women don't have the right to choice about our own bodies.

This admin is not only anti-child, it's anti-woman, and anti-humanity, IMO. I'd love to see all the white supremacists and nazis gathered into their own group within their own compound so they can't contaminate anyone else. Let them live their lives... just far away from decent, civilized people.

[eringer]

13. That is the Objective

Keep them out of school and when they get sick give them aspirin in large doses until they die. In this world everyone gets one Social Security benefit when they are born and both parents are citizens and that will be free cremation.
THIS WAY ONLY THE RICH SURVIVE.
Musk’s Robots will man the Dept of War.
How absolutely beautiful this must sound to the authors of Project 25.

[AZJonnie]

7. The exact same logic could be applied to illegal drug use

Granted, in a sense it's a converse, but the same basic reasoning could be applied. Why are people denied the right to individually choose to do cocaine, meth, heroin? As a general concept, it's because of the harm to collective society.

If you are going to argue that it's wrong to mandate vaccines due to "personal liberty", then you MUST also concede it's wrong to deny people whatever freaking drugs they want to take due to "personal liberty"

Tell me how I'm wrong, Dr. Milhoan?

Also, JFC, where do they get these freaking idiots and how do they have these jobs they're obviously completely unsuited for?

[slightlv]

15. I can see where you say it's a converse, but I agree with you.

I absolutely see total hypocrisy regarding "medicines" and "drugs". If one is individual choice, the other should be as well. Collective harm? Me smoking a bit of pot never killed a kid... the most that ever happened was I got rattled boiling hot dogs one time.

[surfered]

9. Well,

[eringer]

10. Dr Kirk is a Quack Doctor

This stuff is sheer lunacy. However, it fulfills this administration’s objective of killing off the poor and uneducated which is critical to making America Great Again.

[EuterpeThelo]

11. My grandma

was on the radio show "Queen For a Day" because she raised money to buy iron lungs for kids who suffered from polio. I saw one once in person in a museum in Iowa and oh. my. goddess. I can't even imagine the horror of having to live in one.

[Skittles]

12. wow

that's very impressive! Your grandma ROCKED

[dedl67]

28. A man died recently in his (I think) late 70s who spent his entire life in an iron lung.

When I was in the hospital with polio in 1952 I could see a long line of iron lungs against the only wall I could see in the huge room full of patients (we were all in straightjackets and couldn't move much). I feel bad for those poor folks. (I remember "Queen for a Day".)

[milestogo]

16. So the next generation will have the option of getting polio.

Along with lots of other terrible things.

[dedl67]

32. Most people are poor at evaluating risks

In particular, many people seem to attach more weight to the risk that a vaccination may cause them some harm than they do to the risk of getting a disease that vaccination is intended to protect them from.

[iemanja]

17. The goal must be to cull the population

It's the only explanation for their cancelling so many vaccines: they mean to kill people.

[3catwoman3]

19. This is so fucking stupid that I feel like screaming here in my kitchen

"...“concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed with polio as a result of a choice not to vaccinate. But, he said, “I also am saddened when people die of alcoholic diseases,” adding, “Freedom of choice and bad health outcomes.”

This sounds a hell of a lot like this bukkshit from Charlie Kirk - "I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."

Dr. Milhoan is another physician who seems to have taken the Hypocritic Oath rather than the Hippocratic Oath.

[Solly Mack]

20. Die, Americans, die.

[Talitha]

22. Unvaccinated people should be made to wear a bell while in public.

Just like Lepers in oldentimes. At least we'd know who to stay the hell away from.

[Mysterian]

23. Unfortunately, it will require a major tragic outbreak to convince these morons of the error of their ways

Thousands and thousands of ruined lives will result from their stupidity.

[SamKnause]

33. Over 1 million died of covid.

That didn't give a shit.

They mocked people who wore masks.

They refused to wear masks.

They are a death cult.

There is no reasoning with these people.

[JPK]

24. Insurance companies

Should refuse coverage of illnesses that were preventable by vaccines such as Polio. Those that become afflicted and end up in iron lungs then sluffed off on the taxpayers because the kids parents decided to not vaccinate their kids should be held financially liable for the ultimate care of their child if they refused having their child vaccinated. Same for Measles, or any other disease that can affect a non vaccinated child that would have to rely on the taxpayer to care for their child into the future for the consequences of their stupidity.

[Bristlecone]

35. I have no doubt they will indeed refuse coverage.

If you have opted not to get the vaccine.
It would be “good business” unfortunately.

[mdbl]

25. Does anyone want to associate with idiots who purposely choose to spread diseases?

I certainly don't.

[travelingthrulife]

27. "Medical battery".

These people have no ability to understand science. I remember several people who had to walk with crutches their entire lives after contracting polio. Others died.

[patphil]

29. I got vaccinated for polio in grade school in the 1950's when the vaccine first came out.

It was hailed as a Godsend, given the devastation caused by the disease.
All the kids in the school were lined up and marched through the lines to the people administrating the vaccine.
Parents would have to opt out to keep their child from getting the shot; very few did. I was too young to comprehend the immensity of this point in time, but I remember the news stories of dead and crippled kids, and how the vaccine literally saved lives.
Now the shitheads who run the FDA want to bring us back to the bad old days.
Their decision borders on criminal. A lot of kids will die if parents don't see that they get these shots.

It's too late to say your sorry when you're standing at your child's grave site.

Note: It was a Catholic grade school in upstate New York, and they were strong advocates of getting the kids vaccinate for childhood diseases.

[dedl67]

34. Jonas Salk was a hero - one of many great persons who graduated City College of New York

[BootinUp]

30. God told them so. nt

[SamKnause]

31. Seems their intentions are to fill up the cemeteries with babies and small children.