Be afraid, be very afraid if Trump wins (boldface mine):

Former President Donald Trump said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have a “big role in the administration” if he wins Tuesday, telling NBC News in a phone interview that he is open to some of his more controversial ideas.

Kennedy, who ran for president as an independent this year before he dropped his bid and endorsed Trump, has long spread conspiracies and falsehoods about vaccines and other public health matters. He has, for example, frequently claimed that vaccines are linked to autism, even though studies have debunked that theory for decades.

Asked Sunday whether banning certain vaccines would be an option during a second term, Trump didn’t rule it out.

And it’s not just Trump or Kennedy either (boldface mine):

The co-chair of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s transition team promoted the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism in a CNN interview Wednesday. He also said Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr., hopes to get “data” through a Trump administration to have vaccines pulled “off the market.”

Howard Lutnick, the billionaire CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald and a longtime friend of Trump’s, told the network’s Kaitlan Collins that vaccines are “not proven” to be safe. Lutnick said he’d recently been schooled on vaccines by Kennedy, the failed independent presidential candidate and anti-vaxxer who has endorsed Trump.

Kennedy has said he would have significant influence over public health policy if Trump wins the White House.

“So, I spent two-and-a-half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr., and it was the most extraordinary thing. Because, let’s face it, we’ve all heard on the news all sorts of sort of snarky comments about him,” Lutnick told Collins.

…Lutnick went on to say that Kennedy wants vaccines pulled off the market ― and that Kennedy hopes a Trump administration could get him the data to accomplish that.

“He wants the data so he can say, ‘These things are unsafe,’” Lutnick said. “He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off ― off of the market.’ So that’s his point.”

The former president himself has long voiced skepticism of vaccines and has promised to cut funding for schools that require them, playing into anti-vax conspiracy theories that have gone mainstream in the Republican Party. (All states have variations of laws requiring certain vaccines.)

Biden’s response to the COVID pandemic wasn’t great, but this is just bonkers. And Gritty help us if avian influenza* blows up…

*I think it’s a low probability event now, but if we find it in multiple pigs on multiple farms, we could be closer to something bad happening.