Mia Farrow took to social media on Friday to slam a “nightmare” report that a lawyer working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — has pushed for the federal government to revoke its approval of the lifesaving polio vaccine for children.
“No RFK Jr. we cannot go back to this. # polio,” wrote the actor and polio survivor alongside a photo of leg braces used by her late adopted son Thaddeus Farrow, who was paralyzed from the waist down after contracting the disease.
She continued, “I too had polio as a child- one year before the vaccine. Thanks to ghe vaccine, kids don’t have to go through that nightmare today.”
The actor and activist — who has workedon polio vaccination campaigns and looked to raise awareness for the disease — also attached a photo of children in iron lung respirators at California’s Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in the 1950s.
Mia Farrow’s criticism arrived after The New York Times revealed that Aaron Siri is helping Kennedy select top health officials for the president-elect’s incoming administration.
Siri, who Kennedy has consulted, has waged a war against several other vaccines and filed a 2022 petition for the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of a standard polio vaccine for babies and children.
He has claimed that the agency needs to do further studies to confirm the vaccine’s safety.
The Times report has also drawn critics such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a polio survivor, who noted in a statement Friday that the polio vaccine “has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease.”
“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed – they’re dangerous,” he said.
He continued, “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
Polio, which can cause lifelong paralysis and death, has continued to have a presence in the U.S. and beyond since the approval of its vaccine in 1955.
A resident in Rockland County, New York was paralyzed due to polio in 2022 and a child was paralyzed in Gaza earlier this year, marking the region’s first case in over two decades and sparking a mass vaccination campaign.
“We still need to give the polio vaccine as long as these strains are in the environment,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an expert in vaccines at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in an interview with the Times.
Farrow contracted polio herself at age 9 during a 1954 outbreak that impacted some 500 people in Los Angeles County.
She was brought to an isolation unit at Los Angeles General Hospital, separated from her six siblings who she didn’t see for months and her belongings were burnt due to fear that the disease would spread to them, The Guardian reported in 2006.
She told The Guardian the disease “marked the end of my childhood” and left her with “embryonic survival skills.”
On Friday, Farrow reflected on her experience with polio and being separated from her parents while she was placed in the hospital’s polio ward.
“I would see them once a week – thru the glass window at the end of my ward. I could not walk. It was terrifying. Kids died. Iron lungs were awful,” she wrote on social media.
“Dont let RFK Jr ban the vaccine.”