Jesus Wept: How Trump, RFK Jr., and Religion will Kill Children

Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Kirk Milhoan did not stumble into a public health catastrophe. They built one for reasons that had nothing to do with children and everything to do with themselves

Start with a number. In 1952, the United States recorded 57,628 cases of poliomyelitis. Thousands were paralyzed. More than three thousand died. In hospitals across the country, children lay inside iron lungs, large metal cylinders that mechanically expanded the chest cavity because the patients could no longer breathe on their own. Some of those children stayed in them for months. Some for years. Jonas Salk’s inactivated vaccine, declared safe and effective in April 1955, changed all of that. By 1979, wild poliovirus had been eliminated from the United States entirely. The vaccine worked. Its safety profile, established across hundreds of millions of doses over seven decades of continuous surveillance, is not a subject of legitimate scientific dispute. And yet, in January 2026, the man now chairing the federal committee that sets the American childhood.

His name is Kirk Milhoan. He is a pediatric cardiologist, a former Air Force flight surgeon with two combat tours in Iraq, and an ord…