The polio vaccine "killed many, many more people" than polio ever did.

The sources establish that Kennedy publicly claimed the polio vaccine caused more deaths than polio, or in some accounts, more deaths than it prevented. PBS News and The South Dakota Standard report the attribution, while AS USA repeats the claim in coverage of the history of the Salk vaccine.

However, those reports do not present evidence supporting the numerical comparison. The available source material also does not provide an authoritative count of deaths caused by polio vaccines, nor a complete historical count of deaths caused by polio worldwide.

An X post by Farrukh labels the claim false and suggests it may relate to early vaccines contaminated with SV40, but the post is truncated in the supplied search result and is identified as a claim-origin source rather than independent proof. Susan Glasser's X post describes the vaccine as having saved millions of lives, but it likewise does not provide supporting data.

Based strictly on the supplied sources, the strongest defensible conclusion is that the statement is an unsupported claim, not a demonstrated fact. The source set is too limited to assign a high-confidence true or false verdict, although the available historical context does not substantiate Kennedy's assertion.