Forget RFK Jr.- Donald Trump Was Already Wrong On Vaccines
- Charlie Biscotto
- Jan 12, 2017
- 3 min read
On Tuesday, The New Republic published an article turning inward and showing that Democrats aren't always the party of science. In an effort to avoid false equivalence, it noted that while Democrats are more likely to believe in astrology, you "don’t see too many Democrats sponsoring bills to teach astrology in schools." But the point was made that even some of the people on "our side" in the general debate about science don't always follow the greater sensibility that scientific inquiry should be the basis for learning about our world.
Either inspired by this article or worried that he might be out-flanked on unsubstantiated pseudo-science, Donald Trump immediately called a meeting with leading anti-science lefty, Robert Kennedy Jr. Kennedy claims that he was offered the chairmanship of a commission on vaccines and autism, though the Trump team has denied that. Whether Kennedy takes an official position or not, however, the Trump administration is already a problem on vaccines.
In a GOP primary debate back in September 2015, Trump claimed a link between autism and vaccines and suggested that people should space out their vaccinations, both harmful myths that have been thoroughly discredited. A Washington Post article yesterday by Saad B. Omer. highlighted the origins and dangerous consequences of this particular falsehood:
In the most notorious example, vaccination rates in Britain declined after a 1998 article in the journal Lancet pushed the purported link between the measles vaccine and autism. The measles vaccination rate, approximately 92 percent in the year before the 1998 paper, declined to a low of 80 percent by 2003 in England and Scotland. It took until 2011 for immunization rates to return to their earlier levels. The article was eventually retracted and found to be fraudulent, and its lead author lost his medical license.
To reiterate: Donald Trump, a man with a college degree and access to all of the information that disproves this particular rumor still doesn't trust the science that shows overwhelmingly that vaccines are safe and that herd immunity is a key component of public health. There are so many falsehoods circulating that it's nearly impossible for physicians to break through the noise, and the consequences are already on display.
I spoke with Molly, an Ohio-based pediatrician who asked that I not use her full name to avoid politicizing her practice. She works primarily with lower-income patients who are less likely to have a college education (one community more susceptible to influence by celebrities and social media) and more likely to be people of color (the one community that, to our shame, has some justification in questioning government science). She reports that about one out of every three parents she meets expresses some concern about vaccines for their child. In fifteen-minute appointments, she sometimes spends as much as 1/3rd of her time just convincing parents of the science behind immunization, time that she would much rather spend actually dealing with the child's health and well-being.
Because of the dangers of treating unvaccinated children in the same facilities as children who are too young to be fully vaccinated, many offices refuse to take new patients who have not received their vaccines. This is a necessary step, because, in Molly's words, "if parents can't trust us to safely vaccinate their children, the whole doctor-patient therapeutic bond is defunct."
We've highlighted Donald Trump's propensity to be factually incorrect here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, so it is no surprise that his grasp of science would be found lacking. This time, however, he's playing with children's health. Whether Robert Kennedy Jr. is made head of a vaccine commission, a member of a general autism commission, or gets no further recognition at all from the Trump administration, the job of your local pediatrician gets harder when the Science-Denier-In-Chief takes office on January 20th, 2017.