In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen."
He recently ran for president as an independent and has now endorsed Trump. If Trump wins, RFK could get a major job in the administration.
Newfound Trump ally and notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr. claimed that former President Donald Trump wants him to select the leaders of key public health agencies should he win the upcoming presidential election.
Kennedy Jr., who abandoned his independent bid for the presidency to join Trump’s transition team in late August, alongside fellow ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, told MAGA commentator Tucker Carlson that in a future administration, he would be tasked with purging “corrupt influences” from the agencies to “drain the swamp.”
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The crowd applauded as Carlson asked him to expand on how he would seek to achieve those goals.
Kennedy Jr. replied: “That’s unclear because there’s no… You know, at this point, like I said, I’m on the transition committee and there is no… I don’t have a post for myself that’s picked out. I know that I’m going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run FDA and NIH and CDC in a way that restores public health rather than…”
Interrupting, the host laughed out loud and gleefully mused that those currently running the agencies “must be dying.”
W. Ian Lipkin, Larry Brilliant and Lisa Danzig at The Hill:
In a video posted on Twitter in July, former President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exchanged conspiracy theories about the toxicity of childhood vaccines. This widely viewed conversation adds fuel to an alternative reality spread by the anti-vaccination movement.
In the video, Trump talked about “A vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby.” He added: “Then you see the baby all of a sudden start to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right?”
In a Fox News interview from that month, Kennedy made similar false claims that vaccines are “exempt from pre-licensing controlled placebo trials.”
There is no evidence that childhood vaccines cause autism or other brain disorders in children. The original report from Andrew Wakefield that tried to link the measles vaccine to autism has been retracted.
Concerns raised by Kennedy about the vaccine preservative thimerosal have also been discredited, as its removal from vaccines in 2001 had no effect on the frequency of disease.
Furthermore, in many children with autism, studies of blood from mothers obtained during pregnancy, and from children on the day of birth, indicate that abnormalities are present before children receive a single vaccine.
Unfortunately, although the leaked video went viral, the science and public health benefits of vaccines have not.
