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 endorsed Trump. RFK could get a major job in the administration. Even if RFK Jr. does not get a cabinet post, he can still do a lot of damage from a staff job in the White House. Dan Diamond et al. at WP:
But health officials and public health experts say giving Kennedy any role in federal vaccine policy could sow doubt and confusion about vaccines. They contend that could lead states to weaken vaccine requirements to enroll in school, resulting in lower vaccination rates among children.
“It gives executive leaders within a state, especially in red states, and lawmakers the license to go ahead and completely dismantle and annihilate those public health guardrails that we’ve had for decades,” said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for the Immunization Partnership, a Texas-based group of doctors and vaccine advocates. “We will see more schools suffering vaccine preventable outbreaks, we’re going to see more children sick, we could potentially see more children being hospitalized, and, God forbid, children dying from things that are preventable.”
Already, the share of kindergartners exempted from vaccine requirements rose to a high of 3.3 percent last school year, compared with 2.5 percent five years prior, a trend experts say is driven in part by vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine sentiment. All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving certain vaccines. And most also permit exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.
Religious exemptions for vaccines have skyrocketed by nearly 22 percent in Mecklenburg County in North Carolina over the last five school years, said Raynard Washington, director of the public health department. Vaccine-preventable diseases have followed suit: Cases of pertussis, known as whooping cough, jumped from four last year to 64 so far this year. Chickenpox cases have tripled to at least 15.
The numbers could rise even more if local, state and federal public health officials start sending conflicting messages about vaccines, Washington said. “We certainly don’t want to do something to exacerbate the issue, fueling more disinformation about what I think is settled science — that these vaccines are effective,” he said.
