Eric M. Garcia at The Independent:
President-elect Donald Trump refused to say definitively that vaccines do not cause autism at a press conference.
Trump spoke alongside the chief executive at SoftBank, who pledged to invest $100 billion in the United States, as they addressed reporters on Monday.
During the press conference, Trump repeated misinformation that he has previously espoused about vaccines and autism. He also said that he had met with the heads of Pfizer and Eli Lily, as well as Mehmet Oz, his nominee to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Robert F Kennedy Jr., his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, who has repeated the debunked claims about vaccines and autism.
“So 30 years ago, we had, I’ve heard numbers of like one in 200,000, one in 100,000,” he said in terms of how many children are diagnosed with autism. “And now I’m hearing numbers of one in 100. So something’s wrong. There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it.”
Trump also said he supported the vaccine to prevent polio, but said he did not like mandates when he was asked if he believed schools should require to children to be vaccinated.
