Trump Thinks RFK Jr. Should Investigate Vaccines and Autism

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Allan Smith and Aria Bendix at NBC:

President-elect Donald Trump suggested that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to run Health and Human Services, will investigate supposed links between autism and childhood vaccines, a discredited connection that has eroded trust in the lifesaving inoculations.

“I think somebody has to find out,” Trump said in an exclusive interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker. Welker noted in a back-and-forth that studies have shown childhood vaccines prevent about 4 million deaths worldwide every year, have found no connection between vaccines and autism, and that rises in autism diagnoses are attributable to increased screening and awareness. “If you go back 25 years ago,” Trump claimed, “you had very little autism. Now you have it.”

“Something is going on,” Trump added. “I don’t know if it’s vaccines. Maybe it’s chlorine in the water, right? You know, people are looking at a lot of different things.” It was unclear whether Trump was referring to opposition by Kennedy and others to fluoride being added to drinking water.

...

The debunked link between autism and childhood vaccines, particularly the inoculation against mumps, measles and rubella, was first claimed in 1998 by a British doctor who was later banned from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom. His research was found to be critically flawed and was subsequently retracted. Hundreds of studies have found childhood vaccines to be safe.

Suicide Risk

In The Politics of Autism, I write about the many challenges facing people on the spectrum.  Among many other things, they are at high risk for suicide. (In July, the United States transitioned from 10-digit National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to 988 – an easy-to-remember three-digit number for 24/7 crisis care. "

Brown, C.M., Newell, V., Sahin, E. et al. Updated Systematic Review of Suicide in Autism: 2018–2024. Curr Dev Disord Rep 11, 225–256 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40474-024-00308-9

Abstract:

The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive update of literature published between January 2018 and April 2024, examining suicidal thoughts and behavior (STB) prevalence, risk factors, theoretical models, and interventions in autism.

Recent findings

We identified four recent meta-analyses and two systematic reviews. Pooled prevalence estimates in autism ranged from 34.2% for suicide ideation to 24.3% for suicide attempts. Autistic traits, interpersonal factors, and depressive symptoms were identified as STB risk factors, with elevated risk observed across the lifespan.
Summary

We included 80 studies examining STB in diagnosed autistic people or autistic traits in non-clinical samples. Autistic people were found to have an up to eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared to non-autistic people, although reported rates varied considerably between studies; co-occurring mental health conditions, social, psychological, and cognitive factors exacerbated risk. Validated STB assessment tools and interventions for autistic people were notably scarce.

What RFK Could Do

 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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Arthur Allen at NPR on what will happen if RFK gets the job.

"The litany of things that will start to topple is profound," said James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. "We're going to experience a seminal change in vaccine law and policy."

...

"It is a fantasy to think we can lower vaccination rates and herd immunity in the U.S. and not suffer recurrence of these diseases," said Gregory Poland, co-director of the Atria Academy of Science & Medicine. "One in 3,000 kids who gets measles is going to die. There's no treatment for it. They are going to die."
...

Hodge has compiled a list of 20 actions the administration could take to weaken national vaccination programs. They include spreading misinformation, delaying FDA vaccine approvals and dropping Department of Justice support for vaccine laws challenged by groups like Children's Health Defense, which Kennedy founded and led before campaigning for president.
...

The biggest threat to existing vaccination policies could be plans by the Trump administration to remove civil service protections for federal workers. That jeopardizes workers at federal health agencies whose day-to-day jobs are to prepare for and fight diseases and epidemics. "If you overturn the administrative state, the impact on public health will be long-term and serious," said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law.

"When you think of RFK Jr., think of rows of tiny coffins."

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Mona Charen at The Bulwark:

In 2019, Samoa was experiencing a spike in measles cases due to a mistake and a lie. The mistake was made in 2018 by two nurses who mixed ingredients for a measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine incorrectly, causing the deaths of two infants. (They pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.) The lies came soon after, encouraged by RFK Jr., who has consistently propagated the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism, peanut allergies, and other ailments. Though he now denies that he was ever “anti-vaccine,” Kennedy declared as recently as July that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and, in another interview: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.”

Many Samoans had seen the film Vaxxed, produced by two of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies, which alleged that the MMR vaccine was harmful and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud. (Samoa, as distinct from the territory of American Samoa, is a sovereign state with its own health ministry that can and does regulate vaccines. In the United States, the FDA has that responsibility, not the CDC.)

The film and social media rumors led to an uptick in parents refusing to get their kids vaccinated. After the deaths of the two infants, RFK Jr. threw gasoline on the fire with a visit to the island in 2019, meeting with local vaccine opponents and voicing suspicions that the MMR vaccine had contained a mutant strain and had caused the then-burgeoning epidemic. Eventually, more than 3 percent of the whole population of the island was infected. For babies aged six to eleven months, that figure was closer to 20 percent. More than 150 of them died.

Dr. Paul Offit, pediatrician and author of Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, told the Guardian that “the Samoan incident showed us how disinformation can kill. [RFK Jr.] sowed further distrust, he jumped all over it—he met with anti-vaxxers in Samoa to promote the notion that ‘it’s not measles, it’s the vaccine,’ and immunization rates dropped.”

When you think of RFK Jr., think of rows of tiny coffins.

WSJ editorial:

Many conditions can be treated and prevented without drugs. The next Trump Administration could use its bully pulpit to encourage exercise, healthier eating, less screen time and regular screenings for cancer and diabetes.

But vaccines are also essential to preventing disease in children and adults. Childhood vaccines have all but vanquished deadly infectious diseases in the U.S. HPV vaccines have greatly reduced cervical cancer. Scientists have discovered that latent viruses like Epstein-Barr can trigger auto-immune conditions and cancers later in life, so developing anti-virus vaccines can ward off debilitating diseases.

Mr. Kennedy says he doesn’t plan to take away anyone’s vaccines, but he wants to reduce liability protection for vaccine makers. Removing a vaccine from HHS’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which compensates patients for adverse effects caused by vaccines, would force companies to withdraw from the market to avoid costly lawsuits.

Trump transition manager Howard Lutnick told CNN before the election that this was RFK Jr.’s plan: “He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I’ll . . . show how that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market.”
***

Who will benefit from RFK Jr.’s agenda? The trial lawyers and China, which is seeking to surpass the U.S. in biotech including mRNA. If RFK Jr. were a Democratic nominee, GOP Senators would oppose him as a threat to public health. If they confirm him, they’d better hope they won’t need the cures that won’t be developed.

 

Children's Health Defense

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

His antivax organization has the Orwellian name of "Children's Health Defense."

Shannon Bond at NPR:

Today, CHD is a prolific content creator and a leading source of false and misleading claims about vaccines — including the long-debunked false claim that vaccines cause autism. It operates a daily newsletter, a streaming video channel, and a movie division. In 2020, it helped finance a sequel to the viral "Plandemic" video, which baselessly alleged the COVID-19 pandemic was planned as part of a global conspiracy. The next year it put out a film targeting disproven claims about vaccines at Black Americans.

Legal advocacy is also a significant focus of CHD's work. In 2019, the group unsuccessfully sued New York over the state's school vaccine requirements amid a measles outbreak. During the COVID pandemic its legal work ballooned, CHD president Mary Holland said in an interview with NPR.
...

[Dr. Paul] Offit said he is seeing evidence that confidence in vaccines is eroding among some Americans, pointing to falling vaccination rates for kindergarteners and rising cases of measles and whooping cough.

"The voices of misinformation and disinformation have gotten louder and better funded and more ubiquitous. So it's much, much harder to push against that," Offit said. "And I do think at heart, most people do trust their doctors. Most people do get vaccinated. Most people do trust vaccines. But I think what's happened is you're starting to see a fraying at the edges."

Kennedy is still on leave from CHD, and while his name remains on some of its lawsuits, Holland said he is "not involved on a day-to-day basis." She declined to comment on whether CHD would change its legal strategy if Kennedy were to be confirmed as HHS secretary.

Last month, on her weekly online broadcast, Holland celebrated Kennedy's nomination.

"Game on. We are really there," she told her co-host, Polly Tommey. "And it's not going to be easy, Polly, but look at how far we've come.

Biden Administration Moves to End the Subminimum Wage

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the employment of people on the autism spectrum.

Jacqueline Alemany at WP:

The Biden administration is moving to phase out a Depression-era program that allows some employers to pay disabled workers far less than minimum wage, fulfilling one of President Joe Biden’s campaign promises and triggering what is likely to become a fierce legal and political battle.

The decision is the culmination of the Department of Labor’s year-long review of the program, which opponents have criticized as a form of discrimination and supporters have described as providing disabled people with hard-to-find opportunities for steady wages and meaningful work. The agency will issue a proposed rule Tuesday that would immediately halt the issuance of certificates that allow employers to pay less than minimum wage and institute a three year phaseout period for employers that already hold those certificates.

Before it can take effect, the rule will be subject to a public comment period, possible legal challenges and the scrutiny of the incoming Trump administration. The public comment period is expected to conclude on Jan. 17, 2025, just days before Donald Trump takes office. His administration will have to evaluate and respond to those comments, and then issue a final rule — or withdraw the rule entirely.

Labor Department press release:

The U.S. Department of Labor today announced a proposed rule that would phase out the issuance of certificates allowing employers to pay some workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour, for the work they perform.

The rule proposes to gradually eliminate certificates employers can apply for under Section 14(c) of Fair Labor Standards Act that allow them to pay certain workers with disabilities subminimum wages. The department proposes to discontinue the issuance of new certificates and establish a three-year phase-out period for employers with existing certificates once a final rule becomes effective.

“This proposal demonstrates the Biden-Harris administration’s dedication to good jobs for workers with disabilities,” said Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su. “In the decades since Section 14(c) was included in the Fair Labor Standards Act, there have been significant legal and policy developments that have dramatically expanded employment opportunities and rights for individuals with disabilities. With this proposal, the department expects that many workers currently paid subminimum wages under Section 14(c) will move into jobs that pay full wages, which will improve their economic wellbeing and strengthen inclusion for people with disabilities in the workforce.”

The proposed rule would do the following:

• Cease the department’s issuance of new Section 14(c) certificates starting on the effective date of a final rule.
• Institute a three-year period beginning on the effective date of a final rule for employers holding existing Section 14(c) certificates to gradually cease paying subminimum wages to workers with disabilities.

RFK Jr. Talked to Vaccine Scientists, But Disregarded Them

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote, a madman "is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point."

Vivian Salama, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber at WSJ:

[Dr. Paul] Offit said he walked Kennedy through a slew of studies, which Offit said didn’t show any harm from mercury in vaccines. He noted that by 2001, the U.S. had removed a preservative containing mercury from vaccines for young children as a precautionary measure. Still, Kennedy wrote a 2005 article linking vaccines to autism in Rolling Stone and Salon, which both publications later retracted.

A 2015 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association of the health records of 95,000 children showed the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine didn’t increase the risk of autism.
...

Vaccine scientists have met with Kennedy and answered his questions on multiple occasions, people familiar with the conversations said, explaining that all vaccines go through safety testing ahead of their release and are also monitored after. Some shots for children, if tests in adults show that they safely prevent deadly diseases, don’t undergo placebo testing, because medical experts consider it unethical to withhold proven lifesaving treatment.

Vaccinologist Peter Hotez, who has a daughter with autism, also spoke to Kennedy in a series of phone calls in 2017—conversations initially brokered by Fauci.

“He had already set it in his mind that vaccines cause autism,” Hotez said, adding: “He didn’t have a lot of interest in the science, and wasn’t willing to bend.”

Trump to Nominate Antivax Profiteer to Head the FBI

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze  the bizarre theories surrounding vaccines.

Trump will nominate Kash Patel to head the FBI. In April Isaac Schorr reported at Mediaite:

Kash Patel, who served as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense in former President Donald Trump’s administration and is widely expected to be tapped for a national security role in a prospective second term, is hawking pills that claim to reverse the effects of the Covid vaccines.

Patel captioned his post, “Mrna detox, reverse the vaxx n get healthy with @warrioressentials,” and tacked on a promotional graphic touting Warrior Essentials’ “Spike Protein Recovery System.”

“You were immune to the propaganda, but are you immune to the shedders,” reads the graphic. The system is comprised of three separate pill types that the company insists removes “toxins” from your cells, repairs “circulatory health,” and finally, restores “immunity and DNA stability.”

“Shedding,” according to Warrior Essentials, refers to a claim of “spike protein transmission from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated.”

“It’s important to understand we may all be at risk from spike proteins and covid vaccines, even if we are unvaccinated,” insists the pill company. “Studies have shown viral shedding of spike proteins is happening and it appears the messenger RNA is transferring from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated. This means the unvaccinated can be at risk for the same complications and negative effects as those who took the shots.” Vaccine shedding is considered a myth by most medical practitioners.

The RFK Danger

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Ashleigh Fields at The Hill:

Scott Gottlieb, who served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during President-elect Trump’s first term, expressed concerns with the pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) due to his anti-vaccine advocacy.

“I think if RFK follows through on his intentions, and I believe he will, and I believe he can, it will cost lives in this country,” he said during a Friday appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down, and like I said, if we lose another 5 percent [of vaccinations], which could happen in the next year or two, we will see large measles outbreaks,” he continued.

Many are worried Kennedy, who would need to be confirmed by the Senate to become HHS secretary, will amplify vaccine hesitancy for children despite his promise not to take away vaccines.

Gottlieb said he doesn’t think Trump wants to see a “resurgence” in infectious diseases, such as measles, polio and whopping cough. But he noted the nation’s doctors aren’t prepared to provide patients with diagnoses for diseases that have been largely absent for several decades, which could rise if vaccine rates drop.

 

RFK Linked Vaccines to Holocaust, Called for Jailing Dr. Paul Offit

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Brandy Zadrozny at NBC:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.

...

Kennedy made these remarks and others — most previously unreported — over years of appearances at AutismOne. The comments, dating back to 2013, include claims that the CDC is a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to “Nazi death camps.”
...

At the 2013 AutismOne question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC’s motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Kennedy made a comparison to the Holocaust.

“To me this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids,” Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines — which had been debunked over a decade earlier. “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”

He also gave more detail on the people he believed belonged in prison.

“I don’t think this is going to happen because they always manage, the bad guys somehow manage to weasel their way out of it,” he said. “But I would do a lot to see Paul Offit, all these ‘good people,’ behind bars.”

Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. He currently serves on a Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee. Asked for comment, Offit said Kennedy had targeted him and others on government vaccine panels for nearly two decades as main characters in baseless conspiracy theories, attacks that have invited harassment and threats.

The Project 2025 Threat

In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 7.5 million children 3 to 21 years old received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in AY 2022-23.

About 980,000 of them were autistic, up from 498,000 in 2012-13.

The Trumpist Project 2025 would gut that law, wiping out protections for all those students.  See here for details:

It would also scrap the entire Department of Education.

During the campaign, Trump denied any connection with Project 2025 but is now stocking his administration with its architects.

 Deborah Spitalnik at NJ Spotlight News:

Project 2025’s elimination of the federal Department of Education abdicates our responsibility as a society to provide children with equitable opportunities for learning and skill development to become productive, successful adults. For the 18% of school-age children receiving special education services in New Jersey and their counterparts across the country, the right to education came about through the courts and eventually federal law, now IDEA — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The Department of Education has an essential role in protecting rights, ensuring access and quality for children and young adults with disabilities, and requiring individual schools and each state to provide education that enables students with disabilities to learn and pursue life goals as do their typical peers. Project 2025 would allow states to use federal funds without oversight and opt out of educational programs, relegating students with disabilities to at best, second-class citizenship. Moving educational functions to the Department of Health and Human Services threatens students with disabilities, diminishing the power of education as a fundamental right and source of development for all children. As in threatening to change federal grant-making in the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, Project 2025 would eliminate Department of Education competitive grants, reducing educational innovation and improvement. For children with disabilities, federal grants to New Jersey have contributed to access to the general curriculum, creating positive school climates enabling all students to learn, and preparing students for adult life and employment. Project 2025 would eliminate these sources of innovation, stifling progress and foreclosing opportunities hard-won by years of advocacy. Head Start — which provides preschool education and health services in New Jersey for 12,748 poor children with and without disabilities, as well as families and pregnant women — would be eliminated by Project 2025.

More on Weldon

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.

 Trump is nominating former Rep. Dave Weldon to head CDC.  David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine:

During his 14 years in Congress, Weldon funneled his belief in an “autism epidemic.” He also apparently believed in the thimerosal-autism link, to the point of promoting highly dubious studies and attacking decent studies examining whether mercury in childhood vaccines had been responsible for such an “epidemic.” Back in the day, he even spoke at antivax “conferences” falsely billed as scientific conferences:

Understanding autism and searching for a cure is a passion that I will continue to carry with me. In 2004, I delivered an address at the Defeat Autism Now Conference and the keynote address to the Autism One Conference in Chicago regarding the autism epidemic affecting one in 163 children. I challenged public health officials to direct the funding to defeat this epidemic. Today, autism affects one in 88 children. America can’t afford further delay in autism research.

Defeat Autism Now! was the umbrella organization for a lot of antivax quacks abusing children with “autism biomed” treatments to “cure” them of the “vaccine injury” blamed by antivaxxers for their autism, while the Autism One conference was the longstanding fake medical conference held in Chicago annually for many years that showcased all forms of antivax and autism quackery. For those of you not familiar with Autism One, It was at the 2013 Autism One conference that RFK Jr. likened vaccines to the Holocaust, at least to my knowledge, and where Kerri Rivera described feeding bleach to children in 2012 to treat their autism.

Back in 2003-2004, Weldon used his position in Congress to write letters to then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding demanding an “investigation” of supposed links between vaccines and autism. Basically, the letters made the same claims that RFK Jr. made in his 2005 conspiracyfest Deadly Immunity. Recall that the central claim in RFK Jr.’s article, co-published by Rolling Stone and Salon.com (to their eternal shame), was that there was evidence that thimerosal in vaccines was associated with a highly elevated risk of autism in children but that the CDC, at a meeting in 2000, “covered it up.” This is a claim that I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, after the conference center where the meeting was held, an example of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (at least in the US), one I’ve deconstructed in the past. Weldon, even though he’s a physician, fell for the Simpsonwood conference conspiracy theory, promoted a year and a half later by antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hook, line, and sinker. The first letter regurgitates the “concerns” being promoted by the antivaccine movement at the time. The second letter turned up the heat, trying to persuade Gerberding to postpone an important Institute of Medicine conference until the “concern” about the Verstraeten study had been addressed. As we all know, the IOM conference did go on and the IOM report found (and strongly stated) that there was no evidence to support correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism risk. Once again, antivaxxers were deceptively looking at standard epidemiological and statistical techniques to account for confounders as something nefarious, as they misrepresented how the observed “association” between thimerosal and autism risk declined and disappeared as appropriate confounders were accounted for as the CDC intentionally “covering up” an association, and Weldon was the Congressional spearhead for this conspiracy theory.

Truly, the vaccination program and public health efforts by the CDC are in serious jeopardy, even worse than I had imagined. I suppose I should be happy that Trump didn’t appoint Andrew Wakefield as CDC Director.

RFK and CA

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

At a Sacramento event in 2015, Kennedy said: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone, This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

 Ana Ibarra at CalMatters:

Five years ago, hundreds of people crowded the halls of the state Capitol protesting legislation that sought to tighten California’s vaccine rules. Outside, music blasted something about a revolution and people carried signs that read “Vaccine mandates violate bodily autonomy.”

From the sea of red-clad protesters emerged a familiar face idolized by the anti-vaccine activists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He was the guest of honor in one of the biggest public health showdowns the state has seen in recent years. Ultimately, he and his followers lost — the Legislature passed a law to clamp down on fraudulent or inappropriate medical exemptions for required childhood vaccines.

Today, Kennedy finds himself on a bigger stage with potentially far more influence and power. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated the former environmental lawyer turned controversial vaccine critic to oversee the nation’s health policy as secretary of Health and Human Services.

He has been known to make false, and at times dangerous, claims about medicine and public health. Perhaps most infamously he linked vaccines to autism — a claim that has been debunked over and over again.
...
Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who as a state senator authored the 2019 medical exemption law and a separate law that eliminated personal belief exemptions for childhood vaccines, said having a health secretary who casts doubt on vaccines is “a danger” and “disturbing.”

“I imagine we’re going to see a lot more direct attacks on individual scientists, individual people. I’m anticipating that I’m probably gonna be hoisted somewhere by those guys as well. I don’t think RFK Jr. has forgotten about me yet,” he said.