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 helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
He is now Trump's secretary of HHS. Yesterday, he testified before the Senate HELP Committee and lied through his teeth.
Some of Mr. Kennedy’s statements did not comport with the facts. He told the Senate health committee that no current vaccines except those for Covid had been tested against placebo. That prompted the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who had left the room, to return to correct him.
“The secretary made the statement that no vaccines except Covid have been evaluated against placebo,” Mr. Cassidy said. “That’s not true. A rotavirus, measles and HPV vaccines have been.”
Mr. Kennedy’s assertion that he has “not fired any working scientists” flies in the face of reality. Hundreds of scientists from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have lost their jobs as part of his plan to overhaul the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Trump administration has also frozen or canceled scores of research grants at academic institutions, many of them from the National Institutes of Health, which falls under Mr. Kennedy’s purview. Columbia University alone has experienced significant cuts to more than 300 federal grants, many of them for medical research.
