In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by llowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
President Donald Trump made numerous false or misleading claims about vaccines and autism on Monday.
Trump has long pushed vaccine misinformation. He delivered his latest inaccurate remarks at a White House event during which he signed an executive order that recommends that US children receive fewer vaccinations over a longer period of time than they do today.
Trump again floated the idea that vaccines cause autism, though that notion has been thoroughly debunked by extensive research in multiple countries. He again baselessly impugned the safety of the combination vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, which has for decades proven highly safe and highly effective.
He again wildly overstated the size of the vaccine doses children receive, which are nowhere near “the size of a bottle of soda.” He again wildly understated the prevalence of autism 20 years ago. And he again exaggerated the number of injections children have been required to receive.
I have been tracking Trump's autism lies for a long time. From 2015:
During the recent GOP debate, Donald Trump suggested that kids are developing autism because they are getting too many shots too soon. “Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
Curiously, Trump used almost the same words three years ago. “It happened to somebody that worked for me recently,” he said on Fox News in 2012. “I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of the sudden they go in and they get this monster shot…then all of the sudden the child is different a month later.”
{mosads}Wherever this mysterious anecdote came from, Trump was talking nonsense. Multiple scientific studies have shown that there is no connection between autism and the vaccine schedule, or any individual vaccine. The idea of such a linkage has been circulating for years because of a 1998 study that turned out to be fraudulent. The British medical journal that ran the piece later retracted it, and its lead author lost his medical license.
