Trump Posts Antivax Video

 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 have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

Megan Messerly at Politico:

President Donald Trump on Monday posted a video to his social media account promoting the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.

The decades-old video, in part, features David Geier, who Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped this spring to investigate links between vaccines and autism, alongside his father, Dr. Mark Geier, whose medical license was suspended following claims he endangered children with autism. The anti-vaccine activists have published numerous studies on the topic and discuss some of their ideas in the video, which circulated around the internet Monday after Trump shared it.

 

Trump has been pushing the vaccine theory for nearly twenty years.   In 2007, Josh Hafenbrack reported at The South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

At a news conference Thursday in a gold-trimmed Mar-A-Lago ballroom, Trump's wife, Melania, noted her 22-month-old son, Baron, and said: "I cannot imagine what the mothers [with autistic children] and mothers all around the world go through. ... Let's get rid of autism."

In an interview, Donald Trump said he thinks the rising prevalence of autism is related to vaccinations of babies and toddlers.

One in 150 children is now diagnosed with autism, with the prevalence higher among boys.

"When I was growing up, autism wasn't really a factor," he said. "And now all of a sudden, it's an epidemic. Everybody has their theory, and my theory is the shots. They're getting these massive injections at one time. I think it's the vaccinations."

Antivax Tactics

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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

In the book, I write:

Many articles and blog posts arguing for the vaccine-autism link have the trappings of genuine academic research: tables, graphs, citations, and scientific jargon. Some of the authors have credentials such as M.D. or Ph.D. degrees. None of these things is a guarantee of scientific value, as the history of science is full of crackpot theories (e.g., AIDS denialism) that are the heavily-footnoted products of people with letters after their names. But most people will not be able to spot the scientific weaknesses of such work. Outside of academia, few understand concepts such as peer review. Jordynn Jack describes one dubious article that appeared in a non-peer-reviewed publication: “Regardless of the scientific validity of the article, though, the writers perform the writing style quite effectively. It would be difficult for the layperson to distinguish this article from any other scientific research paper, especially if one did not investigate the nature of the journal … or of the scientific response to the article.”

Dr. Jessica Steier at NYT (h/t Fred Lynch):

The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says he wants to understand what causes autism. It’s a perfectly laudable goal and one that scientists have been pursuing for decades. But after announcing a large new federal study on the topic, he made a shocking choice by bringing in the vaccine critic David Geier as a researcher.

...

There have been some 70 studies since Mr. Wakefield’s looking for any link between vaccines and autism. Of these, 26 have linked vaccines to autism in some way, and 43 found no connection between vaccines and autism.

A whopping two-thirds of studies that claimed to have found a link were written by David and Mark Geier. These studies have been heavily criticized for using deceptive research techniques and flawed data.

Among the eight other studies that found a link, four were retracted for data manipulation, flawed methods or undisclosed conflicts of interest. Most of the authors have been involved in anti-vaccination campaigns and have had other papers retracted.

One such study that Mr. Kennedy referred to in his Senate confirmation hearing was published in a WordPress blog disguised as a journal and was funded by an anti-vaccine organization, among other problems.

Fortunately, independent scientists have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies since 1998 involving over 5.6 million people across seven countries. All found no connection between vaccines and autism. These studies were rigorously designed, were reviewed by independent peers and do not contain telltale signs of data manipulation, as the Geier studies do.

Geier's Monkey Business

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. 

Liz Essley Whyte and Dominique Mosbergen at WSJ:

An antivaccine activist recently hired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has started hunting for proof that federal officials hid evidence that inoculations cause autism, according to people familiar with the matter.

David Geier, a longtime vaccine opponent hired this spring as a contractor in the health department’s financial office, is seeking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that antivaccine activists, including Kennedy, have alleged was buried because it showed a link between vaccines and autism, the people said.

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Geier is seeking access to a database known as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or VSD, which Kennedy referenced in his 2005 Rolling Stone article. But before joining HHS, Geier was barred at least twice from using the database because officials said he had misused it.
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The health secretary has said Geier isn’t managing autism research but that he would look into whether data is missing from the database. “There has been a lot of monkey business with the VSD,” Kennedy told lawmakers last month.

Children’s Health Defense, the antivaccine nonprofit Kennedy once led, will host an online event Friday marking the 25th anniversary of what they call the “autism coverup.” Kennedy was slated to speak, according to an earlier version of a schedule posted online. His name was later removed.

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In 2004, Geier and his father were prohibited from accessing the VSD after CDC officials determined they had misrepresented what they were going to do with the data. The CDC kicked the Geiers out of the VSD again in 2006.

Geier, at a 2015 conference, lamented that his access to the VSD had been suspended. “They think that that is been completely debunked and the science that we’re doing is no good,” he said.

NIH researchers have been asked to help Geier, people familiar with the matter said. NIH employees recently requested that the CDC send over the entirety of the VSD—an ask that set off alarm bells at the CDC and among researchers at the healthcare networks, who worried whether their patients’ private health information