Price Hearing, Continued

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.

At STAT, Dylan Scott reports on a Senate Finance Committee exchange between Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and HHS nominee Tom Price:

Do vaccines cause autism?” Menendez asked Price during Tuesday’s hearing, the first time the issue had been raised with the HHS nominee during his confirmation.

“I think the science in that instance is that they don’t,” Price said. He went on: “But there are individuals in our country who are very —”

Menendez cut him off.

“I’m not asking about individuals,” he said. “I’m asking about science.”

Was Price trying to add something that would reassure antivaccine activists?

At The Huffington Post, Arthur Delaney reports:

In light of the president’s fringe beliefs, last week Every Child By Two and dozens of other groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, asked senators to get Price to commit to vaccines.

Later in the hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked whether Price, as a physician, believed parents should get their kids vaccinated according to the schedule set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of the health department. Price didn’t exactly say that they should.

“I think that the science and healthcare has identified a very important aspect of public health, and that is the role of vaccinations,” he said.

Further Pushback Against Trump & RFK Jr. on the Autism-Vaccine Myth

Many posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  (He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.) The story that Trump might appoint anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head a presidential commission -- whether on vaccines or autism -- has provoked widespread reactions.

At Respectful Insolence, Orac writes:

So basically, antivaccine activists, led by Polly Tommey, who also co-produced VAXXED, are collecting stories of “vaccine injury.” One could say that the movie VAXXED consists, to a large degree, of stories of “vaccine-induced” autism, and the VAXXED team has been busy collecting such stories and posting videos to its website, grouped by state. For instance, here is Michigan, which as of last night included six videos. Not surprisingly, California has many more. So far, the VAXXED team claims it’s received over 650 e-mails from people who have submitted their stories.

This could be a very effective technique with this particular President for the simple reason that he does not understand science, shows little interest in science, and clearly values anecdotes over data. He is very easily influenced by flattery. He has a long and sordid history of antivaccine views. He’s been very consistent in this, dating back to at least 2007. He became antivaccine because of stories told to him by parents just like this, according to RFK Jr.

At STAT, Sheila Kaplan proposes question for HHS nominee Tom Price.

Do you share the president-elect’s concerns about the safety of US vaccines?

Trump has made a number of remarks indicating that he is concerned about vaccine safety, seemingly lending credence to debunked theories suggesting vaccines can cause autism. He also met recently with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken anti-vaccine figure, who later said he had been asked to lead a committee on vaccine safety. (Trump’s transition team did not confirm he had been asked to do so.)

As the head of the nation’s top health agency, Price would be in a position to, at the very least, set the administration’s tone on vaccines.

At The Sacramento Bee, Karin Klein writes that RFK's California campaign against vaccination mandates focused on thimerosal, which has been out of vaccines for more than a decade.

Kennedy says that his mission would be to look at the science, but how could he be trusted to do that when he thinks any science that doesn’t fit with his preconceived notions is a plot? This is how he voiced his fringe vaccine belief: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

He later apologized for that insulting and wildly inaccurate description of autism, but it proves the point: This man is not a scientist or anything remotely resembling a medical expert. He doesn’t belong anywhere near a scientific inquiry.

Want an example of a holocaust? In 1990, measles killed 872,000 people worldwide. A global vaccination effort reduced that to 158,000 people by the year 2011. A recent study found that the measles vaccination campaign had saved the lives of 20 million children from 2000 to 2015 – and even so, missed measles inoculations mean that 400 children a day continue to die from the disease.

The danger isn’t vaccines. Measles and many other diseases are highly contagious, potentially fatal, but preventable. The danger is from people who throw around scare words, paving the way for its comeback.

Physicians Slam Trump's Antivax Stand

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.

Dr. Christopher A. Sanford and Dr. Paul S. Pottinger write at The Seattle Times:

President-elect Donald J. Trump apparently believes that vaccines cause autism.

Tom Price, M.D., Trump’s nominee as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, belongs to a Phoenix-based group that promotes the belief that vaccines cause autism, and that “shaken baby syndrome” — a brain injury in infants or toddlers as a result of forceful shaking — is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury.

In August 2016, Trump met with anti-vaccine activists, including Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 paper in Lancet — since retracted after being found to contain falsified data — first linked autism to vaccines. At that meeting, according to participants, Trump agreed to further meetings with anti-vaccine activists.

This is worrisome. Each year approximately 1.5 million children around the world die from vaccine-preventable illnesses. In 2015, measles alone killed 134,000 people, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. This represents a marked improvement: between 2000 and 2015, the number of global deaths due to measles dropped by 79 percent, a reduction attributable to enhanced vaccination.
...

We are physicians who teach tropical medicine in East Africa each year, where we witness the tragedy of illnesses and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. Our training, experiences and observations align, both here and in low-income nations: vaccines save lives.

Trump may become our president, but this doesn’t mean we need to compromise our health, especially that of our children.

Price

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.

Trump is nominating Rep. Tom Price (D-GA) to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

Price belongs to the crackpot antivax group, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. At Respectful Insolence, Orac writes:

[It] is worth briefly mentioning the pure antiscience and pseudoscience that emanates from the AAPS, particularly through its house organ, the Journal of American Physicians and Scientists (JPANDS). This journal is a veritable cornucopia of ideology-motivated quackery and pseudoscience, including antivaccine pseudoscience up to and including the despicable claim that shaken baby syndrome is a “misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning” and that sudden infant death syndrome might be caused by vaccines, the bogus claim that abortion causes breast cancer, and anthropogenic global climate change denialism (don’t ask what that’s doing there). Indeed, Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of AAPS, denies the very concept of a scientific consensus.

James V. Grimaldi and Michelle Hackman report at The Wall Street Journal:

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.

 Rep. Tom Price, a Georgia Republican, bought and sold stock in about 40 health-care, pharmaceutical and biomedical companies since 2012, including a dozen in the current congressional session, according to a Wall Street Journal review of hundreds of pages of stock trades he filed with Congress.

In the same two-year period, he has sponsored nine and co-sponsored 35 health-related bills in the House.

Trump, Price, and the Antivax Movement

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.

Rebecca Robbins reports at STAT:

“For the first time in a long time, I feel very positive about this, because Donald Trump is not beholden to the pharmaceutical industry,” movement leader Andrew Wakefield told STAT in a phone interview.

“He didn’t rely upon [drug makers] to get him elected. And he’s a man who seems to speak his mind and act accordingly. So we shall see,” said Wakefield. A former doctor whose medical license was revoked, Wakefield launched the movement to question the safety of vaccines nearly two decades ago with a fraudulent study (which has since been retracted) suggesting that a widely administered vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella can cause autism.

Wakefield and a small group of like-minded activists spent nearly an hour with Trump in the closing months of the presidential campaign. “I found him to be extremely interested, genuinely interested, and open-minded on this issue, so that was enormously refreshing,” Wakefield said.

Robbins notes that HHS secretary-designate Tom Price has note been vocal on the issue. 

But Price, a former orthopedic surgeon, is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative group that publishes a journal that has promoted discredited views — including the supposed link between vaccines and autism. The group’s executive director, Dr. Jane Orient, confirmed Price’s current membership in an email to STAT.

Wakefield told Robbins that he has two goals at the federal level:

The first is to convince Congress to repeal a Reagan-era law that effectively moved vaccine injury lawsuits out of the civil courts by setting up a separate compensation system. That system awards compensation to people who can meet strict requirements for showing their injury was caused by a vaccine. Autism is not on the list of recognized injuries that can sometimes stem from vaccines— so activists have long wanted to do away with the system.

A second goal: to get the administration to appoint an independent board to oversee vaccine safety. Many anti-vaccine activists see the CDC, which currently oversees safety, as a corrupt agency in league with drug makers, though they have not produced evidence to back up that allegation.