For all the talk about how Donald Trump may be dangerous for the nation, it has all been conjecture – until now.
Kennedy, who is opposed to vaccines, claiming that those containing the element thimerosal may cause autism, which has no scientific evidence to back it up, chortled that Trump had asked him for the meeting, and asked him to “chair a commission on vaccination safety and scientific integrity.”
Kennedy wrote a book and promoted a documentary that supported the elimination of vaccines; as CBS News reports:
“During one showing of that documentary, according to the Sacramento Bee, Kennedy compared the damage done by vaccines to “a holocaust.” “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,” Kennedy said at the screening in 2015. “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
Kennedy later apologized.
But Trump himself has vacillated on the issue of vaccines, saying in a 2015 GOP primary debate:
I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time. Same exact amount, but you take this little beautiful baby, and you pump–I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me. … [in which] a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back and a week later had a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.
He has also tweeted:
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all strongly support protecting children with recommended vaccinations. To eliminate vaccines would be truly dangerous; as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted:
In 1974, Japan had a successful pertussis (whooping cough) vaccination program, with nearly 80% of Japanese children vaccinated. That year only 393 cases of pertussis were reported in the entire country, and there were no deaths from pertussis. But then rumors began to spread that pertussis vaccination was no longer needed and that the vaccine was not safe, and by 1976 only 10% of infants were getting vaccinated. In 1979 Japan suffered a major pertussis epidemic, with more than 13,000 cases of whooping cough and 41 deaths.
The CDC added that the success of vaccines protected the U.S. population:
Before the middle of the last century, diseases like whooping cough, polio, measles, Haemophilus influenzae, and rubella struck hundreds of thousands of infants, children and adults in the U.S.. Thousands died every year from them. As vaccines were developed and became widely used, rates of these diseases declined until today most of them are nearly gone from our country. Nearly everyone in the U.S. got measles before there was a vaccine, and hundreds died from it each year. Today, most doctors have never seen a case of measles. More than 15,000 Americans died from diphtheria in 1921, before there was a vaccine. Only one case of diphtheria has been reported to CDC since 2004.
An epidemic of rubella (German measles) in 1964-65 infected 12½ million Americans, killed 2,000 babies, and caused 11,000 miscarriages. In 2012, 9 cases of rubella were reported to CDC.
The CDC concluded:
The United States has very low rates of vaccine-preventable diseases, but this isn’t true everywhere in the world. Only one disease — smallpox — has been totally erased from the planet. Polio no longer occurs in the U.S., but it is still paralyzing children in several African countries. More than 350,000 cases of measles were reported from around the world in 2011, with outbreaks in the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In that same year, 90% of measles cases in the U.S. were associated with cases imported from another country. Only the fact that most Americans are vaccinated against measles prevented these clusters of cases from becoming epidemics.
Disease rates are low in the United States today. But if we let ourselves become vulnerable by not vaccinating, a case that could touch off an outbreak of some disease that is currently under control is just a plane ride away.
Trump seems to be swayed by anecdotal evidence rather than actual facts. In some cases that might be tolerable, but there are millions of lives at stake, and this is no time to accede to those wanting to take us back to the era of losing thousands of children to diseases we can currently prevent.