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“When RFK Jr had the CDEC change the childhood vaccine schedule, clarity became the casualty.”
– immunologist and podcaster Dr. Zachary Rubin
U.S. President Donald Trump and his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week uttered several enormous lies about the dangers of childhood vaccines that defy all scientific data and logic.
So why do millions of people — in the U.S. and Canada and elsewhere — believe them?
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I have always thought the current widespread vaccine hesitancy afflicting Canada and the United States had nothing to do with vaccines themselves. No, long before vaccine hesitancy reached a fever pitch (pun intended), the enemies of vaccines had to do something else first.
That something was the systematic discrediting of all the people and institutions that would rise up and refute claims that vaccines were dangerous.
News media. Research scientists. Physicians. Medical journals. Anyone with a smidge of subject matter expertise — and the professional news organizations and journals that publish work based on that expertise — were slowly but surely defamed and demeaned by the anti-vaccine lobby and politicians who sought to exploit it for their own gain.
That is what makes this week’s extraordinary utterances by President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so incredibly worrisome.
Trump signed yet another democracy-defying executive order on Monday calling to end multi-disease immunizations like the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot that has been administered for more than half a century and saved untold millions of lives.
U.S. President Donald Trump holds up an image taken from his Truth Social account as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. watches during a meeting to sign an executive order about vaccines on Monday. (Jacquelyn Martin / The Associated Press)
This is the second run Trump and Kennedy have taken at childhood vaccines.
This past January, Kennedy announced he was reducing recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11, excluding shots for influenza, COVID-19, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A and B, Meningococcal disease, RSV, Dengue, and the MMR shot.
A court challenge from medical organizations was successful in getting an injunction preventing the policy from going into effect.
Of greater current concern are two whopper lies Trump uttered during Monday’s news conference.
First, Trump once again tried to link childhood vaccinations and autism (no link exists).
He then launched an incredulous claim that children required 72 jabs. (The current and entire course of childhood vaccines is about half that.)
“I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a… bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body. And bad things happen in many, too many cases,” Trump said.
Was that a 500 ml, one-litre or two-litre bottle? For the record, individual childhood vaccination shots run between 0.25 and 0.5 ml or, as the New York Times noted, “roughly one-twentieth to one-tenth of a teaspoon.”
It’s easy to make fun of an insane claim like that, but the political messaging behind it is incredibly effective, despite the fact just about every major news organization debunked everything Trump said.
People will believe this crap because they’ve been conditioned by the MAGA-verse to not believe those who would attempt to debunk it.
What is really going on? This is yet another play on “parental rights.”
Heading into mid-term elections this fall — elections where Republicans fear widespread losses owing to the president’s historically low approval ratings — Trump is trying to position Republicans as the candidates who will empower parents, even if it’s to do the wrong thing.
The White House news release on the executive order made this quite clear. After falsely claiming the order was based on the best peer-reviewed science in developed countries (it is absolutely not), Trump promoted the order as a way to protect “religious liberty and parental rights.”
It’s a huge and dangerous lie.
Parents have, and have always had, the final say over which vaccines their children receive. Measles outbreaks are evidence enough of that.
The important takeaway here is that this isn’t about whether a vaccine is safe or not; it’s a con game to lure midterm votes by offering parents something they already have.
Anticipating the responses I’m going to get from readers who will summon all kinds of hoo-ha from the farthest corners of YouTube warning us of the pervasive dangers of childhood vaccines, here is the bottom line:
Of all of the medical procedures or treatments you may receive in your lifetime, vaccines are among the safest.
Yes, there are some adverse effects, but they are mild and rare.
And there is no link to autism. None. Zero.
There’s only so many times people like me, and others in the professional media, can say this: when politicians try to tell you that vaccines are unsafe, or imply it with policies designed to discourage vaccine uptake in the name of parental rights, please remember they are lying.
And lying to you to fool you into voting for them.
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