Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.
In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.
“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.
“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”
The thing about the “vaccines = autism” conspiracy theories is that we have them because of a conspiracy theory. Or more just a conspiracy.
Andrew Wakefield, the one who became prominent for publishing the idea in the medical community, pushed out his shoddy study because he wanted to replace the MMR vaccine with his own vaccine.
So plenty of people think that vaccines cause autism because they believed someone who (believed someone who believed someone who […]) wanted to sell a different vaccine.
Someone who wants to believe won’t be convinced. But I have seen this bit of info cause “vaccine skeptics” to take pause.