“Donald Trump is a part of a fringe movement that includes… others who have dangerously perpetuated the false link between vaccines and autism”, Singer said.
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And the potential fallout from that exchange has infectious-disease experts anxious .
It was possibly the easiest question of the night when Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, was lofted a no-brainer about whether Donald Trump should stop repeating one of the most debunked, fear-mongering ideas in medicine: that vaccines cause autism. Each and every one of the vaccines the CDC recommends for children through age of 18 prevents a disease that could cause serious debilitation or death. “It is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time“, he said. “I think he’s an intelligent man and will make the correct decision after getting the real facts”. “The candidates have been given a platform, and with that platform comes a certain responsibility to know the facts”. And weakened herd immunity is the reason we have measles outbreaks at Disneyland. “It’s not surprising there would be some pushback”.
On Wednesday, during debate of GOP candidates, Trump once again repeated the controversial statement that he had given earlier. And toward the end, they entered a debate over the safety and effectiveness of vaccines that roiled the Legislature in 2015. Then Rand Paul jumped in with the brilliant, “I’m all for vaccines”.
Yet even some on the libertarian wing of the party who defend the comments of Carson and Paul say they accept the need for at least some vaccine mandates.
To be clear: Each of the 12 vaccines administered to children target common causes of crippling and deadly childhood diseases and represent the fruition of many years of hard-won medical research and careful analysis by scientists and clinicians.
“There have been numerous studies and they have not demonstrated that there’s any correlation between vaccinations and autism”, Carson responded. [5 risky Vaccine Myths].
Starting with their trip down the birth canal, babies are confronted with millions of bacteria on a daily basis, Duchin said. “That means a small child like Morgan Hintz that has 500 seizures a day and is failing on nine traditional medications, is not allowed to use cannabis oil – and if they attempt to do that in Florida, they will take the child away and put the parents in jail”. Here’s a nice synopsis of those studies, courtesy of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“A child went to have the vaccine, got very, very sick, and now is autistic.”
He even offered a tragic story of a child who was vaccinated, developed a fever, and then went on to be diagnosed with autism.
“Why do we vaccinate so young?” You’re not protected until you have three doses. It all stemmed from comments he made to Rolling Stone about her: “Look at that face!” he said.
Kids who don’t receive timely vaccinations also endanger “herd immunity”-the concept that everyone in a community enjoys general immunity against a disease if most people are immune to it, Baker added. I’m also concerned with how they’re bunched up”.
It’s bad enough when candidate debates feature bogus political information, but when the events convey misleading public-health information to the public, it’s arguably quite unsafe . A recent survey of a nationally representative sample of 534 primary care doctors found a third said they allowed parents to delay vaccinations or space them out often or always. “Far from it…. There is no evidence at all that spacing vaccines out or changing the schedule would improve health or help children”.
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Kimberlin also scoffed at the notion, asserting that the vaccination schedule is the result of careful study and analysis and that abandoning it would be roughly equivalent to experimenting on children. In that outbreak, 117 people across the United States were stricken with measles after a handful were exposed to the virus on vacation in southern California.
