In the wake of the debate, Trump has been blasted. Some cheered online when Tapper tried to portray Trump as the know-nothing enemy of scientific expertise that supposedly justifies progressives’ power over ordinary Americans’ personal, civic and political lives. But Stephanopoulos’ question was still used by Democrats throughout the 2012 election to smear Romney and the GOP as anti-sex.
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Plus, as the Autism Science Foundation notes, when researchers “looked at children who received vaccines and those who didn’t, or who received them on a different, slower schedule… there was no difference in their neurological outcomes”. Since 2000, the rate has roughly doubled, to 1 in 88 children.
“A lot of what Trump says is annoying but this is serious“.
However, Trump’s co-candidate Ben Carson said that vaccinations have nothing to do with autism, and that there is proof about this. Trump added that he isn’t against vaccines, but thinks the dosages should be more spaced out.
“And that’s all I’m saying, Jake. George Washington wouldn’t let his wife visit until she got vaccinated”.
Donald Trump stuck to a position that’s totally unsupported by medical evidence – that a link exists behind autism and vaccines.
“This was something that was spread widely 15 or 20 years ago, and it has not been adequately, you know, revealed to the public what’s actually going on”.
He said, “I’m in favor of vaccines”.
The alternative, spacing the same vaccines out over longer periods of time, is not a good option. “Delaying vaccines only leaves a child at risk of disease for a longer period of time; it does not make vaccinating safer”, Dr. Karen Remley, Executive Director of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement.
But Tapper kept pushing. “She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine”, Bachmann said.
HAELLE: Well, each time you go to the doctor’s office, you are subjecting your child to more microbes that are in that office. Whether Carson can vaunt himself into the top spot outright may hinge on his ability to transform the momentum he has gained into unwavering support for his campaign.
But Trump claimed he has “seen” evidence of a child suffering after effects of the vaccine. That’s an impossible-to-prove negative because human genetics and the human environment are far too varied, diverse, nuanced and complex for anyone to declare that no harm will ever come to any child. As a fellow physician it was unsettling to me to see them speculating wildly outside their areas of expertise, especially in the wake of Trump’s unsafe comments.
Dr. Art Reingold, a professor of public health at UC Berkeley, also vouched for the safety of the schedule. “I would be happy to give parents many, many choices, but some of their personal choices affect the community around them”.
So the argument is moving on from the (relatively) simple and bogus claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism to a more complex and on its surface not implausible claim: that a great number of inoculations in a short time can overwhelm an infant immune system. Asked if he was “surprised” that Carson, who is a pediatric neurosurgeon, “effectively refused to correct” Trump in the exchange, Gupta said he was.
That’s the obvious civic and small-c-conservative, small-d-democratic middle-ground between the many progressives’ extreme insistence that their vaccine policies are just completely ideal , and some parent’s unjustified – and even selfish – extreme refusal to vaccinate their kids from school-shared diseases that once killed many children. “The candidates have been given a platform, and with that platform comes a certain responsibility to know the facts”.
Stephanopoulos, the Democrat activist, kept pushing.
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Romney pushed back. “The idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do, that no state wants to do, and then asking me whether they can do it or not is kind of a silly thing”.
