And they worried he wouldn’t be bipartisan! Last week, President-elect Donald Trump met with that scion of America’s premier Democratic dynasty, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The confab, which reportedly occurred at Trump’s request, centered on the issue of childhood vaccines and their (nonexistent) relationship to autism. When Kennedy emerged from the meeting, he was exultant: He told reporters that the president-elect had asked him to chair a commission on “vaccine safety and scientific integrity.”
“President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies, and he has questions about [them],” Kennedy said.
It later emerged that Kennedy may have been engaging in some rather, well, Trumpian behavior: shooting his mouth off. No decision on a commission—Kennedy-led or otherwise—has been made, the Trump transition team said, though “the president-elect is exploring the possibility of forming a commission on Autism.”
If Trump does indeed form such a commission—not an inherently terrible idea, given the rapid increase in autism cases over the past decades—he’d do well to keep people like Kennedy as far away from it as possible. Because for more than a decade, Robert Kennedy Jr. has been a prominent proponent of a discredited and dangerous conspiracy theory that links common childhood vaccines to autism.
The conspiracy theory dates back to February 1998, when the British medical journal the Lancet published a paper linking the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) to the appearance of autism. The finding was an explosive one and was dutifully recounted through much of the mainstream press in Britain and the United States.
Immediately, however, various scientific organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control, ran their own studies on the matter. None found any such connection. Thanks to the dogged work of investigative journalists at the Sunday Times of London, meanwhile, the Lancet piece was retracted; partially in 2004, and then fully in 2010. Its author had numerous conflicts of interest, the Times found, and worse, had manipulated the data in order to reach its tendentious conclusion. The article, frankly, was a fraud.
By then, though, the damage had been done. In England, vaccination rates plunged from 92 percent to 80 percent following publication of the paper. Measles infection rates skyrocketed accordingly. In 1998, 56 people in England and Wales were diagnosed with the virus, which is highly contagious; 2,030 contracted it in 2012.
It’s been a similar story on this side of the pond, with an increasing number of communities vaccinating so few children that they are losing herd immunity—the point at which such a high percentage of the population is inoculated against an illness that it becomes essentially impossible for it to spread. In the case of measles, between 92 and 95 percent of the population needs to be immunized to achieve herd immunity. They’re not close to achieving that in, say, Nevada County, California, where an elementary school last year reported that just 43 percent of its students had been vaccinated. Nor are they doing well at Google day care, where today’s best and brightest warehouse their offspring: In early 2015, only 68 percent of children at one Google day-care facility had been immunized; at another Google facility nearby, the figure was 49 percent. (Nearby Yahoo may be struggling commercially, but it’s doing something right: 94 percent of the kids in its day-care facility are vaccinated.) In the year 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated in the United States; in 2014, 667 came down with the illness, many thanks to an outbreak that began at Disneyland. Happily, that number fell last year, though we must remain vigilant: “The majority of people who got measles were unvaccinated,” the CDC noted archly. Measles is no joke: Complications may range from high fever and violent coughs to meningitis, encephalitis, and death.
For more than a decade, Robert Kennedy Jr. has flogged the discredited and downright dangerous theory that vaccinations lead to autism. In 2005 he published an infamous piece in Rolling Stone and Salon arguing that thimerosal, a chemical historically used to preserve vaccines, was linked to autism. (The CDC and other medical authorities uniformly reject this conclusion.) Though both of those redoubts of political progressivism ultimately backed away from Kennedy’s work—Salon retracted it, while Rolling Stone simply deleted it from its website—he has remained dogged. Kennedy has continued to spread his dangerous theories, including on Bill Maher’s highly rated and ironically titled HBO show, Real Time. It’s safe to say that over the past decade, Kennedy has become the leading public face of antiscience vaccine denialism.
Well, with one major caveat: At times, none other than Donald Trump has flirted with supplanting Kennedy for the crown of America’s most prominent vaccine crank. In 2014, he said on—where else?—Twitter, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes—AUTISM. Many such cases!” In a GOP presidential debate in September 2015, he floated a similar theory.
Nonetheless, we are encouraged that the Trump transition team quickly batted down Kennedy’s suggestion that he will lead a presidential panel to investigate vaccines. Perhaps Trump’s advisers or family members have talked sense into him; perhaps he was pandering all along with his antivaccine sentiments. Either way, there should be a bipartisan consensus to keep RFK Jr. far from the microphone. And if the new president wants to let him down easy, perhaps there could be a plush consolation prize. Ambassador to Fiji sounds nice.
