Last month, Donald Trump issued an indefensible broadside designed to upend the childhood vaccine schedule. The accompanying White House event was a misinformation extravaganza, which included the president falsely claiming that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines can possibly be “quite lethal” when combined into a single shot.
Asked if he had any evidence whatsoever to back that up, the Republican replied, “No, what I’ve heard is that there are, there are some people that say it is that way.” (He didn’t say who might be among “some people.”)
A day later, Trump kept this going, again falsely arguing, “MMR, if you give them separately, the M, the M and the R, it’s fine. When you put them together, they’re sort of like a nuclear weapon, according to some.” (He again failed to explain who’s included among these unidentified “some.”)
The president’s comments were preposterous nonsense, which he managed to make worse late last week.
At an unrelated Oval Office event, Trump said his administration would be “demanding” even more changes to the childhood immunization schedule, which he said were intended to address autism, which even he ought to understand by now has nothing to do with vaccines.
According to the president’s vision, it’s not enough to separate the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines needlessly; he also wants to divide vaccines further into fifths.
“So you have shot 1, shot 2, shot 3, shot 4, shot 5,” Trump said, explaining his vision. He added, “We’re going to break it into 20% doses.”
If that weren’t quite enough, the president went on to say that under his vision, the immunizations would be “given in six-month intervals so that a small amount of the vaccine gets pumped into the body.”
So let’s recap. The current recommendations call for one MMR shot — a vaccine that’s proven to be safe and effective — when a child is roughly a year old. Trump wants to break that up into three shots, which is wildly unnecessary in the first place and would take an enormous amount of time and resources to make happen.
But that’s not all he wants. The same president, whose views on science and public health have long been an embarrassment, wants to break up those shots further into five separate shots, opening the door to 15 shots (one through five for measles, one through five for mumps and one through five for rubella) spread out over years.
Trump, who famously suggested treating Covid-19 by injecting people with disinfectant, concluded that his absurd plan would likely lead to “a massive reduction in autism,” which, again, doesn’t make any sense, since vaccines do not cause autism.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but on matters of medicine, science and public health, this guy is still about as reliable a source as a Magic 8 Ball.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Trump to demand more misguided changes to the childhood immunization schedule appeared first on MS NOW.
