National Post (National Edition)
AND SOLOMON,
With repealing Obamacare, building a wall, cutting corporate taxes and keeping jobs at home all high on Donald Trump’s agenda, the announcement Tuesday that he asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to consider chairing a commission into vaccine safety and scientific integrity took many by surprise.
It shouldn’t have. Vaccines and his belief that they can cause autism are personal to Trump, who held multiple meetings with vaccine skeptics in the late stages of the presidential campaign and into the packed transition period prior to assuming the presidency. Moreover, although vaccine skeptics are often associated with farleft Birkenstock elites, many Republicans — including top Republicans close to Trump — have expressed doubts about the uncritical acceptance of vaccines.
Aside from a small minority, neither Trump nor any of the so-called vaccine skeptics are ideologically opposed to all vaccines, or even consider themselves antivaccine in any way. They’re more likely to think vaccines are over-hyped and overused, and want them to be used in ways they consider more judicious and more consistent with personal freedom.
Dr. Ben Carson, the pediatric neurosurgeon who is Trump’s choice to be the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, represents a common conservative viewpoint on vaccines. As he told Jake Tapper in a nationally televised debate for the Republican nomination for president, “Vaccines are very important — certain ones, ones that would prevent death or crippling. There are others — there’s a multitude of vaccines that probably don’t fit into that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases. But you know, a lot of this is pushed by big government.”
Other past Republican contenders for president who dissent from the official government position on vaccines included Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey and Dr. Rand Paul, a physician and senator from Kentucky who is also a member of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a free-market alternative to the more mainstream American Medical Association.
AAPS, which was founded in 1943 to “fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine,” is known for its opposition to mandatory vaccinations; many of its members, including Paul, believe children have suffered “profound mental disorders” after being vaccinated.
But another member of AAPS looms especially large: Dr. Tom Price — who is outspoken on the need for patients to have autonomy over the treatment they and their children receive — is Trump’s pick to serve in his cabinet as the new secretary of Health and Human Services.
Other skeptics close to Trump include Rick Perry, his energy secretary, who has said he regrets having proposed the mandatory vaccination of teens with the HPV vaccine when he was governor of Texas, and Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, who as governor of Indiana lobbied against legislation that would have required teenagers to be vaccinated with the HPV vaccine.
The opinion that counts most, of course, is Trump’s, and on vaccines he’s long been adamant. “Autism is an epidemic,” he stated in a September TV debate, referring to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control showing the dramatic yet unexplained rise of autism over time, now afflicting one child in 68 and over two per cent of boys. That contrasts with “25 years ago, 35 years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close,” Trump says. “I am totally in favour of vaccines, but I want smaller doses over a longer period of time.”
In the September debate and on numerous earlier occasions, Trump has referred to his personal experiences with those he’s known. “I’ve seen people where they have a perfectly healthy child, and they go for the vaccinations, and a month later the child is no longer healthy,” he told Fox News in 2012. “It happened to somebody that worked for me recently. I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world. And all of a sudden, they go in, they get this monster (sized) shot. You ever see the size of it? It’s like they’re pumping in — you know, it’s terrible, the amount. And they pump this into this little body. And then all of the sudden, the child is different a month later.”
Others very important to Trump — his voters — also help explain Trump’s enthusiasm for a commission into vaccine safety. According to an Economist/YouGov poll taken in December, 31 per cent of Trump voters believe that vaccines can cause autism and only 21 per cent reject that view outright. Other voters doubtless worried about vaccines for reasons other than autism. Many of those vaccine-issue voters would have been highly motivated, since the health of their children was at stake.
Trump believes his presidency places him at the head of an historic movement, “a beautiful movement. We are going to make America safe and great again.” Making America safe doesn’t just involve building a wall to keep out criminals and terrorists, he believes. To Trump, it also includes making sure that there’s safety in America’s vaccines.