Junk science on stage

In the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump isn’t just making life difficult for his fellow GOP candidates. He has now made it harder for doctors, parents — pretty much anyone with a functioning brain who understands that kids don’t catch autism when they undergo vaccinations, and that a nation of children vulnerable to measles, mumps, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases represents the real threat.

During the CNN debate Trump casually tossed out an anecdote of one of his employees whose child developed a “tremendous fever” a week after a routine immunization and “now is autistic.”

(The Washington Post reports that Trump told virtually the same story three years ago, putting the lie to his claim that this all came to his attention “just the other day.”)

The two medical doctors on the stage, Ben Carson and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, endorsed the safety of vaccines — Carson even scoffed at any link to autism, noting that study after study debunks that claim. And yet these two who ought to know better also managed to undercut the importance of the immunization schedule endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

None of the candidates brought up the multi-state outbreak of measles this year linked to Disneyland, and the fact that the majority of the people who got sick were unvaccinated. Nor did anyone bother to mention (if they had ever bothered to check) that in 2014 the United States recorded the highest number of measles cases since measles was declared eradicated in 2000.

Uninformed opinions like Trump’s are partly to blame for that regression. Spewing gibberish in front of a national TV audience isn’t just ignorant. It’s irresponsible and dangerous.