Tuesday, January 10, 2017

There's No Vaccine For Stupid

Just a reminder that there are terrible, non-scientific people on the left as well as the right, and while climate change denial is certainly something that the Trump administration will be chastised over for decades, it looks like the Orange-elect is into eating from the anti-vaccine dumpsters as well.

Donald Trump will meet Tuesday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent skeptic of vaccines for children, suggesting that the president-elect continues to believe a widely discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. 
The meeting was announced by a spokesman for the Trump transition team, Sean Spicer, who said that the two would discuss vaccines Tuesday at Trump Tower, in New York. 
Trump notably expressed support for the theory at a Republican presidential debate in 2015. 
“You take this little beautiful baby, and you pump . . .” he said of vaccinating children. “We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.” 
The comments were widely denounced by medical professionals who say that there is no evidence that vaccines lead to autism. In fact, the study that popularized the idea has been retracted and discredited as fraudulent. Multiple high-quality studies have found no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump was apparently very open to RFK, Jr's nonsense, so apparently we're now going to have a presidential commission on this idiocy.

President-elect Donald Trump asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental activist and skeptic of vaccines, to chair a presidential commission on vaccine safety, Kennedy said Tuesday. 
The two have questioned whether vaccines cause autism, a claim consistently debunked by medical professionals across the board. 
The commission will be designed "to make sure we have scientific integrity in the vaccine process for efficacy and safety effects," Kennedy told reporters after the meeting with Trump. 
Kennedy said Trump requested the meeting, and the president-elect "has some doubts about the current vaccine policies and he has questions about it. His opinion doesn't matter, but the science does matter and we ought to be reading the science and we ought to be debating the science."

Absolutely nothing good will come from this, mark my words.  If the official position of the Trump administration is that we shouldn't be vaccinating kids, then a lot of kids are going to get very sick and possibly die from things like measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough, which are all preventable by diseases.

Even holding this commission is a ruthlessly evil idea, as parents are going to get the idea that vaccinations aren't safe and will refuse to do so with their kids.

Trump is just ridiculously terrible, and he's not even president yet.

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