Trump Appoints Anti-Vaccination Crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Head Committee on Vaccine Safety

Donald Trump has nominated a head of education who’s a creationist, an attorney general who is openly hostile to civil rights laws, and now is appointing anti-vaccination crackpot Robert F. Kennedy to chair a committee on vaccine safety: Trump Moves To Challenge Vaccine Science.

Donald Trump moved to question one of the signature medical accomplishments of the 20th century Tuesday, reportedly appointing a leading critic of vaccines to chair a commission on vaccine safety.

“President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies and he has questions about it,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told the pool reporter at Trump Tower after meeting Trump Tuesday. “Everybody ought to be able to be assured that the vaccines that we have—he’s very pro-vaccine, as am I— but they’re as safe as they possibly can be.”

And that last statement is simply not true. Robert F. Kennedy is very well-known as an opponent of vaccination. Buzzfeed points out:

Kennedy has accused government scientists as being “involved in a massive fraud,” manipulating studies to demonstrate the safety of the compound. And he has claimed that an “insatiable pharmaceutical industry” is pushing them to do so in pursuit of boosting revenues from vaccines.

In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article for Rolling Stone and Salon alleging that the federal government was covering up the danger of vaccines. After the piece was subject to a series of corrections about inaccuracies, in 2011, Salon retracted the piece.

Donald Trump is also on record promoting the fraudulent notion that vaccines cause autism, and has met with disbarred anti-vaccination hoaxer Andrew Wakefield.

Trump too has publicly argued for the link between vaccines and autism. In August, the president-elect also met with Wakefield. He said he gave Trump a copy of his 2015 anti-vaccine documentary, Vaxxed, which the president-elect promised to watch.

Here’s Kennedy in 2015, speaking in front of a big banner that says vaccines are “UNAVOIDABLY UNSAFE.” Does that sound like someone who’s “pro-vaccine” to you?

YouTube

Make no mistake; this anti-science idiocy coming down from the highest office in the country is going to get people killed, and lead to a massive resurgence of preventable diseases.

Also see:
Fact or Fiction: Are Vaccines Dangerous? – Scientific American

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