Donald Trump just
href=”http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000083929&play=1″>went on CNBC and argued that vaccines are causing autism
wp-image-5495″ title=”Bill Gates” src=”http://www.yoopya.com/ymedia/uploads/2012/04/bill-gates-energy.jpg” alt=”Bill
Gates” width=”450″ height=”311″ />
Autism is so prevalent today. I’ve been saying this for a
long time, that the — I’m not against vaccination but I’m against massive vaccinations at one time in order to save
doctor visits with the doctors. and frankly, a lot of people love that and some people didn’t look it. My attitude is if you
spread the vaccinations over a period of time, what do we have to lose? Autism is so
prevalent.
Trump has been making similar claims on Fox and Friends and on Twitter.
href=”http://www.twitlonger.com/show/guf27o”> On TwitLonger
position:
I’ve gotten many letters from people fighting autism thanking me for stating how dangerous 38
vaccines on a baby/toddler under 24 months are. It is totally insane – a baby cannot handle such tremendous trauma. Now they
come up with this ridiculous study blaming obesity in the mother. The FDA should immediately stop heavy dose vaccinations and
you will see a huge decrease in children with autism. What do they have to lose—nothing—but plenty to gain if I am correct.
There is great dishonesty about autism!
title=”Donald Trump” src=”http://www.yoopya.com/ymedia/uploads/2012/04/trump1.jpg” alt=”Donald Trump” width=”450″
height=”294″ />
Donald Trump
Luckily for me, someone smarter and richer than Trump — twenty times richer –
has already done the bulk of the job of correcting this statement. On national television, no less.
Cue
href=”http://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/”>Bill Gates
retracted paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that helped kick off the idea of a vaccine-autism link:
Gates: Well,
Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he
created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again
and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many
of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people
who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these
vaccines are important.
Just to emphasize that: “an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids.” Gates,
through the work of his foundation, has seen the impact that these vaccines can have. Hundreds of thousands of kids still die
of measles every year worldwide because they don’t get measles vaccine. In a few countries, there are still cases of polio.
If we stopped vaccinating, it would come back here. Whooping cough is making a comeback, perhaps partly because of weaknesses
in the vaccine, but also because some people are choosing not to get kids their shots. Trump’s statement that we have nothing
to lose by trying out giving fewer vaccines, or even changing the vaccine schedule, which makes it more likely that kids will
miss shots, is simply wrong. If there were a link between vaccines and autism, we would be faced with a terrible choice:
choosing whether children would get autism, or whether children would die.
Thankfully, we don’t face that choice. At
one point, the worry was that overdoses of thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines, was causing autism;
that preservative is no longer in routine childhood vaccines. But there are no data supporting this worry. Large studies have
failed to show any signal that getting more vaccines makes it more likely that kids will be diagnosed as autistic. When I
profiled Bill Gates last year, I remember him telling me that scientific proof just wasn’t enough to get rid of this
connection in some people’s minds.
“Some scientific myths like the thimerosal thing are hard to get rid of entirely,”
Gates said. ”You know, it’s just hard to have everybody look at the data, which couldn’t be clearer on the fact that that is
not associated with the increase in autism.”
These kinds of worries hit us right in parts of our brains that have
little to do with the analysis of data from scientific studies. When my kids got their shots, I remember being nervous about
the autism link, even though I didn’t believe it. Because when you’re holding an infant, the thought that you might be doing
something to hurt them is simply terrifying. It takes work to make it go away. But no one is helped if we keep following
blind alleys. It would be better to put more effort to make sure that kids with autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed as
early as possible, so that therapists can do more to help them.
On one point, I do agree with Trump:linking the rise
in autism to obesity is a stretch at this point. I think most of the reporting on this topic makes us seem farther along in
finding answers than we actually are. For instance, reports that we may have finally found some genetic changes that may
cause autism in some kids probably went too far, as UC-Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen
href=”http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1027″> details here.
more genetic mutations than those without, but we don’t know if something is causing the mutations and the autism, or if the
mutations are cause the autism, or if there is some other explanation. Scientists studying autism are climbing a giant
mountain and have only the tiniest handholds.
I also understand that many people don’t want to trust vaccine makers
like Merck,
href=”http://www.forbes.com/companies/pfizer/”>Pfizer href=”http://www.forbes.com/companies/glaxosmithkline/”>GlaxoSmithKline
for-profit companies and have behaved badly in the past. But trusting Trump seems like a stretch here, too. We should at
least admit that medicine is more complicated than an episode of “The Apprentice.”
Trump on CNBC:
style=”text-align: left;”>
Bill Gates on CNN:
classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″
codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″>
value=”true” />
value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/_GztDgpDy6k&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3″ />
name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” />
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/_GztDgpDy6k&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3″
allowFullScreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” />