#kurt eichenwald

Kurt Eichenwald at The Threats Within:

During a Republican debate in 2015 - back when Donald Trump’s candidacy was widely considered a joke, he spewed some evil nonsense that, if there was less ignorance in the world, should have ended his candidacy. “People that work for me, just the other day, two years old, 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,” he said. When the debate ended and Trump galumphed off the stage, the person - not people - who worked for him was so angry he got in the candidate’s face, balling him out for what he had said. “I was furious,” the former Trump ally told me years later. “The case he was talking about involved friends of mine. And not only did he invade their privacy, he lied about what happened.” Yes, the ally told me, the child had the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (better known as the MMR vaccine.) And yes, the child was autistic. But there was no “tremendous fever.” The child did not become “very, very sick.” The symptoms of the child’s autism showed months before receiving the vaccine. The family had the diagnosis of probable autism long before the vaccine. And after the child received the MMR, the already-present symptoms didn’t accelerate. Nothing changed in the child a week later, a month later, six months later. Eventually, the diagnosis changed from probable autism to autism - long, long after the MMR. Trump never apologized for intruding on this family’s pain, lying about it, or deceiving the scientifically illiterate. Instead, he has continued to ape the blatherings about childhood vaccination from.

[...] But one thing was keeping the coals of a future career burning: The praise of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer whom Trump has nominated as Health and Human Services Secretary. At a 2015 event where Kennedy appeared with Wakefield, our possibly future head of national medical issues proclaimed to the assembled crowd, “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield.” Trump also jumped on the bandwagon. After his lie during the Republican debate and the resulting condemnation of his repeating the then-disproven link between vaccines and autism, he doubled down as is his wont. In 2016, he invited Wakefield - literally, this universally condemned fraud! - to a meeting to discuss vaccination policy. Wakefield emerged from the meeting saying not only that Trump believed vaccines cause autism, but that he promised to do something about it if elected president. In his first term, as we all know, Trump had a number of intelligent people around him to block his worst impulses. His head of HHS was a former deputy secretary of the agency (and former drug company executive, but what can you expect?) It’s also difficult to believe that he is an anti-vaxxer, given his push to develop a COVID vaccine and his own use of it. But remember: This is not about vaccines for adults like those for COVID. This is about childhood vaccination (Which Trump opposed for COVID.) This time around, with Kennedy, Trump has gone full-blown anti-vaxxer which, if Wakefield is to be believed, is a reflection of the president-elect’s views. Kennedy is just the vehicle reflecting Trump’s own uneducated, uninformed and ignorant beliefs about childhood vaccination. He tipped his hand during a recent interview with Time magazine. It started when he said, “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there's something causing it.” Why? Well, we should be looking at vaccines, Trump said. And he’d make sure that his people, led by Kennedy - an uninformed, intellectually lazy anti vaxxer - would form a team to look into it. He said his administration would conduct “very serious testing,” on the link between vaccines and autism, after which “we will know for sure what's good and what's not good.”

And a couple of other screenshots from the thread, things of interest that might get some air soon: