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Paul Offit: Trump Needs Vaccine Experts, Not Conspiracy Theorists
Trump could have turned to any number of reputable experts to learn about vaccine safety. Instead, he went straight for the fringe.
Imagine you’re the president-elect of the United States and you wanted to know more about vaccine safety. Who would you turn to?
You could turn to Nancy Messonier, who heads a team of researchers at the country’s leading center for the study of vaccines: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Or you could turn to any one of a number of academic researchers who are involved with the Vaccine Safety DataLink, a computer-linked system of medical records that can determine vaccine-safety issues in real time as new vaccines are first used by American children. Or you could turn to a variety of leading experts, like Stanley Plotkin, who is the country’s (and the world’s) foremost authority on vaccines and has written the definitive textbook on the subject. Or you could turn to Walter Orenstein, former director of the National Immunization Program who is now at Emory University, and another worldwide leader. Or you could turn to Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt vaccine researcher who has devoted her life to vaccine-safety issues and to the health and well-being of children.
Donald Trump, unfortunately, didn’t turn to any of these groups or individuals. Rather he turned to two other people.
First, he turned to Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who in 1998 published a paper in the Lancet claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. In August 2016, Trump met with Wakefield. At the time they met, a British journalist named Brian Deer had already found that Wakefield’s paper had misrepresented clinical data, biological data, and the sources of funding for the work. For these reasons, the Lancet retracted the paper and the General Medical Council in England stripped Wakefield of his license to practice medicine.
snip
On Jan. 10, 2017, Donald Trump then turned to one more person for information about vaccine safety: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy believes that thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury-containing preservative that hasn’t been used in vaccines given to young children since 2001, is causing severe developmental delays including autism. Since Kennedy first made this claim, seven studies performed in Denmark, England, Canada, and the United States have examined children who received thimerosal-containing vaccines or vaccines that didn’t contain thimerosal. The incidence of autism was the same in both groups. Nonetheless, in 2014 Kennedy published a book titled, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak—an ironic title, given that the science already had spoken. So why does Kennedy also persist? The answer is the same: conspiracy. The thimerosal-causes-autism conspiracy, however, isn’t as vast as the MMR conspiracy; this one involves researchers in only four countries on two continents.
Imagine you’re the president-elect of the United States and you wanted to know more about vaccine safety. Who would you turn to?
You could turn to Nancy Messonier, who heads a team of researchers at the country’s leading center for the study of vaccines: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Or you could turn to any one of a number of academic researchers who are involved with the Vaccine Safety DataLink, a computer-linked system of medical records that can determine vaccine-safety issues in real time as new vaccines are first used by American children. Or you could turn to a variety of leading experts, like Stanley Plotkin, who is the country’s (and the world’s) foremost authority on vaccines and has written the definitive textbook on the subject. Or you could turn to Walter Orenstein, former director of the National Immunization Program who is now at Emory University, and another worldwide leader. Or you could turn to Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt vaccine researcher who has devoted her life to vaccine-safety issues and to the health and well-being of children.
Donald Trump, unfortunately, didn’t turn to any of these groups or individuals. Rather he turned to two other people.
First, he turned to Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who in 1998 published a paper in the Lancet claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. In August 2016, Trump met with Wakefield. At the time they met, a British journalist named Brian Deer had already found that Wakefield’s paper had misrepresented clinical data, biological data, and the sources of funding for the work. For these reasons, the Lancet retracted the paper and the General Medical Council in England stripped Wakefield of his license to practice medicine.
snip
On Jan. 10, 2017, Donald Trump then turned to one more person for information about vaccine safety: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy believes that thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury-containing preservative that hasn’t been used in vaccines given to young children since 2001, is causing severe developmental delays including autism. Since Kennedy first made this claim, seven studies performed in Denmark, England, Canada, and the United States have examined children who received thimerosal-containing vaccines or vaccines that didn’t contain thimerosal. The incidence of autism was the same in both groups. Nonetheless, in 2014 Kennedy published a book titled, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak—an ironic title, given that the science already had spoken. So why does Kennedy also persist? The answer is the same: conspiracy. The thimerosal-causes-autism conspiracy, however, isn’t as vast as the MMR conspiracy; this one involves researchers in only four countries on two continents.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/11/paul-offit-trump-needs-vaccine-experts-not-conspiracy-theorists.html?via=desktop&source=twitter
Paul Offit is one of my heroes.
Sid
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