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Jordan Strauss / AP
Donald Trump's transition team announced today that the president-elect will meet with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine critic.
The Trump team said the meeting will be “on the subject of vaccines and immunizations.”
Kennedy, a longtime environmental activist and radio host, gained notoriety after a 2014 book called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, in which he argued that the mercury-containing compound, used as a preservative in flu vaccines, was linked to autism.
“There is no link between vaccines and autism,” the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) clearly states, echoing findings about the lack of a connection between vaccines and autism made repeatedly by major scientific and medical organizations worldwide.
“If vaccines become a political identity issue like climate change, then it's not good for public health,” Saad Omer, associate professor of global health, epidemiology, and pediatrics at Emory University, told BuzzFeed News about public response to Trump's meeting.
Thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 1999 out of concern over a paper published by British physician Andrew Wakefield, who first argued for a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. After numerous investigations, Wakefield's paper was called “fraudulent” and was retracted. His conduct was called “dishonest” and “misleading,” and he was disbarred.
Autism rates have steadily increased since 1999, now at 1 in 45 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which the CDC has ascribed to changes in survey methods that put the diagnosis ahead of other developmental disorders.
Nevertheless, 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.
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.
Trump's transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
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