President Trump will ask prominent vaccine safety skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead a planned commission to study vaccine safety, Kennedy said Wednesday. Commission members will include "household names" who "have not taken a position on the issue" of vaccine safety, he said.
Hm.
Kennedy said that in a Jan. 10 meeting, Trump told him he expected an "uproar" from the pharmaceutical industry concerning vaccines, and that the industry "would try to make him back down and he wouldn’t back down.” Immediately after the meeting, Kennedy told reporters that Trump had asked him to lead a vaccine safety commission, a claim Trump staff quickly denied. At a press conference Wednesday, Kennedy said he has since spoken with Trump staffers twice.
"They say they are still going forward with” a commission, he said. Kennedy spent much of the press conference repeating widely discredited theories about links between thimerosal in vaccines and neurological disorders in children. In fact, almost no pediatric vaccines contain the preservative, according to an FDA document.
Kennedy also vilified the CDC as a “cesspool of corruption,” and accused FDA, the drug industry, and the scientific and medical establishment of colluding to poison American children.
Actor Robert De Niro, who was also in attendance, said he "agreed 100%" with Kennedy’s comments. Kennedy and De Niro said they are not "anti-vaxxers," but they remained silent when Tony Muhammad, a representative of the Nation of Islam, told reporters that polio vaccines had caused 95 million cases of cancer in America.
Considering Mr. De Niro’s macho man video aimed at the President during the election, he’s come a long way – except that he hasn’t.
Shame. Shame. Shame.
How about a Presidential commission on how to educate the American public (and particularly the parents of young children) on the safety and urgency of vaccinations?
