Trump's lovefest with anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., liberal activist
and Donald Trump's new best friend.

Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories make for strange bedfellows. Witness this past week's widely reported meeting between Donald Trump and liberal activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to discuss vaccines and vaccine policy. RFK Jr. emerged from the meeting to claim that Trump had invited him to chair a new commission on vaccines, specifically to discuss the thoroughly discredited claim that vaccines cause autism.

Talk about the blind leading the blind. Trump has been an anti-vaxxer for years (as I've pointed out before), but for him it seems more like an afterthought–yet another of the many false claims he likes to throw out at random moments. RFK Jr., in contrast, has made anti-vaccine conspiracy mongering his raison d'etre for many years, most recently when he published an entire book to promote the bogus theory that thimerosal causes autism.

Just to get this out of the way: vaccines don't cause autism. (If you want details, here's a nearly book-length article that explains more.) The thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines was removed a decade ago (in an excess of caution), but that never caused autism either. Because of one bogus, now-retracted study published by Andrew Wakefield in 1998, millions of dollars have been spent investigating–and ultimately disproving–any possible link between vaccines and autism. All that money could have been better spent trying to find the real causes of autism, but it was wasted instead in an effort to undo the damage caused by one fraudulent doctor, Wakefield, who eventually was found to have committed fraud and lost his medical license.

Autism is a complex disease with a strong genetic component, and thousands of devoted scientists are trying to understand it better. RFK Jr. is not one of those scientists. He's a lawyer who previously devoted himself to environmental causes. He's also a ideologue who is all too willing to distort the facts and simply make things up if it suits his agenda. He and Trump share that particular style of discussion.

(Aside: it's hard to ignore the irony of a devoted liberal such as RFK Jr. joining forces with Donald Trump. For example, on the issue of global warming, in 2007 RFK Jr. said about Exxon and other companies that denied global warming, "This is treason and we need to start treating them now as traitors." Apparently he doesn't feel that way any longer.)

So back to this "vaccine commission" that RFK Jr. wants to lead. Besides the blindingly obvious fact that RFK Jr. is completely, utterly incompetent to lead such a commission, he and Trump also seem unaware that the U.S. already has a vaccine commission. It's called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it's filled with medical experts who have spent their lives studying vaccines and vaccine safety. It also includes a consumer representative, and it is completely open, despite the conspiracy-mongering protestations of RFK Jr. If you want to see who's on it, just look here. The ACIP meets three times a year, its meeting schedule is also posted on the website, and the meetings are open to the public.

Cleary RFK Jr. loves the attention he's getting from Trump. And Trump seems to have found a soulmate in his fellow anti-vaxxer, despite RFK's strongly liberal political views. After the private meeting and RFK's announcement that Trump had invited him to chair a vaccine commission, Trump's representatives denied it. But a day later, RFK Jr. announced that he was leaving his environmental group in order to chair this hypothetical "vaccine safety" commission, and he also claimed that he and Trump had been discussing it for a month.

Putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of a commission on vaccines is akin to putting Josef Stalin in charge of prison reform. By insisting that vaccines cause autism, both Trump and RFK Jr. have already ignored a vast body of science that shows vaccines to be not only safe, but perhaps the single greatest benefit to public health in the history of medicine. If Trump gives RFK Jr. a platform to spout his anti-vaccine nonsense, the two of them will set back healthcare by decades. Infectious diseases such as measles will return with a vengeance, and children will die. That will be an awful outcome, and no one–not even Trump or RFK Jr.–can possibly want that. Let's hope that someone in Trump's inner circle stops him before this goes any further.