The CNN GOP presidential candidate debate once again opened the door for Donald Trump to assert that autism is an epidemic and that vaccines are involved. Of course, enough evidence to support even Donald Trump’s ego shows that neither of these is true, but Trump’s not one to let facts or evidence get in the way of an opportunity to try to flash what he clearly considers his trademark loud-mouthed independence.
Rand Paul was also predictably strident on the subject of vaccines and played to his own crowd by talking about “freedom” and vaccines. That’s because, you see, every USian has a right to be free to let their children contract deadly diseases during the most vulnerable times of their lives. No, really. They do. They just usually can’t send them to public school if they make that choice. Freedom is often a chain of small exercises in freedom, not all of them entirely simpatico with one another.
But at least Trump and Paul are consistent. Trump so much so that he apparently has only one set of phrases in his vaccine-response playbook, involving using the words “horse” and “epidemic” as much as he can. Paul has pretty much always pounded out the false beats of the freedom drum.
Carson, on the other hand, did a complete flip-flop in the CNN debate. Back in February, Carson called vaccines “necessary and safe." He went even further:
Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society. Certain communicable diseases have been largely eradicated by immunization policies in this country and we should not allow those diseases to return by foregoing safe immunization programs, for philosophical, religious or other reasons when we have the means to eradicate them.
Yes. Carson actually said that personal-belief exemptions aren’t a good thing. His remarks on this subject were published at length in the Washington Times last winter, giving a shout-out to evidence.
Certain people have discussed the possibility of potential health risks from vaccinations. I am not aware of scientific evidence of a direct correlation. I think there probably are people who may make a correlation where one does not exist, and that fear subsequently ignites, catches fire and spreads. But it is important to educate the public about what evidence actually exists.
Obviously, this statement doesn’t play to his base, so as Carson starts to gain an edge and some momentum as a potential frontrunner, he found himself a fence to sit on, at the boundary between science and pseudoscience. It’s a wobbly fence, given the lack of evidence supporting one side of it, particularly when the someone sitting on it prides himself on his medical credentials and is, in fact, a pediatric neurologist.
Perhaps the latter is why he at least got it right about autism in the debate. Sort of.
Well, let me put it this way. There has — there have been numerous studies, and they have not demonstrated that there is any correlation between vaccinations and autism…This was something that was spread widely 15 or 20 years ago and it has not been adequately, you know, revealed to the public what’s actually going on…
What he means by that last statement is unclear. What hasn’t been adequately revealed to the public about what? Does he mean to imply some kind of secrecy about autism? Billions of words, dollars, hours, and minds have been focused on autism for decades now. We in fact know quite a bit about it, but gabbing on about copy number variation and genome-wide association studies isn’t very catchy in a presidential debate.
Carson later says:
The fact of the matter is, we have extremely well-documented proof that there’s no autism associated with vaccinations.
It's true. We do.
Carson then found the comfort zone of his fence … and, he probably hopes, the center of his target voter bloc.
Vaccines are very important. Certain ones. The ones that would prevent death or crippling.
That’s pretty much all of them. So far, so good.
There are others, there are a multitude of vaccines which probably don’t fit in that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases…
Where are these multitudes? I would ask Dr. Carson to take a look at the CDC vaccine schedule for children up to age 6 and tell me which of these diseases has not killed or "crippled" children. Vaccines have saved millions of lives worldwide, including more than 700,000 children’s lives in the US alone from 1994 to 2014.
Someone seems to have counseled Carson to go with the “too many, too soon” tactic that Jenny McCarthy so passionately promoted as her slogan after she had to shift her goalposts away from other vaccine-related claims. When you use the same words as Jenny McCarthy to reinforce your assertions about science and medicine, you have fallen off the fence and landed squarely in the land of pseudoscientific nonsense. Carson went there:
But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time and a lot of pediatricians now recognize that, and, I think, are cutting down on the number and the proximity in which those are done, and I think that’s appropriate.
It’s odd that he didn’t think that was appropriate less than a year ago. But less than a year ago, Ben Carson wasn’t even on the radar of many voters. How those likely to vote for him generally feel about vaccines isn’t clear, but Republicans in general are less likely to favor requiring vaccinations and more likely to favor leaving the decision in the hands of parents, a new development in 2015 compared to 2009 polling.
Carson’s gone mealy-mouthed and equivocal where he once was firm and backing what the evidence says. Why? Maybe he thinks that compromising professional integrity and eliding evidence-based medicine is the way to make voters think he’s on their side of the fence—whichever side that is.
