President-elect Donald Trump’s term hasn’t even begun, yet an alarming ritual is already developing: deciphering his latest musings about vaccines.
At a news conference on Monday, Trump offered up a hodgepodge of positions. He said he wanted his administration to investigate the widely discredited claim that vaccines cause autism: “Something’s wrong, and we’re going to find out.” He also signaled that he may oppose school vaccination mandates, because “I don’t like mandates; I’m not a big mandate person.” On a slightly brighter note, Trump said he’s a “believer” in the polio vaccine, seemingly distancing from the lawyer for his pick for health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of that lifesaving vaccine.
Trump was in thrall to myths and downright kooky ideas about vaccines — and health more broadly — long before his first term in the White House.
It’s already exhausting to wait with bated breath for Trump’s latest opinions on various vaccines. But it reflects how Trump’s second term is shaping up to be different from his first. Though Trump has long held misguided ideas about vaccines and health, this time his personnel — and the world — are different.
Trump was in thrall to myths and downright kooky ideas about vaccines — and health more broadly — long before his first term in the White House. In a 2015 presidential primary debate, he said:
“You take this little beautiful baby and you pump — I mean, it looks just like it is meant for a horse, not for a child, and we had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
Let’s be clear: Trump’s rendition of a child basically contracting autism is a ridiculous fiction, stemming from a discredited study.
And that same year in a radio interview Trump cast doubt on the efficacy of flu vaccines and did so in a way that revealed he didn’t understand how they work. “I’ve never had a flu shot, and I’ve never had the flu. ... I have friends that religiously get the flu shot and then they get the flu,” he told the hosts. In reality, getting sick with the flu even after getting a flu vaccine doesn’t mean it didn’t work, and there’s loads of evidence that it reduces the severity of illness and slows spread of the virus.
Trump’s illiteracy about health issues goes well beyond shots. He reportedly avoids exercise because he thinks humans are like batteries and have a finite amount of energy that is depleted by exercise. During the Covid pandemic, Trump floated the idea that disinfectant could be a remedy for an infection from the coronavirus — an idea so ludicrous that the famously stubborn Trump soon walked it back.
While Trump’s past comments about vaccines and health were certainly concerning (and sometimes just funny), this time they’re far more dangerous. That’s because Trump’s cavalier dismissals of vaccine norms and science can now be operationalized. Trump’s choice of Kennedy for HHS secretary reflects a bid not just to float irresponsible ideas about vaccine policy, but to change it. If confirmed, Kennedy will have a lot of opportunities to cause upheavals in vaccine policy, including stopping vaccine releases, slowing sales of existing vaccines, phasing out free immunizations for children and reducing vaccine makers’ protection from lawsuits. And NPR reports that the administration could also instruct the Justice Department to drop “support for vaccine laws challenged by groups like Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded and led before campaigning for president.”
Trump is also operating in a different political climate from during his first term when it comes to public perception of vaccines — and that may make him feel especially emboldened to dismantle long-standing vaccine policy. Support for vaccines and vaccination mandates has evolved into a quasi-partisan issue since Trump’s first term, in part because of politically divergent attitudes toward pandemic policy. Kennedy’s base of support during his independent presidential run, which focused on a lot of fringe beliefs about public health and debunked theories about vaccines, also highlighted a small but vocal constituency for anti-vaxxer sentiment.
That said, Trump can’t claim a popular mandate to overturn vaccine policy. He didn’t run on a platform to overturn vaccine policy, and while trust in vaccines is declining, a majority still support government requirements for childhood vaccines. Kennedy’s national support had dropped to around 5% by the time he dropped out of his race and endorsed Trump. Trump absorbed Kennedy into his campaign not because Kennedy had massive national support, but rather because the race was tight and polling showed that Kennedy’s presence in the race was more likely to hurt him than the Democratic presidential candidate.
Trump doesn’t have widespread backing for sweeping change in the way America approaches vaccines and public safety, and his concerns about vaccine safety aren’t grounded in science. But none of that may hold him back from working with fringe extremists to pursue radical changes anyway.
