Yesterday, Robert Kennedy, Jr.—a vaccine skeptic—exited the gilded elevators of Trump Tower saying President-elect Donald Trump had offered him the opportunity to chair a commission investigating vaccine safety.
"Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies and he has questions about it," Kennedy said.
Later in the day, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks clarified that "no decisions have been made at this time" and said that Kennedy and Trump had discussed the possibility of a committee on autism, not vaccines.
But the move was enough to raise eyebrows in the scientific community. Kennedy has long been a public champion of the idea that vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been roundly rejected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the National Academies of Sciences, and others, according to The Washington Post. As the paper writes: "The scientific consensus on vaccines and autism is thorough and solid: There is no evidence of a connection."
Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University's Langone Medical Center, said the continued promotion of such a link came exclusively from celebrities—not medical professionals.
"[Kennedy] has been running around touting autism links to vaccines forever. He continued to do it, and he's joined in this activity by celebrities that Hollywood doesn't seem to want to condemn the way they go after, say, Mel Gibson, like Rob Schneider, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carey," Caplan said.
"They keep saying vaccines are known to cause autism," he continued. "In fact, this has been debunked."
The vaccine-autism link stems from a 1998 paper by British scientist Andrew Wakefield, which linked a mercury-containing vaccine additive called thimerosal to rising autism rates in children. The paper was later revealed to have fraudulent data, and numerous U.S. agencies investigated the claim and found there was no link between the additive and autism. However, public health officials and vaccine manufacturers agreed to reduce the amount of thimerosal in childhood vaccines. Since 2001 thimerosal has been eliminated entirely or reduced to trace amountsin all vaccines required for children under the age of six.
"We pulled the mercury out of vaccines...It didn't change the autism rates, which kept climbing," Caplan said.
Caplan also pointed to the fact that medical advancements have allowed doctors to diagnose autism in children at much younger ages—at points before they would be exposed to any vaccines.
"You're starting to be able to diagnose autism at six or eight months in children. You don't get the [mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR)] vaccine until you're older. So that's pretty good evidence," Caplan continued.
To hear more from medical ethicist Arthur Caplan, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
