Ralph Abraham, Louisiana surgeon general and anti-vaxxer, is the new principal deputy director at the Center for Disease Control.
According to The Washington Post, “Abraham would essentially be running the agency.”
As the head of Louisiana’s public health agency, Abraham “instruct[ed] health officials to stop promoting vaccines including flu shots and instead emphasize personal choice.” He also did not recommend COVID vaccines to patients. “Vaccination against any disease should remain a personal choice,” he said.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also an outspoken anti-vaxxer who “fired all of the CDC’s federal vaccine advisers and replaced them with people who have criticized coronavirus and other shots.”
He also changed the text on the CDC website last week, making the false claim that vaccines might cause autism: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism’.” [Never mind that you cannot prove a negative.]
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview that he personally instructed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to abandon its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism — a move that underscores his determination to challenge scientific consensus and bend the health department to his will…
The rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism sparked a torrent of anger and anguish from doctors, scientists, and parents who say Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence. Many scientists and public health officials fear that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, which now baselessly claims that health authorities previously ignored evidence of a vaccine-autism link, foreshadows a larger, dangerous attack on childhood vaccination.
Only one study (of 12 children) has ever claimed a link between autism and childhood vaccines — and it has been discredited and retracted. No one has been able to replicate it, rather the research has shown it to be a falsehood. Yet the harm from that 1998 report persists to this day.
From the World Health Organization:
Vaccination is one of the most effective ways to prevent diseases. Over the past 50 years, essential vaccines against just 14 diseases have saved at least 154 million lives. During the same period, vaccination has contributed to 40% of the drop in infant deaths.
Look. Vaccines are safe for almost all people. Having sufficient people vaccinated against a disease to create “herd immunity” means that those who cannot get a vaccine (like very young children) or who are at risk due to age or immune suppression (like some cancer patients) are protected from viral spread.
With these two moves, the CDC can no longer be viewed as an agency controlling disease. It is, instead, promoting contagions.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com