It should come as no surprise to anyone that Donald Trump holds a ridiculous belief or two. In the second Republican debate, he revealed himself to be anti-vaccination. Here’s the thing, Trump: this isn’t just another controversial thing for you to say. Being anti-vax is not only ignorant and unintelligent, but dangerous and irresponsible.
There is, to date, absolutely no reason to believe that vaccines cause autism. The idea was sensationalized by celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and a single “scientific” study by Andrew Wakefield. McCarthy, of course, was just the vehicle for popularizing the myth; its genesis was Wakefield’s ill-fated pass at the scientific method. His study — which connected the MMR vaccine with autism — has been repeatedly debunked. He lost his medical license for publishing his fraudulent results, and the journal retracted the publication. The scientific community violently rejected his conclusion, and Donald Trump’s anecdote about his employee’s kid with autism doesn’t do anything to change that. Around 8 percent of parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Anyone who chooses to believe in this discredited evidence is either willfully ignorant or completely out of touch.
The more likely explanation for Trump’s employee’s child's situation is simply this: Around the time that kids are receiving their major load of vaccinations, they’re also at that tender age where autism can sometimes be diagnosed. Anyone who’s ever taken a basic statistics course can tell you that correlation doesn’t equal causation, which is one of those things that makes reasonable people think that making serious medical decisions based on the delusions of Jenny McCarthy and Donald Trump is a terrible idea.
People used to die from all kinds of easily preventable diseases like measles, mumps, smallpox, polio and rubella. Kids, being especially vulnerable, made up a large percentage of the fatalities. Then along came vaccines. Smallpox has famously been eliminated outside the laboratory, and you can bet that didn’t happen because we found the cure, but because we found the vaccine. In 1885, Louis Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine, turning the infection from a death sentence into an inconvenience. Vaccines are not just a bunch of shots — they’re a medical godsend. No one has to die of measles anymore. If it’s within your power as a parent to protect your children from becoming statistics, it is negligent not to do so.
When you choose not to vaccinate your children, you’re not only exposing them to diseases they should be safe from, you’re exposing everybody else’s children as well, even the vaccinated ones. Some vaccines — chickenpox, for example — aren’t 100 percent effective, so more exposure means more chance of getting the disease, even with a vaccination. Some children, due to allergies, ailments like HIV or treatments for cancer, can’t be vaccinated because they are immunocompromised, and your unvaccinated child puts them at greater risk. This is the concept of herd immunity, and it isn’t new.
So make the intelligent decision: get your kids the shots. They’ll cry, and that might not be fun for you, but it won’t give them autism. It might save their lives, and it keeps both them and society healthy.