Baylor College’s Tropical Medicine dean Dr. Peter Hotez said Monday on CNN’s “Newsroom” that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not understand “how magical these vaccines are.”
Host Jim Acosta said, “Your thoughts this morning, seeing RFK Jr. up on the Hill today.”
Hotez said, “Well, you know, my big concern, Jim, is his staunch attacks on vaccines. I’ve been dealing with this now for a couple of decades because i’m not only a vaccine scientist and a pediatrician, but i also have a daughter with my youngest daughter Rachel has autism and intellectual disabilities.”
He continued, “Yeah, and I’ve spoken to RFK Jr. over the years and beginning in 2017, and he doesn’t understand the science. And he’s I can tell you from my firsthand conversations with him that he’s not interested in learning about the science.”
Acosta said, “I mean, I guess you could show graphs like that, but then people will say, well, I don’t trust that graph, you know? I mean, how do you how do you break through that?”
Hotez said, “Well, the first thing you do is you put the arrow on the place where the vaccine began. So if you were to put that arrow, it’s right at the top of the last peak in 1955 within a year and a half after the polio vaccine was licensed, we had a 90% reduction in polio cases, because that’s what vaccination campaigns do. And it’s not unique to polio. We saw, I saw this firsthand as a pediatric resident in Boston we went from admitting a child every couple of weeks with Hib meningitis, Haemophilus influenzae, type b meningitis to having that illness disappear over the course of 3 or 4 years. That how magical these vaccines are. And we have to treat them with the respect that they deserve.”
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