Donald Trump is at it again, galvanizing the troops on Twitter to support the thoroughly debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. Because he cares.
The impetus, this time, was a new report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which identified a 30 percent surge in the rate of autism in children from just one year ago. It's alarming news that experts are still working to explain; Coleen Boyle, director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, told reporters that the rising numbers may reflect improvements in doctors' ability to identify children with autism spectrum disorders, as well as the increasing number of children with both high intelligence and autism.
In the face of such uncertainty, Trump took the opportunity Friday morning to trumpet his own, wholly uninformed opinion:
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He then followed that up with some light medical conspiracy theorizing:
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As CNN helpfully points out, a study published last year in the Journal of Pediatrics confirmed that there is no association between receiving “too many vaccines too soon" and autism.
And apparently, Trump either didn't see (or chose to ignore) another study out this week: published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it added to the evidence that autism begins in the womb, long before vaccines are administered. Don't bother letting him know about it -- he's already gone back to attacking wind turbines.
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