3 weeks ago
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The co-chair of Donald Trump's would-be transition team said that if the former president is given a second term in office, his administration will work to pull vaccines off the market.
Howard Lutnick made the comment during a Wednesday night appearance on CNN, where he was asked whether Trump will appoint anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the country’s public health agencies.
Lutnick said Kennedy won’t get the position as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, but rather that Trump will give Kennedy access to data to help him go after vaccines.
“He wants the data, so he can say, ‘These things are unsafe,’” Lutnick told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off, off of the market.’”
Lutnick also described a conversation he had with Kennedy, in which Kennedy spread the widely debunked hoax that vaccines cause autism.
“What [Kennedy] explained was, when he was born, we had three vaccines and autism was 1 in 10,000. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines … and autism is 1 in 34,” Lutnick said.
Vaccinations do not cause autism, full stop. The rise in autism diagnoses is because doctors better understand the disease and now have better criteria to diagnose it, as NBC News and many others have reported
