Make America Great Again is about returning America to the lily white 1950s. It’s odd to have nostalgia for polio, which killed 3,000 American kids in an outbreak in 1952, the year the polio vaccine was introduced, but, MAGA’s gonna MAGA.
“I fully believe vaccines cause Autism. It’s another example of crimes against humanity. And innocent babies, children, and their families are the victims.”
That was MAGA Republican stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Twitter, over the weekend, coming down, predictably, on the side of polio.
Anti-vaxxers like MTG are in ascendance with the pending inauguration of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, and his move to back noted anti-vax loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump, on Monday, took questions from reporters in Florida, Ground Zero for the anti-vax set, and in response to a question on if he thinks there’s a link between vaccines and autism, which RFK Jr. has insisted, for years, is the case, he had this to say:
“We’re looking to find out. You know, if you look at autism, so, 30 years ago, we had, I’ve heard numbers of like 1 in 200,000, 1 in 100,000. And now I’m hearing numbers of 1 in 100. So something’s wrong. There’s something wrong, and we’re going to find out about it.”
Actually, the CDC says 1 in 36 American kids is diagnosed as autistic, so, it’s actually three times more prevalent than even Trump is letting on.
The increase in diagnoses from previous generations is directly due to a sea change in how we view autism.
For much of the 20th century, an autism diagnosis was only given to children with severe and obvious issues with communication or unusual, repetitive behaviors.
In the 1990s, what we view as autism expanded to include milder related conditions known as autism spectrum disorders.
Naturally, when you expand the definition of what is considered autism, you’re going to have an increase in the autistic population.
It’s not because autism is becoming more prevalent because of environmental factors, or because of vaccines that have been in wide use since the 1950s, and if the likes of RFK Jr. are to be believed, only in the last few years have started to be a leading cause of autism.
The increased diagnoses of autism in children are a reflection of the medical community catching up to something that has always been an issue, and until recently went under the radar.
Which is what makes what Trump said, in response to a question at the Monday presser about K-12 public schools continuing to mandate that children have polio vaccinations, all the more troubling.
“I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person. So, you know, I was against mandates,” Trump said, obviously relitigating the COVID mandates that were put in place nationwide in the last year of his first term as president, in 2020.
“Mostly Democrat governors did the mandates, and they did a very poor thing, and, you know, in retrospect, they made a big mistake having to do with the education of children, they lost, like, a year or two years of their lives. The mandate was a bad thing. I was against the mandate,” Trump said.
So, because Trump was against COVID mandates that he oversaw, you can see him letting himself be talked into issuing a federal mandate allowing anti-vax parents to expose everybody to the next polio outbreak.
Idiots.
Video: Make Polio Great Again
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Chris Graham
