There’s No Vaccine for Stupid
Innumerate Republican senators castigate Fauci for something he didn’t do.
Shots, Shots, Shots
God knows we’ve had plenty of recent contenders, but yesterday may have been the greatest policy day in history for America’s antivax cranks. There were two triumphs.
First, Donald Trump signed, with great fanfare, a long-awaited executive order to upend America’s pediatric-vaccine schedule. American kids, the president insisted, are simply taking far too many shots. It’s too much liquid going into the kids, in his view. All that liquid, you’re bound to run into trouble.
“I’ve seen proof of where they have a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda and pour it into a little child’s body,” the president said, describing a real vaccine process that definitely, actually, totally happens.
In the best-case scenario, this change will lead to nothing but still more vaccine hesitancy from people who take the president and his antivax-kook advisers at their medical word. At worst, it will lead to unnecessary policy changes that force parents to make many more trips to the pediatrician to get the same amount of vaccine coverage. Either way: lower vaccine uptake, fewer immunized kids, more sickness.
