Social media was on fire this past week as two big anti-vaccination stories circulated the Twitter and Facebook world. The first was the Op-Ed written by the Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Daniel Neides, which is proclaimed the vaccine-autism link among other outrageous statements.

Image/TDH
Image/TDH

Second was the meeting between the President-elect Donald Trump and renown anti-vaxxer, Robert F Kennedy, Jr over a possible position on a “Vaccine Safety Commission”.

Senior Associate at the UPMC Center for Health Security, Amesh Adalja, MD joined me on the Outbreak News This Week Radio Show to give me his thoughts on these two events.

I asked Dr Adalja what he thought about a physician writing an article like Dr Neides.

“It’s really unfortunate that the anti-vaccine movement has made such in-roads that you have a physician at one of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, basically voicing the same things that Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, RFK Jr, the whole anti-vaccine movement that have erroneously linked many different conditions to vaccines, Dr Adalja said.

“To me, the level of evasion for a physician to say that is mind-boggling, because a physician has no excuse for not realizing the fact that we don’t have people dying of polio, that measles has been beaten back from the Americas, we have eradicated smallpox from the planet.”

Adalja also commented on the Donald Trump-RFK Jr meeting saying, “The fact that the President-elect is even talking to someone, I wouldn’t even associate with someone like RFK Jr. That really just underscores how he is just pandering to the anti-vaccine movement as he has been since this campaign began.”

Dr Adalja gives a summary of RFK Jr’s stance on vaccines for members of my audience that might not be aware.

LISTEN to the full segment below:

The Outbreak News This Week Radio Show, the first and only radio program dedicated to infectious disease and health news and information, airs every Sunday at 8 pm ET in the Tampa Bay area on AM 1380 The Biz and online at http://1380thebiz.com/

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