A vocal anti-vaccination activist explained last week that she is supporting Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy because she is confident that President Trump, with the help of Ben Carson as the secretary of Health and Human Services and Chris Christie as the U.S. attorney general, “absolutely will investigate” what she believes is a Centers for Disease Control cover-up of a link between vaccines and autism.
In a Republican debate last year, Trump suggested that vaccines cause autism, a myth that has no scientific backing, and in 2014 he insisted that “the doctors lied” about vaccination. Meanwhile, Carson has presented scientifically inaccurate information about spacing vaccines and Christie has been less than forceful about the need for vaccination.
Tamara Scott, an Iowa conservative activist and Republican National Committee member, invited Eileen Dannemann, who runs an anti-vaxxer website called the Vaccine Liberation Army, to her “Truth for Our Time” radio program last week to discuss Dannemann’s concerns about vaccines. (Scott has invited anti-vaxxers onto her program before; in a previous interview with Dannemann, she alleged that “socialistic teaching” in schools, not parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, is causing disease outbreaks.)
Dannemann told Scott that attempts to investigate a CDC vaccine cover-up have so far been quashed, but that things will be different in a Trump presidency.
“With Trump as president, with Carson as the secretary of HHS and with Christie taking Lynch’s place [as attorney general], we have a team here that absolutely will investigate the CDC corruption and the safety of vaccines,” she said.
Scott added that it’s “not just the vaccines, folks,” but on a number of other issues “we know that Trump would be far better than the other team that basically hates whatever made this great republic great.”
