William Todd Schultz

Last night @SecKennedy defended the President’s claim that children receive vaccinations the size of a soda bottle. His explanation was that the President meant the cumulative volume of the whole schedule when he said he’d seen vaccinations “the size of a soda bottle being poured into a child.” OK, then let’s do the whole schedule. A vaccine dose is 0.5 milliliters. One tenth of a teaspoon. Every parent who has taken their kid in for shots has seen the syringe. It’s not a soda bottle. That’s absurd. The biggest visit of a child’s life is the 2-month visit. Five injections, about 2.5 milliliters, half a teaspoon. Everything a baby receives by injection in the first 6 months of life adds up to roughly 2 teaspoons. The whole schedule, birth through age 18, every recommended vaccine, including a flu shot every single year, comes to roughly 55 injections and under 30 milliliters. A shot glass holds 44. Eighteen years of childhood vaccines do not fill a shot glass. A 20-ounce soda bottle holds 590 milliliters. That is more than 20 times the entire schedule, more than 200 times the biggest visit, and more than 1,000 times an actual dose. No version of this claim comes anywhere near a soda bottle. An executive order was signed anyway. @SecKennedy also repeated that childhood vaccines were never tested in placebo-controlled trials. My colleagues and I have systematically reviewed every randomized trial of childhood vaccines back to 1940. Nearly all were placebo-controlled, every vaccine on the schedule was evaluated in at least one placebo-controlled trial, and close to half used plain saline or the equivalent. The mumps vaccine inside the MMR was proven against placebo in the 1960s. The first hepatitis B vaccine was proven in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. The 1954 polio trial randomized roughly 600,000 children to vaccine or placebo, still the largest medical experiment ever conducted. So here is where we are. The President described something that does not exist and could not exist, a soda bottle of vaccine poured into a child, the same instinct as suggesting people inject disinfectant. And when the Secretary of Health and Human Services was asked a simple yes-or-no question about whether it was accurate, he couldn’t say no. He defended it. The nation’s top health official either doesn’t know what a vaccine dose looks like or won’t say so, and I honestly don’t know which is worse. Nobody around this president will correct him, even about a syringe, even with children’s health on the line. So the fantasy stands, the executive order stands, and parents are left frightened of something that was never real, in the middle of the worst measles year since 1991, with over 2,500 cases and counting. The arithmetic takes five minutes. The fear takes five seconds. That’s the whole strategy.