CNN’s Daniel Dale Drops Scalding Fact Check on Trump’s Vaccines and Autism Claims: He’s Said it ‘Over and Over, Falsely’

 
Donald Trump/RFK Jr.

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale dropped a scalding take on President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims linking childhood vaccines with autism.

Trump made the statements during an executive order signing Monday that splits up the Measels, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) childhood vaccines into three separate shots. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the current federal guideline of one MMR shot provides too much medicine for a child’s body to process.

“President Trump moments ago, again: ‘I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it – where they have a vaccination (that) looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,'” Dale wrote. “In reality, childhood vaccine doses are a small fraction of a teaspoon.”

Dale continued, “This wasn’t one-time hyperbole or something. The president has said over and over, falsely, that American babies are given vaccine doses the size of a glass or vat.”

“President Trump repeats his usual false claim that the prevalence of childhood autism “20 years ago” was “1 in 10,000.” The CDC website shows the known prevalence 20 years ago was 1 in 110,” Dale wrote, including a link to CDC autism data.

“Trump said, ‘In many cases, we were requiring 72 jabs for a beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children,'” Dale wrote, adding, “He didn’t explain where he got that ’72,’ but experts have said it appears to separately count every possible dose of a flu vaccine and Covid vaccine before age 18.”

Trump added during E.O. signing, “I wanna find what’s going on with autism. It’s many, many times what it used to be years ago, and it gets progressively worse, and we’ve had progressively more and more vaccines.”

Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promised Trump that he would use warp speed to get to the bottom of vaccines and autism.

“We will examine every biologically plausible hypothesis and leave no legitimate scientific question unexplored. Mr. President, you have told us you want answers, and so do I. We have just over two years to finish the work and I know you’re impatient, and we’re moving with an urgency that that deadline demands,” Kennedy said.

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