President Donald Trump railed against vaccines during a highly anticipated press briefing on the causes of autism on Monday, blaming combination vaccines for chronic diseases among children, including autism.
The remarks came at an event with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time critic of vaccines, on the causes of autism spectrum disorder, at which officials were outlining findings linking acetaminophen taken during pregnancy to autism. Vaccines were not slated to be a focus of the press conference, but Trump discussed them during extemporaneous remarks.
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“They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace,” Trump said Monday. “I don’t see it. I think it’s very bad. They’re pumping — it looks like they’re pumping into a horse.”
Trump specifically called out the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, also known as MMR, which has been the subject of much debate among critics of vaccines as a cause of autism. That link has been debunked through scientific research over several decades.
Trump said that he believes that vaccines for the three diseases, measles, mumps, and rubella, should be “taken separately,” saying that vaccines with multiple diseases, known as recombinant vaccines, are problematic.
Trump said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee this week decided to no longer recommend for toddlers the combination vaccine of measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox, known as the MMRV vaccine, due to a heightened risk of febrile seizures.
“So there’s no downside in taking them separately. In fact, they think it’s better, so let it be separate. The chicken pox is already separate, because when that got mixed in, I guess they made it four for a while, it really was bad,” said Trump.
“Break up your visits to the doctors. Break them up. Do it in five if you can. Now, it’s inconvenient. It’s inconvenient. Oh, you’re going to have to go back another year later. You’re going to go back each year for four years, five years, three years. Just break it up,” Trump said.
Trump also took aim at the Hepatitis B vaccine, the first dose of which is given to newborns on their first day of life. Critics of the Hepatitis B vaccine for babies have highlighted that the disease is a sexually transmitted infection.
The president said that he believes there is “no reason to give a baby” the Hepatitis B vaccine and recommends parents “wait ’til the baby is 12 years old and formed to take [the] Hepatitis B” vaccine.
He also expressed a desire to rid vaccines of aluminum and mercury, which are present in small amounts in each dose.
Trump’s statements on Monday were the most direct and transparent about his feelings on vaccines. Although he did not directly support the claim that vaccines cause autism, Trump did say that autism must be “artificially induced” due to the rise in cases since the early 1990s.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that 1 in 31 eight-year-olds across the country has an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, up from roughly 1 in 150 in 2000. Trump, at the start of the press conference, inaccurately said that 18 years ago, the number of autism diagnoses was one in 20,000.
The president said that he and Kennedy met roughly 20 years ago and discussed the speculated link between vaccines and autism.
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“I always had very strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from. And he and I, I don’t know the word got out, and I wouldn’t say that people were very understanding of where we were, but it’s turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it,” said Trump.