Trump's vaccine conspiracy theories are a threat to your children | Celine Goudner

Vaccines have been shown safe and effective. When he hints otherwise, the president-elect is gambling with young lives

This week, vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr announced that he'd been nominated by President Elect Donald Trump to chair a commission on vaccine safety. A few hours later, the transition team issued a statement saying that that Trump was "exploring the possibility of forming a committee on autism". Last summer, Trump met with Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license and was found to have produced fraudulent research linking vaccines to autism. Whether Trump is creating a commission on vaccine safety or autism, the message is clear. Trump is offering prominent support to the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism.

The science on vaccines is very clear: they are safe and effective. Vaccines do not cause autism. It's a waste of our tax dollars to rehash this issue yet again. Vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. Let's consider measles, just one of many vaccine-preventable diseases. Before 1963, when the measles vaccine became widely available, 3-4 million Americans got measles each year, of whom 48,000 were hospitalized, 4000 developed encephalitis resulting in long-term brain damage, and 4-500 died. The country's population has almost doubled since that time.