During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder. Or maybe it was the vaccine schedule.(1)
Distrust by by the left in vaccines(2) lasted until 2021 when the COVID-19 one became available. A vaccine they claimed in 2020 was being rushed to market by a Republican president who only care about corporations and was putting people at risk was quickly embraced it once their party was in the White House.
Suddenly, Republicans took the anti-vaccine mantra away from progressives in states like California. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which once claimed to be sympathetic to vaccine-denying parents - but encouraged their members to ask about guns in the home while saying kids couldn't walk to school until age 10 - flipped to being pro-science and now produces their own vaccine schedule. The one they used to say should be ignored if Democratic parents worried vaccines were a Big Pharma conspiracy.
If that doesn't make you lose confidence in the science of party leaders, medical organizations that are basically just lobbyists, and the general stupidity of voters, endure it for a few more decades and you're almost certain to be jaded.
The U.S. Surgeon General under President Lyndon Johnson created the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices using Section 222 of the Public Health Service Act in March of 1964. In 1972, President Richard Nixon made it a federal advisory committee using the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Because so many people had benefited from the polio vaccine(2) they weren't controversial until 1998, when Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a peer-reviewed paper in The Lancet showing that vaccines were linked to autism. Democrats immediately turned on it despite the science community saying the paper was junk methodology. Even in 2010 when it was finally retracted, anti-science progressives insisted it was due to corporate and political pressure and he continued to be invited to organic food industry conferences, where customers believed science was the enemy.
Now that the 2026 Republican party is the Democratic party of 2006 their guidance has changed but our guidance has not - you should listen to your doctor.(4)
Not your school, those vaccines requirements are done by the state, which is why progressive areas like Los Angeles, Berkeley, and San Francisco were able to get away with leading the country in vaccine denial (5) for so long. And not the federal government.
Your doctor knows an infant is vulnerable in ways and at times older children are not. If you have the time to make multiple appointments over a longer period of time, there may not be certain harm in delaying some vaccines to avoid the so-called "chemical cocktail" but there is higher risk. Yet wealthy progressives did just that for 20 years so that's on you.
I am generally in favor of choice, as long as the choice is to let my kids have the protection my doctor says they should have, and that is unchanged. Few have even heard of any government group that creates vaccine schedules or recommends weird supplements like peptides, but they can rely on their physician.
Anyone talking about lack of trust in government recommendations is selling you their political ideology; because their political party did that same thing for decades.
NOTE:
(1) He may be better now. Back then he also smoked but pretended he quit. He wasn't good for science but better than Clinton, and had none of the scandal, so I'd have a cigar with him. As long as he promises not to inhale. Inhaling smoke is what kills you, not the trace nicotine in the smoke. Some day Kennedy will flip on that and then UC San Francisco and all the other zealots hoping for more tobacco industry settlements will change to the science side on that as well.
(2) The California coast alone had more kids unvaccinated than every Republican state combined. A Marin County school, where Governor Gavin Newsom commutes from to go to work, had 74% of its kids unvaccinated.
(3) A million parents, Polio Pioneers they came to be called, lined up their children for the Phase 1 clinical trial. There was no talk of a Big Pharma conspiracy then and Democrats had not doubled the criteria (and thus cost and time) so that only Big Pharma could get a new drug to market. Like exists now but was waived, ironically, by President Trump for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Government scientists in the early 1950s were skeptical of Jonas Salk. Pfizer ones saw his data and agreed with him. He didn't have the money to market it and didn't want to patent it so Pfizer took on the cost for everything without any indication FDA would ever approve it. They'd be in federal prison if they had tried that any time after 1994.
(4) Unless your doctor is one of the concierge American Academy of Pediatrics members in California who gave you a medical waiver to avoid vaccines for your kids in 2015 and beyond, after we finally got California Democrats to see reason and ban philosophical objections. Then you should get a different doctor.
(5) But not the developed world. That's the country of France, but they're getting better now that American Republicans have let them see how moronic it is.
