President-elect Trump said he thinks there are “problems” with vaccines and again drew a false connection between vaccines and autism rates on Monday.
“There are problems. We don’t do as well as a lot of other nations, and those nations use nothing,” Trump said during a wide-ranging press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
During the press conference, Trump again hinted that vaccines are driving up autism rates and that his administration would investigate it. It’s a position Trump has flirted with for years, but it’s recently come to the forefront as the president-elect has allied with vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“If you look at autism, so 30 years ago we had I heard numbers like 1 in 200,000, 1 in 100,000. Now I’m hearing numbers like 1 in 100. So something’s wrong. There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it,” Trump said.
Autism diagnoses have been rising, but experts have attributed the increase to better awareness of symptoms in children and changing criteria to diagnose ASD in kids.
About 1 in 36 children now have a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), compared to about 1 in 150 in 2000.
Trump also signaled he was opposed to vaccine mandates, which have long been part of the country’s public health policy.
“I don’t like mandates; I’m not a big mandate person,” Trump said when asked whether schools should mandate vaccines.
Trump’s opposition to school mandates was a common theme on the campaign trail, though his aides said he was only referring to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
In separate comments, Trump also defended Kennedy, his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy is meeting with GOP senators this week on Capitol Hill as he seeks to shore up support for his nomination.
“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he’s got a very open mind. Or I wouldn’t have put him there,” Trump said
Senators are likely to question Kennedy on his policy stances, many of which run counter to traditional GOP orthodoxy. He has a long history of questioning vaccines and has also promoted the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.
But Trump also said he was a “big believer” in the polio vaccine and promised that “you’re not going to lose” it, noting that he “saw what happened with polio” and has “friends that were very much affected by that.”