A Republican senator is being harshly criticized for scorning President Donald Trump’s recent vaccine executive order despite voting for the president's Secretary of Health and Human Services pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Trump on Monday unveiled a new executive order designed to "promote his long-held but discredited theory that childhood shots should be spaced out into separate medical visits," the Associated Press reports.
“I’m a doctor,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) posted on X on Monday. “This executive order is wrong. The President does not have the expertise to make these changes. Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism.”
Cassidy added, “Breaking up vaccines will mean children have to get more shots to get the same protection, not fewer shots. It will increase hesitancy and make children less safe. Parents should listen to their child’s pediatrician about vaccines rather than listening to an inaccurate executive order.”
He concluded, “This is so wrong.”
Because Cassidy voted for Kennedy, many on X are mocking Cassidy for his seeming lack of courage toward the president.
NOTUS columnist Matt Lewis posted, “If only someone could have predicted that the assurances to secure your confirmation votes were BS…”
Similarly NBC journalist Garrett Haake wrote, “Senator Bill Cassidy — a medical doctor and liver disease specialist — cast the deciding vote to confirm [Secretary Kennedy] and spoke on the floor about the assurances he received that Kennedy — and the admin — would not change existing vaccine recommendations.”
Meanwhile the anti-Trump conservative organization Republicans Against Trump stated, “You voted for RFK Jr. despite knowing full well he’s an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist crank. You emboldened Trump to go even further with his insane and corrupt agenda when you voted Saturday to confirm Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, as attorney general. You own this mess.”
Attorney George Conway, a former Republican and ex-husband of Trump’s former counsel Kellyanne Conway, declared that Cassidy is "back to pretending he has a backbone today because the other day everyone said he didn't because he doesn't. Just wait'll tomorrow.”
Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D., a contributor to the conservative magazine National Review, was more succinct in saying, “This EO is your political epitaph.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2023, an expert on autism warned that Trump’s and Kennedy’s rhetoric linking vaccines to autism is both scientifically wrong and inherently discriminatory.
“It increases vaccine hesitancy and people choosing not to give their kids vaccines, and that increases the resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases,” Zoe Gross, director of Advocacy at the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, told Salon. She also pointed out that “the other reason is that there’s a lot of ableism and anti-autistic sentiment involved in the anti-vaxxer movement, and this lie that vaccines cause autism. You can see that these are people who would rather have their kids get vaccine-preventable diseases and potentially die than do something that they think erroneously risks their kids becoming autistic. That’s a pretty bleak view of autism.”
