Senator and opthalmologist Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, is the latest of the potential 2016 presidential candidates (and the first with a medical degree) to offer an opinion on whether or not to vaccinate children.
"I'm not anti-vaccine at all, but most of them ought to be voluntary," Paul said Monday on the "Laura Ingraham Show."
Later Monday, on CNBC, he went further, saying, "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines," a view that is strongly disputed by the medical community and seems to be based on an influential study published in the Lancet medical journal that was discredited and retracted in 2010.
On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that 102 people in the U.S. had contracted the measles, tracing most of the cases to "a large, ongoing multi-state
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President Obama, in an interview with NBC that aired Monday, had urged parents to get their children vaccinated. "I understand that there are families that in some cases are concerned about the effect of vaccinations. The science is, you know, pretty indisputable. We've looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren't reasons to not," he said.
While touring a facility that makes vaccines in the U.K., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was asked whether Americans ought to vaccinate their children. He said, "All I can say is that we vaccinated ours. That's the best expression I can give you of my opinion." But, he added, "I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well," a response that was roundly criticized by Democrats.
Paul's children were also vaccinated, although because the number of recommended vaccines for children is high, he chose to delay some of the vaccinations and stagger them over time. He reminded listeners on Ingraham's show that another potential GOP presidential candidate in 2016, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, had for a time issued an executive order mandating one vaccine for girls.
"I don't know if you remember when Governor Perry made it mandatory to get, for a sexually transmitted disease, to have everybody have to take it," Paul said. "While I think it's a good idea to take the vaccine, I think that's a personal decision for individuals to take and when they take it."
While Perry was running for president in 2012, he came under heavy criticism for the executive order, and later called it "a mistake." Perry has not said anything recently on the topic.
Neither has Hillary Clinton, for that matter, but in 2008 she filled out a survey from a group now known as the Autism Action Network, and her answer read, "I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines." That survey, however, was taken two years before the Lancet study was retracted.
The CDC says that the greatest number of measles cases reported since the disease was eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 was last year, with 644 cases from 27 states.
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