With 12 weeks remaining before the midterm elections and six weeks before early voting begins in some states, Donald Trump may not be focused on the issues voters care about most, but he’s clearly focused on the issues he cares about most.

In recent weeks, the president has invested considerable time and energy into everything from the Reflecting Pool to his 2020 election conspiracy theories to the White House ballroom vanity project, none of which is especially important to the American mainstream. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise to see the Republican turn his attention this week to another one of his preoccupations: peddling misinformation about vaccines.

The Wall Street Journal reported two weeks ago that Trump had privately lobbied Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to probe the nonexistent connection between vaccines and autism and to take steps to reduce the number of shots that federal guidelines recommend for children. As this week got underway, the president took related steps of his own, signing an executive order Monday designed to upend the childhood vaccine schedule. MS NOW reported:

The executive order recommends reducing the amount of immunizations kids receive to provide protection for 11 diseases, down from the 18 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had previously recommended. The immunizations that were reduced will remain available for certain high-risk groups and “for shared clinical decision-making, ensuring that parents have all options available to them,” according to the order. Those include the hepatitis A and B vaccines, and the Covid-19 and flu vaccines.

It also recommends separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella, also known as MMR, vaccine into three individual shots, along with generally administering vaccines during separate visits “to give parents more options regarding the timing and frequency of this vaccine administration.”

It’s important to emphasize that it’s an open question as to whether this new order has any legal or substantive significance. As The New York Times reported, “Vaccine recommendations in the United States are made by a committee of experts who advise [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], and are then adopted by the agency’s director. But only states can require vaccinations for children to enter school or day care.”

But over the course of Trump’s 40-minute event in the Oval Office, two things nevertheless became clear.

The first is that the president’s gathering was a misinformation extravaganza. The Republican claimed, for example, that he had seen “proof” of “a vaccination thing” in which something “the size of a bottle of soda” gets “poured into a little child’s body.” That’s bananas.

Trump further argued that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines can possibly be “quite lethal” when combined into a single shot. That was so bonkers that a reporter asked if he had any evidence whatsoever to back that up. “No,” he replied. “What I’ve heard is that there are there are some people that say it is that way.”

At the start of the White House event, Trump said he was unveiling “gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations.” It was soon after when he was reduced to admitting his recommendations were based on random things he had heard from unnamed people, all of which were plainly at odds with the findings of actual scientists, physicians and public health officials.

But the other detail that came into sharper focus was that the president seems convinced he still has the credibility needed to advise Americans on matters of medicine and science, which is plainly at odds with everything we’ve learned about him in recent years.

In January, for example, Trump told The Wall Street Journal he routinely ignores the advice of physicians on daily aspirin use, in part because he’s “superstitious” and in part because he wants “nice, thin blood pouring through my heart.”

This is the same Republican who also famously recommended research into treating Covid-19 patients with disinfectant injections and shining “very powerful” lights inside their bodies.

In April, Dr. Mehmet Oz, a physician who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the president had told him that he believes diet soda possesses implausible health benefits, including the ability to “kill cancer cells inside the body.”

Not to put too fine a point on this, but on matters of medicine, science and public health, this guy is about as reliable a source as a Magic 8 Ball.

As the dust settles on Monday’s event and policymakers assess the practical impact of Trump’s executive order, it’s also important to emphasize the difference between garden-variety nonsense and potentially dangerous nonsense. Trump’s falsehoods are the background noise of our daily lives, but his absurdities related to vaccines are qualitatively worse than his everyday palaver.

Partway through the White House gathering, Trump assured the public, “Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing. Nothing bad can happen. … The worst thing that would happen would be nothing happens. We’re not going to lose anything.”

Reality paints a different picture: The more the incumbent tries to undermine public confidence in vaccines while trying to interfere with the childhood vaccine schedule, the more he puts people at risk for no reason and opens the door to the spread of preventable diseases.

The post Trump seems to think he has credibility on medicine, science and public health. He doesn’t. appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.