The Dictatorship
We are pediatricians in South Carolina fighting for parents to get accurate info about vaccines
Parents deserve honest answers about vaccines. They deserve physicians who will listen to their concerns, explain the evidence and help them make informed decisions. Above all, they deserve confidence that the nation’s leading public health institutions are communicating science and not suggesting that there’s uncertainty where none exists.
That is why the recent changes to information presented on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website regarding vaccines and autism are so concerning. News organizations reported in November that the website had been wrongly edited to say, “The statement ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.” Last week, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said that in exchange for his support for Dr. Erica Schwartz to lead the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services made “a sign of good faith” and “modified the CDC’s autism and vaccines webpage.”
The science has not changed: Vaccines do not cause autism.
But those changes have done nothing to mitigate the concerns. The website continues to wrongly say that a rejection of a link between vaccines and autism isn’t based on evidence. It also says, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
As pediatricians who have spent our careers caring for children and their families, we know that trust is one of the most valuable tools in medicine. Trust takes years to build and moments to erode. At a time when public confidence in health institutions has already been tested, government agencies should be strengthening that trust by communicating what decades of scientific evidence have consistently shown, not reopening questions that have long been settled.
The science has not changed: Vaccines do not cause autism.
This conclusion does not rest on one study, one expert or one government agency. The conclusion follows decades of rigorous research conducted around the world involving millions of children, using multiple study designs and across different populations and health systems.
The evidence is overwhelming.
A 2014 meta-analysis by Taylor and colleagues pooled data from more than 1.2 million children in cohort studies and nearly 10,000 children in case-control studies. The researchers found no association between vaccination and autism spectrum disorder; no association between the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccine and autism; and no evidence that thimerosal-containing vaccines or mercury exposure increased autism risk.
In 2021, the Cochrane Collaborationwidely regarded as one of the highest standards in evidence-based medicine, reviewed studies examining MMR, MMRV and varicella vaccines. Once again, researchers found no evidence linking MMR vaccination to autism spectrum disorder.
That same year, an updated systematic review commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality examined 338 studies identified from more than 56,000 scientific citations. The authors concluded with high-strength evidence that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk of autism.
Perhaps the clearest assessment came from The Lancet Infectious Diseases, where researchers described autism as the example for which evidence demonstrating no relationship with vaccination is “particularly strong.” Study after study, conducted by different investigators using different methodologies in different populations, has reached the same conclusion.
Healthy science welcomes questions. But science also requires us to acknowledge when a question has been answered.
In medicine, that is what scientific consensus looks like.
Healthy science welcomes questions. It encourages new evidence, replication and debate. But science also requires us to acknowledge when a question has been answered. Continuing to imply uncertainty after decades of consistent evidence does not advance scientific inquiry; it risks undermining public confidence in one of the safest and most effective public health interventions ever developed.
Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was right to emphasize that the overwhelming body of evidence shows vaccines do not cause autism. Reasonable people may disagree about public policy, but scientific facts should not be replaced with political talking points.
The consequences of confusion are not theoretical.
We are already witnessing the return of vaccine-preventable diseases in communities where vaccination rates have fallen. As pediatricians in South Carolinawhich had almost 1,000 cases of measles before May this year, we have seen firsthand the disruption that follows every measles case: public health investigations, exposure notifications, quarantine recommendations, missed school and work and understandable fear among families with infants, children receiving cancer treatment or others who cannot fully be protected through vaccination.
These outbreaks are not acts of fate. They are, in almost every circumstance, preventable.
The overwhelming majority of American parents continue to vaccinate their children because they understand that vaccines save lives. They deserve clear, consistent communication from the institutions they rely on, not messages that suggest long-standing scientific conclusions are suddenly open for debate.
Families affected by autism deserve better than having their children’s diagnoses negatively and repeatedly linked to a theory that has been disproven for more than two decades.
Meanwhile, families affected by autism deserve better than having their children’s diagnoses negatively and repeatedly linked to a theory that has been disproven for more than two decades.
Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that affects millions of children and adults. Families deserve continued investment in understanding its causes, improving early identification, expanding access to evidence-based therapies and ensuring children receive the support they need throughout their lives. Revisiting a debunked vaccine theory does nothing to advance those goals. Instead, it diverts time, attention and resources away from the questions that remain unanswered.
As pediatricians, our responsibility is not to defend political leaders or government agencies. It is to advocate for children and to provide families with the most accurate information available. When misinformation threatens children’s health, even inadvertently, we have an obligation to speak clearly.
Parents should always ask questions. Physicians should always answer them honestly. Public health institutions should always communicate the strongest available evidence.
After decades of careful research involving millions of children, that evidence remains unchanged. Vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccines save lives.
Our children deserve public conversations, and public policies, that reflect both truths.
Dr. Martha Edwards graduated from Brown University with a degree in neuroscience and completed medical school and residency at the University of Virginia. She has been recognized with multiple community service awards for her years volunteering in a children’s free clinic and currently serves as the President of the SC Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics
Dr. Deborah Greenhouse is a pediatrician at Palmetto Pediatric and Adolescent Clinic/ South Carolina Pediatric Alliance in Columbia, South Carolina. She is a past president of the South Carolina Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. She has served on the AAP Committee on Federal Government Affairs and is currently the AAP District IV Vice Chair.
President Donald Trump said Monday that Israel would have been “terminated” without U.S. military intervention against Iranarguing that his administration’s strikes on Tehran’s nuclear program prevented destruction to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One while traveling to Michigan, Trump defended the U.S. campaign against Iran, saying it fundamentally altered the balance of power in the region.
“You know who wouldn’t survive without us? Israel. Bibi’s coming, he’ll tell you,” Trump said. “If I didn’t get involved, and I didn’t blow up those nuclear, essentially, soon to be nuclear weapons to dust, Israel would have been terminated months ago.”
Later Monday, while delivering remarks at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, Trump touted the United States’ strikes in Iran, saying the U.S. had destroyed Tehran’s navy and air force, while diminishing its drone and missile manufacturing capabilities.
While he touted the U.S. military strikes on Iran as a major success, the audience was notably less enthusiastic about his remarks on the war than they were about immigration and the southern border.
Trump was in Milford to bolster support among auto workers and voters in the key battleground state by highlighting his administration’s efforts to revive domestic manufacturing, expand auto industry jobs and strengthen the economy ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump’s remarks came one day before he is scheduled to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House to discuss the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Trump said he and Netanyahu remain “pretty close” on Iran ahead of their scheduled meeting Tuesday, though he acknowledged minor differences without elaborating.
The U.S. and Iran halted attacks over the weekend, but Trump has repeatedly warned that military action could resume if the talks fail. The president told reporters Iran had reached out seeking renewed negotiations.
“Iran took a beating over the last 14 days, and they asked us very nicely, ‘Please stop. Let’s meet,’” Trump said. “If we don’t make a deal, we go back to the same thing.”
The president also brushed aside concerns raised by Netanyahu over the potential sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, signaling that he would not allow foreign leaders to dictate U.S. arms sales.
“Nobody tells me what we should be selling,” Trump said when asked about Netanyahu’s reported objections. He added that “Turkey’s been a tremendous ally.”
Trump first signaled earlier this month that he was open to restoring Turkey’s access to the F-35 program, reversing a policy that removed the country after it purchased Russia’s S-400 air defense system. Israel has traditionally sought to preserve its qualitative military advantage, including access to more advanced U.S. weapons systems than neighboring countries.
At the rally in Milford, Trump argued his economic agenda is fueling a manufacturing resurgence, even as many Americans continue to grapple with higher gasoline prices and other lingering economic pressures amid the war with Iran.
“I’ve done more for you than your parents,” Trump said to a crowd of autoworkers.
The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.11 on Monday, compared with $3.15 a year ago, according to AAA. That is an increase of 0.96 cents per gallon, or about 31%, as fuel prices remain elevated following recent volatility in global oil markets tied to the conflict.
In the latter half of the speech, Trump returned to familiar themes he often discusses on the campaign trail, including border security, crime, election integrity and foreign policy.
Jake Traylor contributed to this story.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.
At the end of June, President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies lost — for now — the Supreme Court fight over birthright citizenship. Vice President JD Vance said MAGA needed to keep fighting birthright citizenship after the ruling in Trump v. Barbara, but it’s set its sights on a different nativist victory, this time relying on a set of racist laws the high court approved back at the start of the 20th century.
Just two weeks after the ruling on June 30 didn’t go MAGA’s way, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., introduced H.R. 9724, the End Birthright Citizenship for Territories Act. The bill would deny children born on or after Jan. 1, 2027, in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands automatic citizenship unless at least one parent is already a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident. Griffith calls it a crackdown on “birth tourism,” and the bill doesn’t hide where its legal authority comes from.
“The application under the Barbara case of birthright citizenship in the U.S. territories differs from what is established in the 50 U.S. States according to Supreme Court cases,” Griffith noted in a July 16 e-newsletter about the bill. “The birthright discrepancy between the territories and the States dates to legal cases beginning in the early 20th century known as the Insular Cases.”
Those Insular Cases are generally considered so racist that even Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch called them “shameful” back in 2022.
No matter how many times this country calls me a U.S. citizen, Washington still isn’t sure what to do with the place where I was born.
For those unfamiliar with the Insular Cases, from 1901 to 1922, the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings on how much of the Constitution applies to places like Puerto Rico — which had become booty of war after the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 — and other U.S. possessions. In the lead case, Downes v. Bidwellthe court ruled that Puerto Rico belonged to — but wasn’t part of — the United States in a constitutional sense, and used language like “alien races” and “savage tribes” to describe people living there. The doctrine’s author, Justice Edward Douglass White (a former Confederate soldier), built the reasoning explicitly on “differences of race,” warning against extending citizenship to “uncivilized race[s]” he deemed “completely unfit to receive it.” This year marks the 125th anniversary of that first ruling, and is a topic I cover in a new podcast about Puerto Rican colonialism, aptly titled “American Colony.”
“This bill is divisive, it is racist in its foundation, and it is corrosive of the principles of American law. It fits a broader pattern in Congressman Griffith’s record of measures that diminish Black and brown people,” Rep. Stacey Plaskett, a nonvoting member representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, said in a statement. “To be clear — this bill has not attracted a single cosponsor. It has no discernible path to consideration, particularly given the calendar of inaction the Majority has laid out, but we do not dismiss it. We do note that the Vice President has said this is an idea the Administration is ‘looking at,’ and we take that seriously.”
I was born in Puerto Rico, where U.S. citizens still have fewer rights, so when I saw Griffith’s bill for the first time, it raised the same feeling I have always had when it comes to my own birth certificate: that no matter how many times this country calls me a U.S. citizen, Washington still isn’t sure what to do with the place where I was born. For 125 years, the Insular Cases have viewed Puerto Rico as a second-class colonial possession, even when thousands of Puerto Ricans have fought and died for a country that has never fully accepted them.
Griffith’s bill is just the latest attempt to insult us by threatening the possibility of Puerto Ricans having no citizenship at all. Of course, the bill doesn’t explicitly say that, but the threat is there for anyone born next year in Puerto Rico — because the Insular Cases appear to provide some legal justification for it.
That’s not paranoia. Efrén Rivera Ramos, a law professor and former dean at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law, told “Democracy Now!” that the bill’s own drafting creates exactly this kind of ambiguity — the first part reads as if it strips citizenship from anyone born in Puerto Rico after 2027, and only in the bill’s very last provision does it narrow that down to children of noncitizens and non-permanent residents. That sloppiness, Rivera Ramos warns, “may cause problems in the future” if this bill ever becomes law.
But fighting Griffith’s bill clause by clause misses the point. The Insular Cases need to go entirely, a position Neil Weare, co-director of Right to Democracy, has been pushing in court for years.
“It’s not surprising. Two hundred fifty years after the U.S. rejected colonial rule, the federal government continues to rely on the racist Insular Cases for the idea it can do whatever it wants in U.S. territories regardless of founding principles like ‘consent of the governed’ and all ‘created equal,’” Weare said.
Such a resolution is highly unlikely in this political climate, as long as MAGA is involved. Just last week, the White House brought back the image of Trump tossing paper towels after Hurricane Mariaan image that continues to enrage Puerto Ricans nine years later. To him, Puerto Rico is reduced to a meme. Any prospects of statehood are laughed off whenever he says he wants other countries like Canada, Greenland and Venezuela to become states. In fact, according to Trump, he might cry if places like Puerto Rico were to become states.
So why would we expect anything different when it comes to birthright citizenship?
Trump already made this bet once and lost. The Insular Cases are the backup plan, a racist relic that gets dusted off when the nativists fear the end of a lost America. Colonies like Puerto Rico have lived with that excuse since 1901, and it shouldn’t have to keep proving, generation after generation, that its people deserve the citizenship they already have.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of “The Latino Newsletter” and co-editor of “Pressing Issues from Free Press.”
President Donald Trump is giving fragile U.S.-Iran diplomacy “some space” before deciding whether to resume strikes, United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz said Sunday.
Hours later, however, Trump posted images to social media depicting the U.S. attacking Iran.
Waltz also dismissed concerns over the United States’ diminished munitions stockpiles, even as he conceded that “a lot” of weapons have been depleted, which he said was because of the Russia-Ukraine war and fighting with the Houthis.
“I want to be crystal clear: The U.S. military — and I’ve verified this every which way — has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” Waltz told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Waltz’s comments came on the second consecutive day of paused fighting between the United Sates and Iran amid reports of a dwindled U.S. stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors, among other munitions.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the depletion of interceptor stockpiles is among the reasons why the administration is wary of resuming major combat operations in a war launched without congressional authorization and which has grown exceedingly unpopular.
But Waltz underscored that the pause in fighting is to allow for an opportunity for peace — not because of an insufficient weapons supply, and warned that those leaking information to the press about the U.S. not having sufficient weaponry “deserve to be in jail.”
“What the president is doing right now, as we’ve seen all along, is giving some talks some space. Talks are ongoing,” Waltz told NBC. “They’re happening at every level, from the more technical aspect of it all the way to the highest levels, of course, within both the Iranian government and the U.S. government.”
He reiterated in an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that Trump “is giving diplomacy a chance.”
But even after Waltz publicly touted giving peace a chance, Trump posted several AI-generated images on Truth Social Sunday afternoon depicting the U.S. striking Kharg Island. In one imageTrump is standing on the deck of an Iranian oil tanker with an American flag in hand.
Trump met with top aides on Friday to weigh escalating military action against Iran, according to a senior White House official. On Saturday, the president told a French journalist that he is “absolutely” considering resuming full-scale war with Iran if the U.S. doesn’t “get 100% of what we want.”
Waltz declined to give a timeline for when the war would end.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that if Iran plays any role in attacking Israel, it would be making a “terrible mistake” and that the response would be “very forceful.”
“If Iran attacks Israel – either directly or through proxies, either with ballistic missiles or UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]’s or killer drones — it will make a terrible mistake,” he said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”“Because our response, Israel’s response, will be very, very forceful.”
Netanyahu, who launched the war with Iran jointly with Trump on Feb. 28, is set to meet with his U.S. counterpart at the White House on Tuesday, the same day he’s scheduled to attend the funeral of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Jake Traylor and Emily Hung contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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