Top Trump Adviser Wants to Cause a Plague

But Kennedy’s—and by extension, Lutnick’s—flagrant vaccine claims are plainly false. Dozens of vaccines had been invented by 1954, when Kennedy was born, preventing the societal spread of horrific illnesses such as bubonic plague, lockjaw, and tuberculosis. Autism itself has been routinely misdiagnosed and miscategorized since it was first described by Eugen Bleuler as part of a larger, outdated understanding of schizophrenia in 1911. It was later reclassified as a spectrum in 1994 in the DSM-IV, vastly widening the diagnosis.

And as for Lutnick’s assertion that babies receive countless vaccines at birth: Doctors recommend immunization for just a handful of diseases at that young age. Babies inherit some antibodies from their mothers during pregnancy from the vaccines that adults receive over the course of their own lives, but those antibodies begin to wear off about a year into the child’s life, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that children begin their vaccinations for illnesses including polio, diphtheria, the flu, and ​​hepatitis B before they’re a year old.

Still, Lutnick wasn’t against just handing over American’s private health information to such an ungrounded figure.