PERFECT STORM

GOP Senator Savages Trump’s ‘Crazy Stupid’ New Order

“This is going backwards,” Bill Cassidy warned.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy is raging against President Donald Trump’s “potentially tragic” overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule.

Cassidy, a physician, appeared on State of the Union Sunday, and was asked about Trump’s claims that the current combined MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal,” and was comparable to “pumping” a child with “a large vat” or “gallons” of chemicals.

“Yeah, that’s a crazy, stupid thing,” Cassidy said.

Trump has asserted that “nothing bad can happen” by tripling the number of scheduled MMR shots.

Cassidy, however, warned that—particularly amid the affordability crisis and with a base of vaccine-skeptic voters—plenty of bad things could happen.

“Instead of the child getting two shots, they’re getting six. Instead of mom and dad missing work twice to bring the child to the doctor, they’re missing six times.

“And instead of the insurance company paying for two visits, they’re paying for six, which is going to drive up the cost of the premium.”

He described it as a disaster in the making, saying that ultimately “the child is going to get more jabs. The parents are going to lose money directly, and indirectly premiums are going up, which works against affordability.”

Trump’s sudden desire to change the vaccine schedule is another sign that he’s out of touch with voters, according to Cassidy.

“This is why the president’s poll numbers are going down, because people don’t perceive that he knows the reality of their life,” he said.

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“The reality of life is that the current regime has been put in place precisely for the convenience of the child, for the convenience of the parent, and to prevent disease. This is going backwards. We need to go forwards.”

Cassidy also spoke of having seen lives lost directly due to lack of vaccine uptake, and said of Trump’s “nothing bad can happen” comment earlier in the conversation: “If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that.”

Measles is having a worrying resurgence in the U.S. after being declared eliminated in the country in 2000 by the World Health Organization.

A new record was set this July, with the highest annual count of cases since 1991—despite being just over halfway through the year.

Alongside the wave of measles cases attributed to Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s platform of vaccine hesitancy, doctors have reported similar rises in illnesses such as whooping cough and bacterial infections.

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