Dr. Mehmet Oz, America’s green coffee bean-shilling Medicaid and Medicaid Services administrator, made an appearance on Face the Nation this weekend in order to have his ass very subtly and politely handed to him by host Margaret Brennan. He spent the first portion of the interview trying to pretend as though the Trump administration was responsible for the drop in medication costs over the last year, when that is actually due to President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and pushing his belief that AI is going to lower costs for Medicare patients. He spent the second trying to not sound like a complete idiot talking about vaccines while still not hurting the president’s feelings by directly saying he is incorrect about something.
“The CDC released new numbers last week showing 92 percent of the nation's kindergarteners were vaccinated from measles in the last school year, but that's below the 95 percent herd immunity threshold,” Brennan noted, before asking Oz to “clarify” Trump’s recent assertion that the MMR vaccine is “lethal” in its current combined form.
He did not clarify that.
In fact, he outright refused to even address it, and instead kept repeating that the administration wants parents to have a “choice” when it comes to vaccinating their children — not exactly something that would remotely help with getting that vaccination rate back to herd immunity levels.
“We want patients to get the treatments that their doctors are recommending to them, but we also want parents to have the autonomy to decide what their kids receive,” he said, pretending that Brennan had asked him an entirely different question. Brennan reiterated that she was actually asking about whether or not Trump is correct that the MMR vaccine is “lethal” in its current form.
“The president wants Americans, and he said this many times, to get vaccinated as their doctors recommend as long as they have a choice in the matter,” he said, once again ignoring the question. “The challenge we're running into is that many states have not clarified that and actually it's harder for parents to ask these difficult questions.”
No, it’s not that states haven’t “clarified” that, it’s that the states that aren’t experiencing massive measles outbreaks right now refuse to allow the little Typhoid Mary children of anti-vaxxers to come to school until they have had all of their vaccinations. They don’t tell parents that they have a choice, because they basically do not and they shouldn’t.
“The MMR vaccine is not offered in three separate shots,” Brennan said, trying again. “Merck, which produces it, said they couldn't offer that for another 10 years. Currently, it is only offered as a single shot. The president called that single shot lethal. Do you want to clarify that?”
And finally, he did.
“The MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine and it is offered in other countries, the measles in particular, separately, like in Japan,” he said, giving Brennan the opportunity to point out that this did not actually go very well for them. Indeed, after Japan eliminated the combined shot in 1993 after the mumps strain in the vaccine led to increased rates of aseptic meningitis, vaccination rates dropped. In 2001, this led to a major outbreak with somewhere between 225,000 and 286,000 cases of measles across the nation. According to the Centre on Integrated Rural Development for Asia and the Pacific (CIRDAP), “Japan later adopted routine combined measles-rubella (MR) vaccination in 2006, but mumps vaccination remains non-routine, leaving the population susceptible to periodic outbreaks.”
So maybe not the best example! Oz claimed this was because of the increased cost of the vaccine. In Japan, while routine vaccinations cost nothing, voluntary ones (like the mumps vaccine) do cost up to $108 a shot.
Oz pivoted again.
“This comes back to a much more fundamental issue, Margaret. Do parents have the right to ask questions? We already experienced what happened during COVID when we took away that right from parents they were forced to give their kids COVID vaccines.” Brennan interrupted him to point out that they were not, in fact, forced to do that.
“Well, they were pushed hard and oftentimes hindered from doing what they wanted to do like going out socially if their kids were not included in these programs,” he said, describing something entirely different from “forcing.” To be clear, the parents were, in fact, allowed to go to places that required proof of vaccination, as long as they had their vaccines and did not bring their unvaccinated children with them. Not because anyone was being mean, but because they didn’t want to get sick just so some very stupid people could get coddled.
“The request of the president is to make sure that states offer parents either eligibility because of religious beliefs or other reasons why they may not want to have their kids take all the vaccines in order,” Oz said, ignoring the fact that they do have every right to not vaccinate their kids in vaccine mandate states so long as they homeschool said children and don’t send them to school with children who may be immunocompromised.
“Let's pick a specific example — hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is a vaccine I happen to like,” he said. “I got the hepatitis B vaccine, but it helps adults avoiding issues if they're involved, for example, in my case as a doctor if I just hit myself with a needle with a patient, but it usually is for drug abusers and for people who are involved in —”
“Or infants who could be exposed by a caregiver, by someone in their house, by a parent unwittingly, which is why it is provided,” Brennan interrupted him to say.
“Extraordinarily, extraordinarily rare,” he responded, lying right through his teeth. “It's hard to design an entire program around just that possibility. The reality is if a parent wants to delay this vaccine from the hour the child is born for a few years because they don't think they're going to be in those high-risk categories, why not give the parent that choice? Again, we're going to pay for it no matter what.”
Because it’s not that rare, and before we had the vaccine, about 18,000 children under the age of 10 contracted Hep B every year. That’s not nothing when you consider the fact that this put them at risk of death from cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma later in life. It’s a very serious disease and to refuse it because you think it means the doctor thinks your kid is a junkie hooker is very, very stupid.
The interview ended there, but Oz isn’t the only one acting as if vaccination is not, as Trump FDA nominee Heidi Overton put it, “a one-size-fits-all” kind of thing. Because, barring a situation where a child may be immunocompromised, it absolutely is.
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The idea that there are some kids who just don’t need certain vaccines, and that their parents are the best ones to determine this, is positively absurd. If that were the case, we would not have had 2,777 measles cases so far this year. What could parents possibly know about their particular children that would lead them to such a determination, especially in infancy? Are there special signs to look for that only a parent would know? “Oh, our Jaden can’t possibly get measles, I can tell by looking at his diapers!” It does not make sense, it just sounds like it makes sense to people who don’t have much sense themselves.
There is literally nothing — nothing! — to suggest that spreading out vaccines will do anything other than making it less likely kids will complete the full schedule. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it is more safe. Florida Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds, who was also on the program and asked about it, claimed that doing so would give “an infant human body the ability to actually absorb and deal with that that rate of vaccination,” which is not a thing. (Donalds also wants to “study” whether they should roll back polio vaccines.)
Of course, Donalds also insisted that “illegal immigrants,” and not low vaccination rates, were the cause of the recent measles outbreaks in Florida and Texas. However, California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois all also have high rates of undocumented immigrants and are not experiencing very many measles cases. South Carolina and Utah have had the most cases so far, and they do not have especially high rates of undocumented immigrants.
Of course, it’s more or less impossible to come up with a not-stupid response to any question about vaccines that does not undermine the Trump administration’s position on them, because the position itself is absurd to begin with.
This "parental choice" bullshit is really, really infuriating. Making a choice presupposes that you understand all the issues involved, and what the consequences are of each of the different available choices. How many parents actually know this when it comes to vaccinating their children? Especially when there are authority figures like the President and the Sec'y of HHS feeding them false information. If Oz can't be bothered to understand this stupid environment, then he is complicit in child murder, too.
"Donalds also wants to “study” whether they should roll back polio vaccines."
Well, I'd say he should go have a chat with the Turtle, but...