Trump Gets Hammered By Daniel Dale Over Insane Anti-Vax Lies

CNN fact-checker extraordinaire Daniel Dale made a welcome and much-needed appearance on Monday when he swooped in to hammer Donald Trump over a blizzard of dangerous lies about vaccines.

Trump, RFK Jr., and some other anti-vax freaks held a photo op in the Oval Office on Monday to unveil Trump’s batshit Vaccine Schedule Executive Order.

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We covered one especially stunning exchange in this morning’s JAMM. In his opening remarks, Trump blurted “You have the MMR. We want it in three separate vaccinations, given at separate times. Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite — lethal. And separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective.”

Then, a full HALF-HOUR LATER, someone challenged him about it.

But there was much more than that, and Dale took Trump’s lies apart in short order.

KAITLAN COLLINS: This is the President pushing unproven health guidance to millions of parents, based on his own intuition, quote, Common sense, and personal feelings, not scientific research. But this is also not the first time that we've heard the President say as much.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I always had very strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from.

I'm making these statements from me. I'm not making them from these doctors because when they -- they talk about, you know, different results, different studies. I talk about a lot of common sense.

We have to address it, and so I'm addressing it the best I can as a non-doctor. But I'm a man of common sense.

I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor. But I have common sense.

I say, maybe you can, maybe you can't. I'm not a doctor. But I'm like a person that has a good you know what.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: …What do the facts show?

DANIEL DALE: The facts show the President said a whole lot of things that weren't true in a very short period of time. I think the biggest one is, again, promoting this suggestion that there might be some link between vaccines and autism.

This idea emerged, was popularized by a discredited, fraudulent study from the 1990s. It has since been thoroughly debunked by multiple studies, in multiple countries, involving millions of people, and there is no new data in support of it. The American Academy of Pediatrics emphasized today: there's nothing new here. There's no new science. This idea remains thoroughly debunked. And yet, the President is floating it again.

Number two, I think the second most important false claim the President was promoting was this idea that the MMR vaccine can be quite lethal. This vaccine has been approved in the U.S., used in the U.S. since the early 1970s. It is proven very safe, very effective. There can be side effects; they tend to be mild and temporary, and there are no known deaths of any healthy child from taking it. So, baseless. And then additional baseless claims, again saying that fluid the size, he said, of a bottle of soda pumped into children. The typical vaccine dose, as you said, is a fraction of a teaspoon. The MMR dosage, for example, is 0.5 milliliters. A bottle of soda is like 600 milliliters. So, not even a shred of truth to that claim, Kaitlan.

COLLINS: What about when the President says that -- and RFK Jr. also was standing there saying that kids have to get up to 72 jabs. The Health Secretary said, that can be 94 shots by age 18. What is the truth?

DALE: So, I don't know what their math is here, but it appears that they are counting each individual dose of any vaccine that children could possibly get by age 18 and counting them separately, even though many of them are administered in combo shots or even orally, so not in the shots at all. And they're also counting annual COVID and flu shots that are not required by any state for kids to attend school. So, that would be 36 of the 72. So, a fuzzy math, I would say, generously, Kaitlan.

Dale has appeared on the air infrequently after a complete and unexplained absence for nearly three months.