Navigating vaccine misinformation with a pediatrician
Consider This from NPR
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4.1 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
The CDC recently rewrote its vaccine guidance to suggest shots might cause autism, renewing false claims about vaccines and causing anxiety among parents. Physicians often deal with misinformation, but the difference is that it's now coming from the federal government. How do families know what guidance to trust?
NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Dr. James Campbell, a practicing pediatrician and professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, on how families should navigate the changing guidance.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been critical of vaccines, and for years, let an activist group opposing vaccines. |
| 0:09.4 | There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective. |
| 0:13.2 | Although he's backtracked a bit on that comment he made at the Lex Friedman podcast in 2023, he repeatedly questions vaccine safety. I'll tell you how to start |
| 0:23.0 | taking vaccine safety seriously. Consider the best science available, even when the science |
| 0:28.3 | contradicts established paradigms. And now, as the country's top public health official, |
| 0:33.6 | Kennedy is reshaping the federal government's official guidance on vaccines. |
| 0:38.8 | RFK Jr. instructed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its websites |
| 0:42.9 | to state that the link between vaccines and autism can't be ruled out. That's despite the fact |
| 0:49.6 | that the connection between vaccines and autism has long been debunked by high-quality scientific research. |
| 0:56.1 | Kennedy told the New York Times, quote, the whole thing about vaccines have been tested and |
| 1:00.3 | there's been this determination made is just a lie. The move has stunned doctors and health |
| 1:05.9 | experts. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who did vote to confirm RFK Jr., had this to say on CNN Sunday. |
| 1:13.8 | Anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding, |
| 1:21.9 | that vaccines are safe and that if you don't take them, you're putting your child or yourself in greater danger. |
| 1:29.0 | Anything that underlines that message is a problem. |
| 1:31.6 | Some public health experts say that the once-trusted CDC is now no longer credible. |
| 1:36.9 | Dr. Paul Offutt directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. |
| 1:41.5 | I mean, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has shredded the CDC and made it in his |
| 1:46.4 | image, which is to say an anti-science, anti-vaccine image. The worry is that families who rely on the |
| 1:53.4 | federal government for factual information will see the new guidance and will choose to not |
| 1:57.9 | vaccinate their children. This is madness. That's Dr. Sean O'Leary from the American Academy of Pediatrics. |
| 2:04.2 | I'm so sorry that this is going to have an impact on, frankly, the health of children. |
... |
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