This GOP science committee chairman proudly admitted he didn’t vaccinate his kids

Speaking to a crowd at a town hall meeting last week, the GOP chair of a key congressional subcommittee on science and technology said that he didn’t vaccinate most of his children.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk’s comments were in response to a woman who asked him to launch an investigation into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for “covering up” information linking vaccines to autism.

“I believe it’s the parents’ decision whether to immunize or not…Most of our children, we didn’t immunize. They’re healthy,” Loudermik replied rather vaguely. “Of course [since our children were homeschooled], we didn’t have to get the mandatory immunizations.”

From Mother Jones:

The CDC study in question looked at children with and without autism to find out if there was any difference in their rates of MMR vaccination. The researchers found none. The so-called “cover-up” originated from a secretly recorded and cherry-picked conversation between William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, and Brian Hooker of Focus for Health, an organization that seeks “to put an end to the needless harm of children by vaccination and other environmental factors.” In the conversation, Thompson allowed that among African-American boys, in a small subset of children studied, the incidence of autism was higher for those who were vaccinated than those who were not. That statement landed in a wildly misleadingvideo released on YouTube produced by Hooker and Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher whose medical license was revoked in 2010. A year later, a journal that published Wakefield’s paper linking autism and vaccines determined his findings were fraudulent.

The video of the full town hall meeting is below. The vaccine talk begins at about 1:26:00:

Sky Palma

Before launching DeadState back in 2012, Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art.

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