Tag Archives: Donald Trump

How RFK Jr. could add $100B a year to the debt

31 Mar

If autism were a vaccine injury, i.e. if it was legitimate to add autism to the vaccine injury table, I would say, “change the schedule now and pay however many families deserve it, no matter the cost.” But autism is not a vaccine injury. I will note that if Mr. Kennedy truly believed autism is a vaccine injury, he wouldn’t have hired David Geier to do the studies. Having Mr. Geier run an autism study is the equivalent of using loaded dice in a game of craps. Mr. Kennedy is buying the outcome he wants to see. If he wants to do more autism/vaccine studies, let the science speak, to quote Mr. Kennedy himself. He’s not doing that.

Robert Kennedy is (rightly) getting a lot of attention for his vaccine related actions. Just last week he pushed out the FDA’s top vaccine official (Top US vaccine official forced to resign, reports say). I will suggest it’s past time to stop reacting and start looking ahead–ask ourselves what is going to happen and what will the fallout be? That said, if we’ve learned anything from Mr. Kennedy, it’s that one should be careful and not fall into the conspiracy theory trap. So I’ll be careful and conservative as I predict what I think Mr. Kennedy is planning.

One Kennedy goal that seems obvious to me (and many others): get autism recognized as a vaccine injury. Get autism added to the vaccine injury table* to allow families to obtain compensation from the vaccine program. Perhaps he’s made this statement outright. I wouldn’t be surprised. But even if he hasn’t, I doubt many who have followed Mr. Kennedy’s words and actions would argue that this is a likely goal for him.

Let’s say he’s successful. What would be the result? Specifically, what would this cost? The vaccine court, after all, awards monetary compensation. It’s a pretty simple calculation:

$17B is a lot, but it’s not the $100B in the title of the article. Where did I get that? The support needs for an autistic person vary greatly, but, I would argue, they are higher than the average vaccine injury recipient. Also, we are talking about very young autistic children here, so there will be a lot of uncertainty projecting the lifelong needs and the court may be convinced to provide payouts on the higher end of the scale. Often in the past, I saw payments of about $1m to provide support for a lifelong disability awarded by the court, so I chose that number when I wrote the title of this piece. If we take 104,000 autistic kids being awarded $1m a year, we get $104B a year in vaccine court awards.

Let’s state the obvious: that’s a huge amount of money. That’s about 8 aircraft carriers a year. If Elon Musk found $104B a year in savings, believe me, we’d be hearing about it.

To put this more in context, the vaccine program has a trust fund of about $4.3B. This would be gone in the first year (potentially the first month) of autism cases being handled as a table injury. Technically, the vaccine court would have no money after that, and the awards should stop. This would put congress in a tight spot: allocate more money, or tell their constituents that that they voted to deny compensation to disabled children. I suspect they would vote to allocate funds. So we are talking about somewhere between $17B and $100B a year added to the budget, which would be directly added to the national debt.

I will admit that this is a very rough estimate of the financial cost. We could argue how much the average award would be. We could argue that not all autistic kids would get awards, even if autism were added as a table injury. So, maybe the total would go down. However, I also would argue that more kids will be diagnosed as autistic should autism be added as a table injury. Many more. How that balances out in the end can be debated, but I think a reasonable person can see that the answer will be billions of dollars a year and very likely many billions of dollars a year.

If autism were a vaccine injury, i.e. if it was legitimate to add autism to the vaccine injury table, I would say, “change the schedule now and pay however many families deserve it, no matter the cost.” But autism is not a vaccine injury. I will note that if Mr. Kennedy truly believed autism is a vaccine injury, he would not have hired David Geier to do the studies. Having Mr. Geier run an autism study is the equivalent of using loaded dice in a game of craps. Mr. Kennedy is buying the outcome he wants to see. If he wants to do more autism/vaccine studies, he would let the science speak. To quote Mr. Kennedy himself. He’s not doing that.

As I stated at the outset, one has to be careful of relying upon conspiracy theories. I believe I’ve stayed away from that here. I’ve made assumptions of what I think Mr. Kennedy wants to accomplish, but I think those are valid assumptions. And the cost analysis is very simple and I’ve laid it out very clearly. No chance to hide some trick in the math. I could be off by a factor of 10 and the conclusion would be the same.

One could and should ask why I am focusing on the financial cost and not the human cost. First, because autism is not a vaccine injury, we aren’t talking about a real human cost. Second, the financial cost is what will get the attention of Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and congress. Sad to say, but I believe that to be the case.

The most logical outcome of adding autism to the vaccine injury table, in my opinion, is that congress and the president would be forced to choose between keeping autism on the vaccine injury table and ending the infant vaccine program. End the infant vaccine program and many people in Mr. Kennedy’s community (possibly including Mr. Kennedy himself), will say “mission accomplished.”** Pull autism off the table and the net effect is pretty much the same. The idea that vaccines cause autism will be accepted and vaccine uptake will drop. Many states will stop mandating infant vaccines. The infant vaccine program would be effectively dead.

Either way, Mr. Kennedy will be able to say, “See, I’m not anti-vaccine. I didn’t direct the infant vaccine program to end. They just followed the “science” (that I directed be created when I hired David Geier).”

By Matt Carey

* The vaccine injury table lays out injuries that are presumed to be caused by a vaccine. For example, if one develops paralytic polio within 30 days of getting the oral polio vaccine, it is assumed to be caused by the vaccine. If you haven’t heard of this, that’s because the U.S. doesn’t use the oral polio vaccine anymore.

** Recall that one of the people at Mr. Kennedy’s “Children’s Health Defense” is JB Handley (Vice Chair in 2018). Recall that Mr. Handley once wrote: “With less than a half-dozen full-time activists, annual budgets of six figures or less, and umpteen thousand courageous, undaunted, and selfless volunteer parents, our community, held together with duct tape and bailing wire, is in the early to middle stages of bringing the U.S. vaccine program to its knees.”

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Donald Trump: Disabled Americans “Should Just Die”?

25 Jul

Fred C. Trump III has an article in Time Magazine out: “My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’” The article is an excerpt from an upcoming book, “ALL IN THE FAMILY: The Trumps and How We Got This Way“.

What is the context of this quote, “Should just die”? I’d strongly suggest reading the article, but it comes down to this: Donald Trump’s nephew was able to get a White House visit to for a group of disability activists to speak with officials in the White House. This included Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. Again, I’d encourage you to read the article, but here’s one section that stands out:

Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going

“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”

“Sure, happy to do it.”

He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.

“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” 

I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives. For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.

I turned and walked away.

We already know Mr. Trump is no friend to the disability communities. From mocking a disabled reporter (and then being spineless and denying that’s what he did) to disparaging disabled veterans (“A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ ), the pattern is clear. But, this was his own family. And Trump thinks his own grand nephew should, “just die”.

It’s hard enough to get support for people with disabilities in America. Can we really afford another Trump presidency? Pick and issue that’s important to you. If you are disabled or love someone who is disabled, what issue could mean more to you than disabled people should just die?

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By Matt Carey

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Imagine Mr. Kennedy working in a Trump administration.

17 Jul

Donald Trump was be very bad for America and very bad for the autism communities in specific and would be worse in a second term. Robert Kennedy would be very bad for America and very bad for the autism communities in specific. But it can get worse. What if Donald Trump were elected and put Robert Kennedy in a position of authority? Mr. Kennedy asked Mr. Trump for a job as some sort of “vaccine commissioner” before Mr. Trump’s first term.

A leaked video shows Robert Kennedy speaking with Donald Trump. Media outlets are focusing on Mr. Trump playing to Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine sentiments. A Trump/Kennedy conversation exchanging vaccine fearmongering is, frankly, not newsworthy in my opinion. The fact that a call happened is not either, to be honest. It would be appropriate for Mr. Kennedy to speak to Mr. Trump following the assassination attempt. We don’t have the full conversation in the video, so we don’t know who initiated the call or why. Mr. Kennedy says the main message was “national unity”

But here’s the part that I worry about:

Trump also appeared to appeal to Kennedy, though it’s unclear for what exactly. “I would love you to do something,” Trump said, without offering further context. “And I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.”

Allow me to sidestep the “I would love you to do something” comment and focus on what Mr. Trump means by “so good for you and so big for you”. Most likely it’s Mr. Trump offering vague and empty promises. That would be very on-type for Mr. Trump. But, this will read to Mr. Kennedy’s followers as a possible open door to some sort of appointment in a Trump administration. They have speculated in the past about Mr. Kennedy running FDA or CDC. Which again would be very on-type for Mr. Trump’s planned second term: replacing people with competence with loyalists. Mr. Kennedy is unlikely to be a fierce loyalist, in my opinion. But, as a “burn it down” appointee, Mr. Kennedy might serve Mr. Trump’s vision well.

I am just amazed that Donald Trump is a viable candidate. His performance his first term was…bad. His disregard for the foundation of democracy should be undeniable, but denialists abound. The idea that Mr. Trump could appoint Mr. Kennedy to some post shouldn’t be the tipping point in one’s vote. Mr. Trump is bad enough as it is. But, seriously, Kennedy + Trump is worse than Trump alone.

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By Matt Carey

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Donald Trump believes that “the education is flush with cash”. How did he get that “alternative fact”?

23 Jan

Donald Trump was inaugurated last Friday. His speech was overall very poor, but one statement stood out to me above all the others. A statement which is not getting much (if any) press:

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

Emphasis added.

I don’t think anyone who actually deals with the education system in America would consider it “flush with cash”. That said, no one involved in special education would every say such a clearly false statement.

We absolutely are not serving our students, but this is because our education system is woefully underfunded. My own district cut back on many school days a few years ago when California cut the funding sent to districts. Guess what, when funding returned, the district didn’t restore the days we lost. We have about 10 education days fewer than before the budget crunch.

And that’s just in general. Special Education, since the first law in the 1970’s, was supposed to come with 40% of the costs covered by the Federal Government. OK, they said a “maximum” of 40%, but the Federal government has never come close. Estimates are that the contribution is about 17%.

These are the disabled children of our country. Does “America First” mean, “non disabled American’s first”, Mr Trump? Or will you be the one who finally corrects this injustice? That’s going to be hard to do if you think that schools are “flush with cash”.

You’ve come down from your tower to live in a mansion. One walled off from the world. And you surround yourself with people who, like you, don’t understand the experiences of the majority of Americans. And when you make statements like “flush with cash”, it shows.

I’ll be honest, one disappointment with Mr. Obama’s administration was his failure to live up to America’s commitment to people with disabilities, including funding Special Education. How about you prove you can do better than Mr. Obama–don’t tell us that school systems are “flush with cash”, make them flush with cash.

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By Matt Carey

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