The Green party’s presumptive nominee for president, Jill Stein, has claimed questions may remain about the oversight of vaccines, drawing accusations that she has associated herself with the discredited “anti-vaxxer” movement.
Related: Green party’s Jill Stein invites Bernie Sanders to take over ticket
Stein, a Harvard-educated physician, has both cited the proven importance of vaccines, noting that they save lives and have eliminated devastating diseases, and suggested that Americans cannot trust the people who recommend widespread vaccination. Responding to criticisms this week, she said her concerns were about the influence of corporations in government.
“As a medical doctor, of course I support vaccinations,” she tweeted. “I have a problem with the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] being controlled by drug companies.”
But in comments to the Washington Post on Friday and on an online forum earlier this summer, Stein echoed the concerns of anti-vaccination campaigners in her suggestion that unfit or influenced regulators could open the door for dangerous medicine.
“I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases,” she told the Post, citing the efficacy of vaccination against smallpox, polio and other diseases. She then questioned regulators, and by extension the vaccines they approve, saying: “People do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.”
Stein claimed corporations involved with genetically modified food have influenced government oversight of medicine.
“Monsanto lobbyists help run the day in those agencies,” she said, referring to the controversial corporation that also draws the ire of environmentalists. Research shows GM food is generally safe.
Eleven of the 15 sitting members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee are medical doctors who work at hospitals and universities, not pharmaceutical companies. Only two committee members work at pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur US. Both are doctors. The committee’s designated federal officer holds a PhD, and a management specialist also sits on the board. Two seats are vacant.
Stein, who has tried to court progressive voters disillusioned by the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s more center-left policies, made similar comments earlier this year in a Reddit AMA.
“Regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs,” she wrote. “So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US.”
Stein also advocated for more safe vaccinations, writing that dropping rates “can and must be fixed” but that the real issue was “widespread distrust of the medical-industrial complex”.
She added: “Vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure. Each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them.”
Speaking to the Post on Friday, Stein claimed that she remembered, from her time practicing medicine, that “there were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines”.
Research has shown schedule-related concerns about vaccines to be unfounded, and that delays to vaccines actually put children at greater risk. Anti-vaxx campaigners often claim there are dangerous compounds in vaccines, though decades of safe vaccinations contradict the claim and no evidence shows that trace amounts that remain in some approved vaccines cause any harm to the body.
“We have a real compelling need for vaccinations,” Stein said, before insisting: “I think some of [the questions] at least have been addressed. I don’t know if all of them have been addressed.”
Many anti-vaccination fears stem from a paper published in 1998 and since retracted which helped lead to the barring of its author from medicine. Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, insisted without credible evidence that vaccines could be linked to measles, mumps, rubella and autism. The completely discredited report continues to influence vaccination rates, which have fallen around the US in the last 20 years.
Stein seemed to echo such fears in her interview on Friday, though again as part of a broader argument about regulators.
“To assure the American public, whether it’s vaccinations, whether it’s administering estrogen to, you know, treat symptoms of menopause,” she said, “or at one point it was the solution to prevent Alzheimer’s and then it was discovered – oh, my goodness – it may actually contribute to Alzheimer’s – it’s really important that the American public have confidence in our regulatory boards so that all of our medical treatments and medications actually are approved by people who do not have a vested interest in their promotion.”
Related: Vaxxed: an expert view on controversial film about vaccines and autism
The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has explicitly linked vaccines to autism. At a September debate, he claimed, without specifics or evidence: “People that work for me, just the other day, two years old, beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later, got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
In contrast, Bernie Sanders, the progressive candidate whose voters Stein has tried to win since his defeat in the Democratic primary, has forcefully rejected anti-vaccination ideas.
“I think obviously vaccinations work,” he said last year. “The difficulty is if I have a kid who is suffering from an illness, who is subjected to a kid who walks into a room without vaccines, that could kill that child. And that’s wrong.”
Clinton, too, has been unequivocal, tweeting: “The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let’s protect all our kids.”
Green party candidate Jill Stein accused of "anti-vaxxer" sympathies
