If you have a young child, you know how difficult a trip to the pediatrician can be.
Call the doctor’s office to set up an appointment. Please listen closely as our menu options have changed. Press 2. Oops. Call back and press 3. Sorry, we don’t have any appointments for six weeks. Ask your boss for the morning off. Pack the baby bag with an extra outfit just in case. Diaper change. Long car ride as you play that one song over and over. Look for parking. Diaper change, again. Good thing you packed the extra clothes. Show your insurance card. Last time the copay was only $10. What do you mean it’s changed? Wait in a room full of crying babies and a toddler who keeps sneezing without covering his mouth. Pepper the doctor with a dozen questions. Is she sleeping enough? Is she sleeping too much? What’s this weird rash on her leg? Time for a shot. Slather your hands with sanitizer. Head home.
In the first year alone, you can have as many as seven appointments with a pediatrician so that they can monitor your child’s growth, check on their developmental milestones and give them the appropriate vaccinations. It’s exhausting, but it’s worth it to ensure you catch any problems early — and also for the reassurance you get as a parent if the doctor doesn’t find any. And while those vaccine shots aren’t pleasant, you feel a weight off your shoulders after your kids get another one, knowing you’re doing your best to protect against any number of harmful diseases and conditions.
But it now appears that President Donald Trump thinks you should schedule a few more of these sometimes harrowing appointments — because, why not?
In an all-caps post on his Truth Social account, Trump advised “Pregnant Women” to break up their child’s MMR shot (for measles, mumps and rubella) into “three totally separate shots (not mixed!),” get the chickenpox shot separately, delay taking the hepatitis B vaccine for several years and “take vaccine in 5 separate medical visits” (I’m not even sure what this means) along with some more of his weird rantings about Tylenol.
I’ll leave it to the public health professionals to explain why there’s no evidence for any of his bizarre assertions, the fact-checkers to demolish his evidence-free claims about vaccines and Tylenol and the current-and-former “Pregnant Women” to explain why he should take a hike when he tells them to go without the safest and most-recommended over-the-counter pain reliever for them and instead “tough it out.”
I’m just a dad with four kids who has seen my share of pediatrician appointments. And I’m going to venture a wild guess that Trump hasn’t spent much time in the pediatrician’s office with his kids, even though he has one more kid than me. (As he told Howard Stern in 2005 about having more kids with Melania: “I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”)
So I don’t take kindly to Trump’s apparent suggestion that you schedule what this social media post appears to suggest is a total of nine separate vaccinations with your pediatrician, on top of all the other appointments you’re already making — especially when there’s no valid medical reason for it. If you follow Trump’s logic, you’d need separate appointments for shots for rotavirus, diphtheria, polio and flu, too. The diphtheria shot is usually “mixed” with tetanus and acellular pertussis, so he might want you to break those up too. And some of these require multiple doses, which he presumably thinks should all be separate too.
It’s not just the inconvenience. If you are lower-income, more mornings off work, more potential parking fees and more copays can be a real hardship. The last of those is especially rich as an unnamed presidential advisers just claimed in a particularly atrocious Politico article that the real reason pediatricians want to vaccinate your children is that they are taking payola from the pharmaceutical companies. So, Trump is taking them on by — making me see them more? Breaking up the MMR vaccine alone would triple their revenue from copays!
Trump’s blasé attitude toward adding to your already stressful pediatric schedule reminded me of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who wrote in a memo viewed by The New York Times that the company’s employees should be in the office more, claiming that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity.” That may be true for Brin, but he can only work those kinds of hours because he is surrounded by assistants — the chauffeurs, nannies and personal chefs who help keep his life on track.
The rest of us nonbillionaires have no such luck. In Trump’s case, he probably thinks we should just leave that all to women. He addressed his advice to “Pregnant Women” after all.
This is one dad who’s here to say, no thanks. I’m going to keep taking my kids to the pediatrician on my schedule. We’re going to get the shots she thinks are necessary, when she recommends them. And we’ll take Tylenol according to the standard recommendations. I’ll keep taking my medical advice from the professionals, not an unhinged, all-caps social media post from an out-of-touch billionaire.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
