Rand Paul Is Longtime Supporter Of Doctors’ Group That Pushes Crackpot Theories


In a normal world, any ambitions Rand Paul may have had of running for president should have ended on Monday, when he declared that parents should be able to opt out of having their kids vaccinated. The furor was such that Paul was forced to state that he himself believes vaccines aren’t harmful. However, The New York Times has learned that by all rights, Paul should have never been in the spotlight in the first place. It turns out that Kentucky’s junior senator is a longtime supporter of a medical association that actively supports personal exemptions from inoculation requirements. That same group has also pushed a number of other things that make that pseudoscientific idea sound sane by comparison.

Rand Paul at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Rand Paul at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

For over two decades, Paul was a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a group of over 3,000 dues-paying medical professionals based in Tucson. His father, former congressman Ron Paul, is a longtime member. AAPS shares the Pauls’ rock-ribbed libertarianism. For most of its seven-decade history, it has strongly opposed government intervention in medical practice. According to Arthur Caplan, a medical ethics expert at New York University, AAPS members are essentially “libertarians in white coats.” It should come as no surprise that AAPS was one of the strongest opponents of Obamacare. It also actively fought Bill Clinton’s efforts to reform the health care system two decades earlier.

When Paul was ramping up his Senate campaign in 2009, he spoke at AAPS’ annual meeting in Nashville and stated proudly that he had been a member since at least 1990. While on the campaign trail, he openly touted AAPS’ role in fighting both Obamacare and Clinton’s health care reform as part of its larger tradition of fighting government intervention in health care. According to AAPS executive director Jane Orient, Paul’s membership lapsed sometime between 2010 and 2011.

While policy disagreements are all well and good, there are a number of occasions where AAPS has apparently forgotten that you aren’t entitled to your own facts. When Paul said that parents ought to have the option to choose whether to vaccinate their kids, he was largely echoing sentiments expressed by Orient, who openly states that the risks of being vaccinated aren’t something you can “dismiss out of hand,” and therefore the science behind those risks deserves more study.

AAPS has been helping lead the anti-vaxxer charge for some time. In 2003, its journal, The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS), published an article claiming a link between heart disease and certain vaccines. That article was so badly flawed that it drew public rebukes from the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Pediatrics.

Apparently AAPS didn’t get the message, because in 2004 it published an article calling for further study of the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. This second article was published only a few months after UK investigative journalist Brian Deer revealed that Andrew Wakefield’s now-infamous study into the links between MMR and autism had serious ethical flaws. It turned out that lawyers looking to sue vaccine manufacturers were picking up the tab for Wakefield’s study–leading the study’s publisher, The Lancet, to declare that Wakefield’s study should have never been published. It’s hard to believe that this revelation had gone unnoticed at AAPS. As we know by now, Wakefield’s study was ultimately exposed as a complete fraud, resulting in its full retraction in 2010 and Wakefield being banned from ever practicing as a doctor again. However, unless I missed something, this article has not been retracted.

As sketchy as those articles sound, some of the articles published in JPandS are so far off the mark that it’s hard to understand how any self-respecting doctor would associate himself with AAPS. For instance, in 2003, it published a piece of pro-life agitprop that argued the link between abortion and breast cancer had been ignored for political reasons. Along similar lines, a 2005 article claimed numerous studies proved there was indeed a link between abortion and greater risk of breast cancer. Nearly all mainstream medical associations agree that there is no such link.


A 2005 article argued that 7,000 new leprosy cases over a three-year period were directly linked to an influx of undocumented immigrants. It turned out that those 7,000 cases had cropped up over 30 years, not three. This article has yet to be retracted, despite being debunked by NPR, 60 Minutes, and the Old Grey Lady. Small wonder that Quackwatch deems JPandS to be “fundamentally flawed” and Chemical & Engineering News describes it as a “purveyor of utter nonsense.”

One of Paul’s spokesmen, Brian Darling, said that just because Paul was a member of AAPS, it can’t be assumed that he supports its entire agenda. That is very true. However, why would Paul continue to align himself with a group that doesn’t retract articles even after they have been exposed as quackery? At the very least, it doesn’t say a whole lot about his professional judgment.

 

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.