Green Party candidate Jill Stein, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and user of “Dr” in her Twitter handle, recently told the Washington Post that while vaccines are “invaluable,” she still isn’t 100 percent sure about them.
The Post asked about her stance on vaccines after comments she made during a Reddit AMA in May. Stein replied:
I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication. Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.
The list of 17 people on the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee includes one industry representative, and one alternate industry rep. The rest work at universities or medical institutions.
But she also voiced some concerns about vaccine safety in general:
As a medical doctor, there was a time where I looked very closely at those issues, and not all those issues were completely resolved. There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don’t know if all of them have been addressed.
She is far from the first politician to share her questionable opinions on vaccines, but we honestly thought she was better than that.