Nonetheless, getting it right on that score won’t excuse his antivaccine sympathies. In 2019, Boyer introduced a bill that would restrict childhood vaccine coverage under the guise of “informed consent”, Which, of course, has nothing to do with informed– that is kind of the point here, and it’s a common antivaxx gambit. What Boyer’s bill attempted to do was to mandate that parents be told exactly which ingredientsand chemicals are in a vaccinebefore their children are inoculated– the purpose being not to make the parents better positioned to make informed decisions (unless you have a background in chemistry and medicine), but to mislead as many as possible into dropping vaccines by a variant of the toxins gambit and appeal to general chemophobia; there’s a reason why the bill didn’t mandate updated information about the science behind the vaccines.
Apparently Boyer himself was scared to learn from the CDC that some vaccines may contain contain phosphate, bovine serum, formaldehyde, fluoride, yeast extractsor human diploid fibroblast cell cultures (cultures of human fetal tissue), all of which might be scary-sounding to chemically illiterate people like Boyer (and yes: it’s both a toxins gambit and a “human fetal parts” gambit there). While emphasizing that he was “not necessarily opposed to vaccinations for children”, he refused to answer questions about whether he himself believed vaccines were harmful. Then he rattled off a list of anti-vaccine talking points, mostly in the “too many, too soon” genre but also, predictably, this: “I don’t know that most parents know that bovine extract or animal parts or fetus parts are in certain vaccines,” said Boyer. “And I just think, as a parent, we should know the answer to that.” That answer is “no”. There are no fetus parts in any vaccines, and there are no animal parts in vaccines.
Diagnosis: That this guy would come across as a voice of reason among his colleagues is telling. Good grief.
Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence