Kentucky senator Rand Paul backpedalled Tuesday on comments he made about vaccines that quickly drew the condemnations of everyone from medical professionals to senior Republican party members to the formerly quarantined healthcare provider best remembered for calling out Paul’s potential rival for the White House.

Paul’s attempt at clarification landed as Republicans in Washington, from Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to House speaker John Boehner to the dozen or so members of the prospective 2016 presidential field scrambled to describe their views on vaccination.

Following controversial comments by New Jersey governor Chris Christie regarding a measles outbreak spreading across the US, Paul set off another cascade of criticism when he told CNBC on Monday that vaccinations could lead to “profound mental disorders” and that parents “should have some input”.

In his follow-up statement, Paul sought to make a distinction between correlation and causation – the kind of science-minded distinction that some of his critics saw him as abandoning.

“I did not say vaccines caused disorders, just that they were temporally related – I did not allege causation,” Paul said in a statement. “I support vaccines, I receive them myself and I had all of my children vaccinated. In fact today, I received the booster shot for the vaccines I got when I went to Guatemala last year.”

The senator added a tweet for good measure:

Ironic: Today I am getting my booster vaccine. Wonder how the liberal media will misreport this? pic.twitter.com/1vSqwfBp5u — Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) February 3, 2015

The explanation attempt came after Paul’s initial remarks were condemned by medical experts and contradicted by top members of Paul’s own party – and not just because the senator “shushed” his interviewer.

Boehner dismissed Paul’s comments in a reply to reporters on Tuesday: “I don’t know if we need another law, but I do believe all children ought to be vaccinated,” Boehner said.



Kaci Hickox, the nurse who found herself in the middle of a political firestorm last year after she was quarantined upon her return from west Africa despite never contracting Ebola, joined the chorus of critics on Tuesday.

“I am very disappointed with Rand Paul’s statements,” Hickox told the Guardian in a phone interview. “I know he’s a physician, but the science is very clear, and I hope that he and other leaders consider the different sides of an issue before making statements about vaccines that are unfounded in science.

“I wouldn’t trust anyone in a leadership position who wasn’t following the science,” she added when asked about comments about vaccinations this week from other potential candidates.

Governor Christie, whose Ebola policy led to a mandatory 21-day quarantine for Hickox against her will, kicked off the most recent public health tempest during a trip to London by saying that in setting vaccinations policy, the government must strike a “balance” between public health and parental discretion.

In an immediate attempt to squash the criticism, a Christie spokesman issued a follow-up statement, saying: “With a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”

Rand Paul, disruptive political idealist

Longtime observers of Paul’s political career – and his record on issues from climate change to the handling of Ebola cases – saw the same Paul they have always known: more faithful to libertarian principles than to science. On the vaccines issue, however, Paul may have arrived at a juncture where his political philosophy loses its traction on public policy – and potentially limits his appeal to a broader constituency.

“The meta-message that he’s sending is definitely libertarian and directed at this base, which, unlike most politicians, I think he’s consciously trying to expand,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. “If he can find a way to say something that his base both subscribes to, and general listeners can say, ‘Yes, well, I agree with that’ – that has the gradual effect of expanding the base.

“He does seem to be a skeptic of science in more than one regard.”

Paul’s career, from the time he was a practicing ophthalmologist in Kentucky, has always been marked by disruptive political idealism. An objection to the certification policies of the American Board of Ophthalmology led Paul to form his own certification system. He has used his medical background to summon political authority, as when he criticized the Obama administration’s handling of Ebola patients in the United States last fall.

Warning that the disease was easier to catch than Aids and suggesting that medical officials were mishandling the outbreak, Paul said of White House officials: “You start to wonder about a basic level of competence.” Ultimately, the Ebola protection measures proved sufficient. But Paul gave voice to the same authority he seeks on other issues, including man-made climate change.

Paul describes the science behind man-made climate change as inconclusive. “Somebody tell me what 100 years’ data is in an Earth that is 4.6 billion years old?” he said last spring in a conversation with former presidential adviser David Axelrod. “My guess is that the conclusions you make from that are not conclusive.”

Paul has been similarly slow to heed scientific warnings of dangers to his constituents from pollution due to coal-mining practices such as mountaintop removal, said Thom Kay of the pro-environment nonprofit group Appalachian Voices.

“He’s really shown no sign that he cares about any of the science that says how bad mountaintop-removal coal mining is for water quality,” Kay said. “It’s the sort of thinking that I think he takes to climate change.”

Kay said that Paul had not sought ways to move the costs associated with environmentally harmful mining away from residential communities and back to coal companies.

“It’s against his political beliefs to shift those costs back to a company, and because of that, it seems really difficult for him even to admit that carbon dioxide is real pollution, or that dumping coal-mining waste into streams is going to pollute the streams,” Kay said. “The science is really clear on it … But instead of recognizing any of that, he sort of ignores it. More so than denies it.”

Cross, of the University of Kentucky, said Paul was generally good at speaking to multiple audiences.

“He has this rhetorical trope of phrasing things in a way that it sounds to the people out there on the fringe that he’s agreeing with them,” said Cross. “But if you really parse his statements, he’s leaving himself room for fact-based logical dialogue. When he says something like, ‘there has to be a role for parents’ – well, most people can agree with that.”

Measles cases in 14 states have been tied to an initial case in

December at Disneyland theme park in southern California. Confirmed

cases include five Disney employees. The Centers for Disease Control

counted 102 measles cases total in January, a year after the worst

outbreak of measles since its elimination was documented in the United

States in 2000, with 644 cases recorded in 27 states in 2014.

“The stakes are high and this is a disease that we’re seeing,” Hickox told the Guardian. “The current outbreak is over 100, but those numbers will probably continue to grow because of the infectiousness of measles.”

Another prominent doctor turned political figure who is expected to seek the Republican nomination in 2016, Ben Carson, also injected himself into the measles debate on Tuesday.

“Although I strongly believe in individual rights and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit, I also recognize that public health and public safety are extremely important in our society,” Carson said in a statement.

At a hearing on the underwhelming flu vaccine before the House energy and commerce subcommittee, one congressman read part of Paul’s interview aloud and asked the four scientists before him what they thought.

The senator’s comments were not backed up by science, the witnesses all said.