We’ve caught Dr. Drew Pinsky spreading COVID misinformation a couple times in the ConWeb — he falsely claimed that COVID was just like the flu (he did eventually walk that back), and he grossly misrepresented a study on cardiac risks from COVID vaccines. Now that Donald Trump has won the election, Pinsky is apparently feeling like it’s cool again to spread medical misinformation. Michael Katz wrote in a Nov. 8 Newsmax article:
Famed television personality Dr. Drew Pinsky told Newsmax on Friday that after Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday, it is now safe for people to ask major questions regarding health issues in the U.S. without worrying about being canceled.
In teaming with former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump made making America healthy again a prime part of his agenda in the latter part of his campaign. Kennedy is expected to play a major role in health advocacy in Trump’s administration.
“I want you to think about the fact that until a couple of days ago, we couldn’t ask the question, Why are autism rates so high in this country?” Pinsky told “Finnerty.” “Why is chronic disease encumbering virtually everybody in the land? Why? What is going on?
“If you asked that question, you were labeled as a conspiracy theorist because there was a remote possibility that perhaps vaccines had something to do with the autism or not. It should be priority-one to ask these questions regardless of what we think the causes might be. We must look into this. … Could anything more be more important than attending to the health of this country? It is the most important thing.
“And [Kennedy’s] point has always been that we should be testing vaccines the way we test all other medications, that we allow pharmaceutical companies to give to people like me so we can put in their body. We don’t do that with vaccines. And on the food side, we allow the companies that used to bring us tobacco, the very same marketers, lobbyists, and scientists, have moved over to food to make food addictive. What do we imagine is going to happen when we allow that to happen?”
In fact, the purported link between vaccines and autism has been completely discredited, and vaccines are tested for safety like other medications — in fact, it’s greater than for many medicines.
That’s not the only medically dubious thing Pinsky has said of late. In June, he appeared on Newsmax to make an armchair diagnosis of President Biden as showing signs of Parkinson’s disease, though he did concede that “I don’t treat him. I don’t know him. I’ve not actually even met him.”