Wiki-Leaks, Autism, and the Hillary Clinton Campaign…
By Kent Heckenlively, JD
The Bolen Report
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[snip]

Thanks to Julian Assange and Wiki-Leaks, you can read what the Hillary Clinton campaign thinks about the vaccine issue. It’s not pretty. And it’s not that encouraging about the other side as well.

This, almost all below, is an excerpt from my new book, INOCULATED: How Science Lost its Soul in Autism, which will be released on November 9, 2016. You can preorder it from Amazon by typing in my name and the title.

“And just when the Presidential election of 2016 didn’t seem it could get any wilder, it did. Julian Assange of Wikileaks began releasing unflattering emails from Hillary’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and one of them concerned autism.

An email from February 3 of 2015 seemed to have revolved around the discussion prior to Hillary’s tweet of February 2, 2015 in which she compared the safety of vaccines to the roundness of the Earth and the blueness of the sky. The email and the response in its entirety is reproduced below:

From: Nick Merrill

Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 10:13 PM

To: Mandy Grunwald; John Anzalone; Jim Margolis; Robby Mook; Huma Abedin; Joel Benson; John Podesta; Phillip Reines; Cheryl Mills; Kristina Schake; Jennifer Palmieri

Cc: Ethan Gelber; Dan Schwerin

Subject: WaPo: Vaccine debate presents a political minefield – as Hillary Clinton can attest Ethan, Dan and I spent more time than anyone would have liked dealing with this vaccine silliness today, namely the focus that the right was pushing on a questionnaire HRC and Obama filled out in ’08 where they each similarly hedged on an answer about the link between autism and vaccinations, leaving the door open to the possibility.

Below is the most significant piece that was filed so I wanted to flag it. What stood out about today is that the reporters I talked to were less focused on the perception of a flip flop so much as that their takeaway from the tweet last night was that she’s not worried about catering to every constituency so much as being authentic and constructive, or as Dan called it, the Happy Warrior.

As to this piece, thanks largely to Ethan’s research which we conveyed to Karen, [Karen Tumulty, Washington Post] this gives a pretty straight accounting of HRC on the topic.

Vaccine debate presents a political minefield – as Hillary Clinton can attest…

The latest Hillary Rodham Clinton sounded straightforward enough:

“The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork.”

But the issue of vaccinations has long been politically and emotionally fraught – involving not just public health but also the proper role of government, the prerogatives of parents and medical riddles that have yet to be solved.

Probably no one in public life today has felt those crosscurrents more strongly than the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination. On the issue of vaccination over the past two decades, Clinton has repeatedly found herself on the front lines of advocacy and criticism.