Rand Paul Gets a Booster Vaccination

Senator Rand Paul, facing a backlash over his comments that cast doubt on whether he believes vaccines can pose a health risk to children, asserted on Tuesday that he believes vaccinations are indeed safe and that all parents should have their children inoculated.

To prove his point, Mr. Paul invited a reporter with him to watch him get his booster vaccination for Hepatitis A.

“It just annoys me that I’m being characterized as someone who’s against vaccines,” Mr. Paul said as he settled into a chair in an examination room in the Capitol physician’s office.

“There’s 400 headlines now that say ‘Paul says vaccines cause mental disorders,'” he added. “That’s not what I said. I said I’ve heard of people who’ve had vaccines and they see a temporal association and they believe that.”

Speaking on CNBC yesterday, Mr. Paul said he was aware of “many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

Mr. Paul clarified on Tuesday that he believed the science was definitive on the matter and that vaccines are not harmful. As a physician himself (he is an ophthalmologist), he said he was irked to see his views characterized otherwise. “I think the science is clear that if you compare the risks of taking a vaccine to the ill effects of taking a vaccine, it’s overwhelming.”

Mr. Paul got the booster on Tuesday because he was vaccinated last year before traveling to Guatemala.

The doctor’s visit was not without its own minor complications. Mr. Paul, who invited a reporter from The New York Times and had a member of his staff with a camera in tow, ran into resistance from the doctor’s staff, who were concerned that their presence in the office to document the vaccination was a privacy violation.

“It’s my privacy,” Mr. Paul assured the staff members.