FALSE: DO NOT SHARE
Claim:
The Chair of the US CDC said she wants to ‘get rid of white people’.
Answer:
False. A comment on vaccine acceptance differences is taken out of context.
FURTHER INFORMATION
A video on YouTube claims to show the Chair of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr Carole Baker talking, and implies that the CDC wants to get rid of all the white people in the US. The author says below the video, ‘the cdc is an arm of the united nations / vatican and are part of reducing the population and should be held accountable.’
This is false, this comment on preference of different communities to accept vaccines has been taken out of context. Dr Baker is talking about the resistance to vaccination from some communities in Houston Texas, comparing the white community with the immigrant hispanic community. The CDC’s National Immunisation Survey’s show that vaccination reluctance correlates with white college-educated females, with an NCBI study also correlating with higher incomes. Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Frankly, these Caucasian, suburban, educated parents believe they can Google the word vaccine and get as much information as anybody.”
This video is not recent, it appears to be from a panel event of childhood vaccines in 2016. Dr Baker has never been ‘the Chair of the CDC’, she chaired the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from 2009 to 2012. Dr. Baker is a pediatric infectious disease specialist, recently receiving an award in 2019 from The Sabin Vaccine Institute for her work. Baker has authored or co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, including a book on vaccine-preventable diseases.
Short clips of someone speaking can often be misleading, as they miss the context of the person’s full speech, and what other people said before and after it. We have written before about conspiracy theories that the coronavirus is a plot to reduce the global population, as well as concerns about the supposed dangers of vaccines – the anti-vaxxer movement in the US. There are long-standing concerns among the far-right in the US that the white majority is losing influence due to immigration into the country.
SOURCES
World Health Organization (WHO): Six common misconceptions about immunization
World Health Organization: Is there a vaccine, drug or treatment for Covid-19?
McGovern Medical School: Dr. Carol Baker Receives 2019 Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal
National Meningitis Association (NMA): Panel on Childhood Vaccine Successes in the US
Origins of Claim
FULL TEXT OF CLAIM
“I have the solution. Every study published in the last five years when you look at vaccine refusers, I’m not talking about hesitancy but refusers, we’ll just get rid of all the whites in the United States. Because Houston is the most diverse city in the entire United States. There are seven asian languages spoken in that city. I’ve been a minority for more than twenty years in the city of Houston. The majority is what we call ‘hispanic’, that is not a race or ethnicity that is a political designation. All of them are from central and South America, Mexico. Guess who wants to get vaccinated the most? Immigrants.”
