You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate, has alleged a sprawling profit-driven conspiracy. Pediatricians say the accusations are an attempt at intimidation.
Rachel examining a patient in Texas last month. Credit...Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times It was a bustling Monday morning at a little pediatrician’s office in central Texas. Children with rashes, fevers and runny noses cycled through exam rooms decorated with butterflies, planets and colorful maps.
The doctor, who had been treating kids in the community for 20 years, was delighted when a woman she had cared for as a child came in with her newborn. Until recently, she had planned to continue her practice for years to come. But this year, she has begun to reconsider amid the stress and legal costs of defending herself in a statewide investigation by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and Republican candidate for the U.S.
Senate, who has accused doctors, drug companies and insurers of conspiring to push parents into vaccinating children. She agreed to be interviewed and allowed a reporter to visit her practice but asked to be identified by her middle name, Rachel, to protect her from retaliation. Rachel received a letter from the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division demanding her vaccine purchase records over the past 10 years.
The letter also requested her practice’s vaccine policy, and said that it would not be sufficient to cite the childhood vaccine schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A hepatitis B vaccine dose seen on a tray at Dr. Rachel’s office last month.
Credit...Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times Mr. Paxton has also implicated the nation’s largest organization of pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, in the alleged conspiracy over the workaday task of protecting children from polio, measles, meningitis and more than a dozen other dangerous and sometimes life-threatening diseases. Kennedy into the top health position in the federal government.
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