The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now echoing rhetoric long associated with the anti-vaccination movement. As of this week, the CDC is no longer refuting the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.
Late Wednesday evening, the CDC dramatically changed its webpage on vaccines and autism. Page now claims that the federal government has not done enough to disprove the link between vaccinations and a higher risk of autism – a stance long held by the current Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Understandably, many experts are surprised by the changes.
“This represents a new and devastating turn by the CDC, which has been effectively overruled by the secretary of HHS,” Helen Tager-Flusberg, professor emerita at Boston University and member of the executive committee of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, told Gizmodo.
autism disorder
Although the CDC is not officially saying that vaccines cause autism, strange changes to its relevant webpage seem to suggest so. Whereas previously the CDC had definitively declared, based on the overall evidence, that vaccines do not cause autism, it now says: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
Tager-Flusberg and others founded the Coalition of Autism Scientists earlier this April in response to RFK Jr.’s initial announcement that he would reportedly uncover the causes of autism. Since then, they have seen a steady flow of misinformation from Kennedy and his version of HHS, with this latest transformation of the CDC being no exception.
David Mandel, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania and fellow coalition member, says several studies have failed to find any such link between autism and vaccines or specific vaccine ingredients, including those that relied on data collected by the CDC.
“15 studies using the CDC’s own data show that vaccines do not cause autism. Another dozen studies from other countries show the same,” Mandel told Gizmodo. “As any scientist knows, you can’t ‘prove’ the lack of association. You do relevant studies over and over again until the majority of the evidence shows there is no association.”
RFK Jr. takeover
Of course, this is just the latest piece of junk science to emerge during RFK Jr.’s reign over the nation’s public health.
He has unilaterally fired outside consultants and hired people sympathetic to the anti-vaccination movement, pushed to end water fluoridation despite little evidence of its alleged harms, and is willing to link mass shootings to irrelevant factors like antidepressant use. Earlier this September, Kennedy and President Donald Trump also tried to officially blame autism on acetaminophen use during pregnancy — another link that Mandel, Tager-Flusberg and many other health experts do not support.
While many scientists continue to protest Kennedy’s misleading claims, his capture of HHS and CDC has come full circle. Earlier this summer, RFK Jr. fired former CDC Director Susan Monarez after she reportedly refused to sign off on vaccine-related changes recommended by RFK Jr.’s associates. In response, several senior CDC officials resigned in protest.
The CDC now says the US Department of Health and Human Services will conduct a “comprehensive” study of the causes of autism. Given what has happened so far, there are fewer and fewer reasons to trust this long-standing health agency.