With ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s top health official, a federal webpage that previously presented substantial evidence refuting misinformation that vaccines cause autism was suddenly replaced on Wednesday with an anti-vaccine claim that promotes false links.
It’s a move that will certainly be celebrated by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine followers, but it will create more mistrust, fear, and confusion among the public, further undermine the nation’s falling vaccination rates, and ultimately lead to more disease, suffering, and deaths from vaccine-preventable infections, especially among children and the most vulnerable.
On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website “Autism and Vaccines,” the previous top “Key Points” accurately reported that: “Studies have shown that there is no association between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD).”
But, under Kennedy, the top “Key Point” is now a false statement: “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.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, did not respond to Ars Technica’s questions about the change, including why it thinks it is dismissing the substantial number of high-quality studies providing evidence that there is no link between life-saving vaccinations and neurodevelopmental disorders. It also did not address the question of whether CDC scientists were involved in the rewrite.
“We are updating CDC’s website to reflect the gold standard, evidence-based science,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon was quoted as saying in an email response.