The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now echoing rhetoric long associated with the anti-vaccine movement. As of this week, the CDC is no longer rebutting the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.
Late Wednesday evening, the CDC dramatically changed its webpage on vaccines and autism. The page now claims that the federal government has not done enough to rule out a connection between vaccination and higher risk of autism—a stance long held by the current secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Understandably, many experts are aghast at the changes.
“This represents a new and devastating turn by the CDC, which has been effectively dismantled by the Secretary of HHS,” Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor emerita at Boston University and executive committee member of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, told Gizmodo.
Autism distortion
Though the CDC isn’t officially stating that vaccines are responsible for autism, the clunky changes made to its relevant webpage all but imply so. Whereas previously the CDC definitively declared that vaccines do not cause autism, based on the overall evidence, it now states: “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 supposedly uncover the causes of autism. Since then, all they’ve seen is a constant stream of misinformation from Kennedy and his version of HHS, with this latest CDC change being no exception.
David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania and fellow coalition member, notes many 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 don’t cause autism. Another dozen studies from other countries show the same,” Mandell told Gizmodo. “As any scientist knows, you can’t ‘prove’ the lack of association. You conduct related studies, over and over, until the bulk of evidence finds no association.”
RFK Jr.’s takeover
This is the only latest bit of junk science to have emerged during RFK Jr.’s reign over the country’s public health, of course.
He’s unilaterally dismissed outside advisors and installed people sympathetic to the anti-vaccination movement, pushed for the end of water fluoridation despite little evidence of its supposed harms, and is set to tie mass shootings to irrelevant factors like antidepressant use. Earlier this September, Kennedy and President Donald Trump also tried to officially blame autism on the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy—another link that Mandell, Tager-Flusberg, and many other health experts do not support.
While many scientists have continued to push back against Kennedy’s misleading claims, his takeover of the HHS and the CDC has reached 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 allies. In response, several senior CDC officials resigned in protest.
The CDC now states that the U.S. the Department of Health and Human Services will be conducting a “comprehensive” study into autism causes. Given what’s happened so far, there are fewer and fewer reasons to trust this long-standing health agency any longer.
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