Scientists and public health experts are sounding the alarm over plans by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to fund a study on whether there's a causal link between vaccines and the development of autism.
While US autism rates have increased in the last few decades, the scientific consensus is that this is likely due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors, along with lowered stigma around an autism diagnosis. Scientific analyses have repeatedly proven that vaccines do not cause autism (Vaccine 2014, DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2014.04.085). A large-scale Danish study specifically found that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which antivaccine activists often single out, does not cause autism (Ann. Intern. Med. 2019, DOI: 10.7326/M18-2101).
New HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has nonetheless repeatedly promoted the idea that autism is due to vaccines. He would not refute that notion in front of a Senate committee before his confirmation. While Kennedy recently wrote in an op-ed for Fox News that vaccination is a “crucial” tool to combat measles—an outbreak of which recently led to the death of an unvaccinated child in Texas—he also described it as a personal choice and emphasized the importance of nutrition and certain vitamins in preventing disease.
“While a measles outbreak rages in the United States and avian flu spreads unimpeded around the nation,” Yale University epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves says in an email, Kennedy is “wasting time and money on re-heating old anti-vaccine falsehoods.”
“We don't need a study on vaccines causing autism, because the research is clear that it doesn't,” he says in the email.
In a hearing before a Senate committee last week, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist and nominee for National Institutes of Health (NIH) director, said he did not “generally believe” there was a causal link between vaccines and autism based on his reading of the literature, but he suggested that antivaccine sentiment may be itself a reason for additional research.
“I would support an agenda, a broad scientific agenda based on data, to get an answer to [the rise in autism],” Bhattacharya said. “I'm convinced that we have good data on MMR and autism. But if other people don't agree with me and then they don't vaccinate their children, if I’m confirmed as NIH director, the one lever I have is to give them good data.”
Dave Weldon, President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the CDC, will appear before the same Senate committee later this week. A Florida doctor and former US congressman, Weldon has also promoted the disproven vaccine-autism link, and while in Congress, he introduced legislation that would have moved vaccine safety research out of the CDC and into another HHS office.
Republican and Democratic senators have expressed concerns that “the re-litigation of proven cures,” as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wrote in a statement after Kennedy's confirmation, is at odds with the Trump administration’s desire to make the government more efficient.
Federal agencies, including the CDC and the NIH, have limited resources, notes Elizabeth Jacobs, an epidemiologist, University of Arizona professor emerita, and member of the advocacy group Defend Public Health. “If, as they claim, the Trump administration wants to cut waste, fraud, and abuse of government funds, it is perplexing that they would seek to conduct an expensive study based on conspiracy theories rather than scientific facts,” Jacobs says in an email.