On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its web page on autism and vaccines to reflect the skepticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. To be clear up front: There is no good evidence that vaccines cause autism. “Studies over the past three decades consistently have not found any connection between vaccines and autism, including one from 2019 in Denmark that examined the country’s entire child population over a decade,” John Yoon explains in The Times.
The page retains the header “vaccines do not cause autism,” with an asterisk and a note that the statement is still there because of an “agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the C.D.C. website.” The updated page otherwise has all the hallmarks of Mr. Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again communication style. The movement is constantly adopting scientific-sounding language to promote untrue or far-fetched claims. The new page cherry-picks studies and uses MAHA’s favorite buzzwords, like “gold-standard science,” “mitochondrial disorders” and “neuroinflammation.”
Though the majority of Americans still believe childhood vaccines are safe and effective, Mr. Kennedy and other skeptics have done damage to the public trust. According to a Pew Research survey published earlier this week, “Amid calls from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to change how vaccines are tested, 44 percent of American parents say they’re extremely or very confident that childhood vaccines have been tested enough for safety.” Younger parents, Republicans and those with less education are all more likely to be skeptical of the childhood vaccine schedule’s safety and the general effectiveness of vaccines.
I fear that the erosion of trust in vaccines will continue. When I saw the news about the updated C.D.C. page on Wednesday morning I was reminded of a conversation I listened to over the summer between two moms of children with autism on the public health podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” (I was a guest on a later episode of the series.) One mom, who says she is not a scientific expert, says that it just “doesn’t sit right with me” when she hears that the science is settled and vaccines don’t cause autism.
The other mom, Alison Singer, who is a co-founder of the Autism Science Foundation, has a sobering response.
“The bigger issue is that we will never be able to do a study that shows that vaccines do not cause autism, because you cannot do that kind of study,” she says. “You cannot show that something does not cause something else.” Scientists are held back by having to say, “there’s no association or we don’t see a causal relationship in the data,” Ms. Singer says, and adds that she doesn’t think skeptics will believe the research we do have until “we can actually give them information about what does cause autism.”
Mr. Kennedy has a rhetorical advantage in that his deceptions can be definitive, while scientific honesty has to come with caveats. A doctor or a scientist saying that we’re not entirely sure but there is evidence that genetics plays a big role, for instance, is not going to satisfy people who are persuaded by bad information. A web page called “vaccines do not cause autism” filled with nonsense is just the latest example.
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