In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion. The Monday White House news conference with RFK Jr. was a firehose of lies.
In late May, when the Trump administration issued a call for new research investigating the causes of autism, many scientists feared that anti-vaccine politics would decide which projects received funding.
The call for proposals seemingly gave health officials greater control than usual over the vetting process. Researchers had only weeks to propose studies.
And with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spreading the debunked theory that vaccines caused autism, potential applicants worried openly that the Trump administration might bless only those research projects that would prop up its favored conclusions.
So scientists were cautiously optimistic this week to find that the 13 projects chosen to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health were nothing of the sort.
The projects, which were awarded a combined $50 million, drew on diverse sets of patient data. They were grounded in decades of credible autism science. And they planned to examine how strong genetic explanations for the disease interacted with environmental influences to determine someone’s risk of developing autism.
They represented, in short, the very opposite approach to one that came into focus this week in an explosive news briefing at the White House: unproven claims that Tylenol caused autism, along with a barrage of disproved theories that childhood vaccines were dangerous and had driven up rates of the disease, too.
“We’re very enthusiastic and very optimistic that these projects will lead to important answers, no matter what question they’re looking at,” said Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation.
