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 was a firehose of lies.
Kennedy claimed that 40-70 percent of autism moms thought that vaccines had injured their children. The lower range figure apparently comes from a decades-old grab sample of just 41 respondents. The study did not purport to be a measure of public opinion but was rather exploratory research to identify areas for future investigation. See:
Mercer L, Creighton S, Holden JJ, Lewis ME. Parental perspectives on the causes of an autism spectrum disorder in their children. J Genet Couns. 2006 Feb;15(1):41-50. doi: 10.1007/s10897-005-9002-7. PMID: 16547798.More than a dozen high-quality studies over decades have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism. However, Kennedy has held fast to this claim.
"We have two-and-a-half decades of rigorous, large-scale studies showing that whether you got vaccinated, the timing of your vaccine, which vaccines you got, or what preservatives were in those vaccines, they don't cause autism," [Dr. David] Mandell said. "To relitigate, that means putting resources towards studies that could be put towards looking at treatments or looking at other more legitimate environmental causes or looking at services and supports and things that might improve quality of life."
Kennedy also said on Monday that between 40% and 70% of mothers with autistic children believe their child "was injured by a vaccine" and said it was important to listen to those mothers "instead of gaslighting them."
Mandell said it's unclear where Kennedy obtained his figures. Mandell added that, if the numbers are true, he believes it's due to unsubstantiated claims that have been propagated.
"The reason [mothers] think that is because people in authority, in positions of authority, have been telling them that, and they are using fake data to promulgate this false hypothesis," he said. "When people started telling us that [vaccines cause autism] in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we did believe that, and we put lots of resources into studying it, and we did those studies and found that there was no causal link. So yes, we should lay this to rest."
