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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
Polls show that many Americans either believe the myth or think it could be true.
Trump has spread this myth and withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization.
Now his administration is actively defending disinformation.
Dr. Benjamin Mazer at NYT writes about RFK Jr's war on science.
Take the false idea that vaccines cause autism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once plainly declared that they didn’t. Mr. Kennedy instructed the agency to take a different position: “The rise in autism prevalence since the 1980s correlates with the rise in the number of vaccines given to infants,” the C.D.C.’s website has been updated to read.
This sort of claim is typical of the anti-vaccine community. A nearly identical statement appears on the website of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Mr. Kennedy was formerly a part of. It isn’t true: Studies have shown that neither the number of active ingredients nor the amount of additives in vaccines corresponds to an increased rate of autism. But it sounds faintly data-driven and taps into a widely held belief that society has become overmedicalized.
Vaccine critics have won converts by branding their opposition to proven public health interventions as advocacy for individual liberty. “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” Mr. Kennedy wrote last March in response to the country’s measles outbreak. The C.D.C.’s acting director, Jim O’Neill, has followed the health secretary’s lead. In December he refused to endorse universal vaccination as a solution to the measles outbreaks, only going so far as to issue a vague recommendation for parents to “consult with their health care providers about vaccination options.”
Most parents, for the time being, seem to trust their doctor’s advice. Childhood immunization rates remain relatively high in the United States. But it has taken only a slight decline in vaccine confidence to set off the disease outbreaks we are seeing. It is easier for anti-vaccine groups to chip away at public trust than it is for the medical community to rebuild it.
At The Atlantic, Katherine J. Weu writes of the tendency to shrug off outbreaks of measles.
Measles was never inconsequential, though. Even a case that is initially “mild” can wipe out defenses that people have built up to other diseases—a kind of “immune amnesia” that can leave them more vulnerable to infection for months or years. Painful ear infections and prolonged bouts of diarrhea can accompany close to a tenth of measles cases. Some 5 percent of infections result in pneumonia that can eventually turn fatal; rarely, measles can also leave children deaf or blind. The disease also tends to hit undernourished, immunocompromised, and pregnant people particularly hard, and many of the severest cases tend to occur in the youngest children. This year, the U.S. has clocked more than 1,900 measles infections—the most the country has documented since 1992—and 11 percent have resulted in hospitalizations. Three people have died, two of them children.
In the prescient 2011 movie Contagion, major airports -- Hong Kong (HKG), Chicago O'Hare (ORD), and Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) -- serve as key points for Patient Zero (Gwneth Paltrow) to spead a deadly fictional virus around the world.
