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
Nat Lash and Patricia Callahan at ProPublica:
To have any chance of keeping the [measles elimination] designation, the U.S. will need to make a strong case that measles didn’t spread endemically — from person to person in a continuous chain within the country for more than a year. If the Texas virus, for example, made its way across the Southwest to Utah and continued infecting people there, that would be a problem. But if cases in Utah were instead sparked by a patient who caught measles abroad, that would be a new chain, restarting the clock.
For clues, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing the full genetic code of measles viruses that infected patients. Last November, the CDC’s leader at the time said preliminary genomic analysis suggested the Utah cases were not directly linked to those in Texas. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica that the work was done by the state laboratories and the CDC is conducting a more comprehensive investigation.
ProPublica embarked on its own analysis, reviewing over 1,800 whole genome sequences, including those released as recently as last month, to compare the genetic fingerprints of measles viruses circulating in the U.S. and Canada. This showed that the measles virus still spreading in Utah as of this May is very closely related to the one that sickened Texans over a year ago.
ProPublica’s analysis isn’t a smoking gun that proves endemic spread. It’s impossible to tell from this information whether the virus spread from state to state or if it at some point left the country and was brought back by a sick traveler.
But given how similar the viruses are in the sequences ProPublica identified, it’s going to be difficult for the U.S. to prove measles isn’t endemic — “unless CDC has something up their sleeves,” said Dr. Alberto Severini, a retired molecular virologist and measles expert who spent two decades at Canada’s Public Health Agency.
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During prior U.S. outbreaks, health and political leaders, with unwavering language, urged Americans to vaccinate their children and assured them the shots were safe.
Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. haven’t followed that playbook. Both have fueled doubts about the safety of the MMR shot, which guards against measles, mumps and rubella.
Researchers around the world have found the vaccine does not cause autism. Nevertheless, at a press conference on autism last fall, Trump said he had heard for years that there was a problem with the combination vaccine and urged parents to insist on separate shots for their kids — even though standalone shots don’t exist in the U.S.
Kennedy has said the vaccine offers protection from measles, but he also has repeatedly made the shot sound scarier than the disease.
