RFK Jr's Global Disinformation Virus

 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.

Hannah Harris Green at The Guardian:

Measles vaccination in the UK has fallen especially dramatically, with only 84% of five-year-olds receiving both recommended doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as of 2024. The UK is also “ground zero”, for vaccine hesitancy, according to Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. Andrew Wakefield, a former physician, was based in the UK when he linked the MMR vaccine to autism in a 1998 Lancet study that has since been retracted. He subsequently lost his medical credentials. This is the second time the UK has lost its measles elimination status in less than a decade.

Even though it’s been more than 15 years since Wakefield’s study was retracted, the idea that vaccines and autism are linked is gaining new traction around the world, with the help of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary.

“The rhetoric that happens in the United States spills over across borders to other countries,” Nuzzo said, “We live in a global ecosystem, so when they hear, well, [the vaccine is] not good enough for the Americans, maybe it’s not good for us either.”

Kennedy is known for his work with the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which continues to promote Wakefield’s debunked talking points about vaccines and autism.

Organizations like Children’s Health Defense and influencers who promote their rhetoric often bill themselves as activists, but Nuzzo is quick to point out that there is an industry with a profit motive behind their work. A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the “Anti-Vaxx industry” brings in at least $36m a year. Before becoming health secretary, in 2024, Kennedy himself received millions of dollars in combined income from Children’s Health Defense and various law firms that go after vaccine manufacturers.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the US is now also on the brink of losing its measles elimination status. Measles often spreads through international transmission, and the two nations that border the US, Canada and Mexico, have also seen a rise in measles outbreaks. Canada lost its elimination.

Antivaxxers Making Money

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.

Antivaxxers have found lots of ways to make money from their movement.

Michelle R. Smith and Laura Ungar at AP:

Many of the people involved in groups pushing anti-science bills have built lucrative careers on their stance and benefited from the millions of dollars that flow through the movement.

One of Bigtree’s companies was paid $350,000 working on Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 2023 and 2024. A second was paid $184,000 from another Kennedy-affiliated group, the MAHA Alliance, from October to December of last year. In 2023, another anti-vaccine group he leads, the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, paid him $234,000.

After Kennedy was picked as health secretary, Kennedy gave the MAHA trademark to a company managed by Bigtree. Kennedy’s ethics disclosure said he transferred ownership for “no compensation” after making $100,000 in licensing fees from it in the few months he had the trademark.

In an ICAN video on Facebook in August, Bigtree celebrated the group’s successful lawsuit to compel Mississippi to allow religious exemptions from vaccines. Then he said they would “double down” on efforts to change the law in other states where religious exemptions aren’t allowed. Bigtree asked supporters to help by buying a brick for as much as $300 to pave a terrace at ICAN’s offices, where he works.

At The Times, Megan Agnew reports on Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent article started it all.  After losing his British medical license, he moved to Texas and made a bundle of money.   

Wakefield thrived in America, speaking at conferences and heralded as a martyr by mothers of autistic children who believed the disorder was caused by a vaccination. He was the father of the modern conspiracy theory. Crowds cheered, fans sobbed, people called him their “Jesus Christ”. It is from these Texan-born groups that Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s health secretary, was introduced to the same doctrine. Kennedy said in 2019 that Wakefield was “among the most unjustly vilified figures of modern history”.

Today, Wakefield is back on the conference circuit, speaking at events in the UK this month and Austin in November for which he is titled “Dr Andy Wakefield”, despite the fact he is barred from practising.

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He has restyled himself as a filmmaker, releasing anti-vaccine propaganda movies, has a multi-million dollar home and a polished reputation. This is the reinvention of Britain’s most infamous fraudulent doctor.

On Saturday night, Wakefield hailed “a revolution in America” over vaccine policy while making a rare public appearance in the UK. He was speaking at an all-day conference at a hotel in York, and told the audience — who had paid up to £150 to see him — of his excitement over Kennedy’s appointment as US health secretary.

Peter Hotez, a researcher of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said: “Wakefield’s paper was version 1.0 of the antivax movement; before him there wasn’t a link between autism and vaccines. Texas has since become an epicentre of this political movement.”

Measles Update

This month marks the 20th anniversary of  RFK Jr.'s infamous article "Deadly Immunity," which spread the lie that vaccines cause autism.    He is now HHS secretary and reaping the whirlwind of his vile dishonesty.

Tim Henderson at Statelline:

Measles cases have surpassed a recent 2019 record to reach the highest level since 1992, with at least 1,289 cases reported in 39 states.

The milestone comes as health officials are increasingly alarmed by vaccine skepticism gaining a voice in the Trump Administration’s Health and Human Services Administration under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Pediatricians and public health associations filed a federal lawsuit this week challenging a May directive by Kennedy, claiming it “creates barriers” to vaccination for pregnant women and young children.
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The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday that there were 1,288 cases in 38 states, surpassing the 2019 level of 1,274. South Carolina later reported its own first case of the year, an unvaccinated international traveler in the northwestern Upstate area of the state.

Wyoming reported its first measles case since 2010 on July 1, an unvaccinated child in Natrona County.

Other states recently joining the list: North Carolina reported its first case of the year June 24, in a child visiting Forsyth and Guilford counties from another country. And Oregon reported a case the same day for a person identified only as an unvaccinated international traveler sickened in June after returning to the Portland area.

From the lawsuit:

The Wakefield study ignited a wave of vaccine hesitancy and skepticism in the 21st century. In 2005, before he became Secretary, Mr. Kennedy published an article falsely linking thimerosal to autism40 Like Wakefield’s article, Mr. Kennedy’s article contained numerous errors and was retracted.

Because of his name and profile, Mr. Kennedy has been instrumental in increasing the levels of vaccine hesitancy and skepticism in this country. Before he was Secretary, Mr. Kennedy made opposing vaccines a central part of his public identity. During his confirmation hearing, Congress recognized Mr. Kennedy’s outsized role in creating vaccine hesitancy and skepticism in this country as evidenced by the Committee’s following question to him: “You advocate for medical practices that blatantly contradict scientific consensus and spread lifethreatening information. Will you commit to decision-making based on credible, peer-reviewed research, and acknowledge the danger of promoting unfounded theories?” Although Mr. Kennedy answered “yes” to this question,42 his actions as Secretary belie his answer

RFK in Power?

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.

 Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism.  He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen."

He recently ran for president as an independent and has now endorsed Trump.  If Trump wins, RFK could get a major job in the administration.

Matt Field at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

It’s unclear exactly what position Kennedy would fill should Trump return to the White House, but some experts worry about putting Kennedy anywhere near the vaccine policymaking machinery of federal health agencies, two of the most important parts of which being the advisory committees to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) makes recommendations on whether to approve vaccines, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends vaccines for use, determinations that states rely on to set their own school vaccine requirements.

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Dorit Reiss, who researches vaccine law and policy at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco, worries about Kennedy having the ability to shape how government data is presented. She fears he will use data access to create flawed and biased reports on vaccines, ones that will come with the imprimatur of the federal government. “He believes what he wants to believe, and he doesn’t care about the data,” she said.

Reiss thinks Kennedy would face obstacles if he were put in a position to influence federal vaccine policy. States rely on the CDC advisory committee as the basis for their own vaccine policies because they consider it to produce expert advice. In theory, an empowered Kennedy might be able to influence who is on that committee, but if that leads to a less credible committee, states will simply ignore its recommendations. Fill the committee with people like discredited former UK doctor Andrew Wakefield, who produced a now retracted study that linked vaccines to autism, and it will not have the prestige it currently enjoys, Reiss said.

But the committee does have a few direct levers to pull on vaccines, Reiss said. The CDC advisory committee also makes recommendations, that if approved by the CDC director, determine which vaccines insurers participating in the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace must cover. The committee also makes recommendations about which vaccines to provide under a CDC program to provide recommended vaccines to low-income children.

Dr. Hotez

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory. 

Hotez, P.J. A Journey in Science: Molecular vaccines for global child health in troubled times of anti-science. Mol Med 30, 37 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s10020-024-00786-y

{My] greatest challenge in the public square has been countering a growing and increasingly audacious antivaccine lobby and movement. My involvement accelerated after the birth of youngest daughter Rachel, when she was diagnosed with autism and intellectual disabilities. At the time I was a junior faculty member at Yale University School of Medicine, and Rachel was diagnosed at the renowned Yale Child Study Center. At that time Ann’s parents, Don and Marcia Frifield, made frequent trips from their home in New Jersey to help us with Rachel. When Rachel was still very young girl, a paper was published in the Lancet claiming to show that 12 children who received their measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine progressed to a gastrointestinal condition associated with nonspecific colitis and intestinal lymphoid hyperplasia followed by developmental regression and pervasive developmental disorder or autism (Wakefield et al. 1998). Despite multiple epidemiological studies showing that there is no link between MMR vaccine and autism (and a retraction of the Lancet paper), the claims linking autism and childhood vaccinations persisted, eventually alleging it was thimerosal preservative, or spacing vaccines close together, or aluminum in vaccines that triggered neurodevelopmental degeneration and autism (Hotez 2018).

As a pediatric vaccine scientist and a parent of a daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities I noticed there was a vacuum or absence of senior scientists or scientific organizations defending vaccines. In response I wrote Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, a book which placed me front and center in the public defense of vaccines (Fig. 10).

I found this new public role meaningful although it became daunting and even scary at times, as antivaccine activists directed their online attacks against me through intimidating emails and efforts to discredit my science or me personally on social media. I also began to be stalked at meetings where I was scheduled to speak, or eventually at my home. These threats accelerated even further during the COVID pandemic when the antivaccine movement was adopted by a major political party in the United States and I became a target from members of the U.S. Congress and other elected officials, as well as a major cable news network linked to far-right extremism. In a subsequent book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning (Johns Hopkins University Press), I reported how 200,000 Americans needlessly died because they refused a COVID vaccine during the delta and BA.1 omicron COVID waves in 2021–22 (Hotez 2023a). In this new book I detail why so many Americans refused vaccines and how they became victims of a predatory and politically motivated antivaccine disinformation campaign (Hotez 2023a). The backlash to The Deadly Rise of Anti-science book accelerated the public attacks against me online or on cable news channels from elected officials, including at least two U.S. Senators, some members of the U.S. Congress, and two U.S. Presidential candidates, as well as several Fox News anchors. Even though I point out that my intention is to save lives and not to judge individual political leanings, my highlighting the unnecessary deaths from vaccine refusal is viewed as a casus belli from the far right and those with a political agenda.

 

Fig. 10

Left: The author’s book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism (Johns Hopkins University Press); Right: A 2023 political cartoon from Dave Whamond

Antivaxxers, Conspiracy Theories, Christian Nationalists -- and RFK Jr.

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory.  T

A prominent champion is the infamous RFK,Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. he John Birch Society plugged one of his books. 

 David Corn and Dan Friedman at Mother Jones:

On March 23, Steve and Tracy Slepcevic hosted a fundraiser for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the San Diego area. Tickets started at $575, and those who paid $2,750 were to be treated to a “private sunset reception” before RFK Jr. would chat with the assembled and pose for photos. It was hardly surprising that the Slepcevics were supporting Kennedy, given that Tracy is a long-time anti-vaxxer prominent within the autism community. But the personal politics of the Slepcevics illuminate the weird currents propelling Kennedy’s White House bid, for the pair have hobnobbed with QAnoners, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and other pro-Trump extremists. Steve, who has a checkered past as a businessmen that includes an arrest (but not a conviction) for allegedly defrauding victims of Hurricane Katrina, was in the crowd of Trump devotees outside the Capitol on January 6.

Last year, Tracy Slepcevic published a book called Warrior Mom about her years raising a son with autism that she blames on routine childhood vaccines. The book was endorsed by Kennedy and championed by Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser for President Donald Trump who has become a QAnon-friendly Christian nationalist and a leader within the far-right patriots movement. The Kennedy campaign sells signed copies of the book for $150 a pop. Tracy has been an ally of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vax nonprofit that Kennedy ran before entering the 2024 contest. In November, she spoke at CHD’s annual conference in Savannah, Georgia, where she hawked her book and palled around with Kennedy, a longtime peddler of Covid and vaccine misinformation. On Facebook, she declared, “Had a great time at the CHD conference in Savannah with some amazing people…I’m so blessed to be on this journey with each and every one of them.” In promoting her book and activism, she has shared platforms with Stew Peters, a far-right anti-vaxxer who has been tied to QAnon advocacy and has spread (according to the ADL) antisemitic tropes, and with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced scientist who wrote a discredited paper linking autism to vaccines.

 SEE THE 2021 LINDELL WHITEBOARD.

Antivaxxers Push Infertility Myths

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory.  

Some kooks link vaccination to "The Great Replacement" theory, suggesting that they are part of a plot to reduce white populations.

Tara C. Smith and David H. Gorski have an article at Vaccine titled "Infertility: A common target of antivaccine misinformation campaigns." 

Abstract:

Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories about vaccines are key drivers of vaccine hesitancy. A repeated false claim about COVID-19 vaccines is that the vaccines cause female infertility. Dating back decades, various conspiracy theories have linked vaccination programs with infertility and thus harmed vaccination programs in Africa, Asia, and Central America, particularly against polio and tetanus. In the United States, Europe, and Australia, human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccines have been falsely blamed for infertility and primary ovarian insufficiency (POI). After distribution of COVID-19 vaccines began in December 2020, almost immediately there arose conspiracy theories claiming that these vaccines cause menstrual irregularities, miscarriages, and infertility, promoted by noted antivaccine activists Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Andrew Wakefield among others. Here we will explore the history of this antivaccine narrative, how it has been promulgated in the past and repurposed to COVID-19 vaccines, and strategies to counter it.

From the article:

In 2022, RFK Jr.’s antivaccine group Children’s Health Defense released a documentary entitled “Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda” [52], with Kennedy serving as executive producer. Co-producers included Mary Holland, a lawyer who has long promoted the false claims that vaccines cause autism and that HPV vaccines cause infertility, and Andrew Wakefield, the UK physician who has been one of the most famous antivaccine activists in the world since he published his now-retracted case series in The Lancet in 1998 that claimed to find an association between the MMR vaccine and autistic enterocolitis, arguably the main spark behind the late 20th century resurgence of antivaccine sentiment. Infertility has been characterized as a “docuganda”; i.e., a documentary propaganda [53], a genre which includes prior anti-vaccine films “The Greater Good” and Andrew Wakefield’s previous directorial effort, the 2016 film “VAXXED: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe”.

Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda is is largely an updated rehash of a 1990s-era disinformation campaign that spread fear about a push to prevent neonatal tetanus in developing countries by vaccinating young women, and one of the earliest antivaccine campaigns to use the Internet as a powerful tool to spread such fear. As part of this fear-based campaign, antivaccine advocates conflated ongoing clinical trials of an experimental antifertility vaccine, which conjugated a subunit of human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone with diphtheria or tetanus toxoid proteins, to ongoing tetanus immunization programs led by the World Health Organization [54]. Though there was no connection between the immunization program and the clinical trial, the confusion between the two led to distrust of the tetanus vaccines. Once such distrust spread, tetanus vaccines were tested for the presence of hCG. However, ordinary pregnancy tests were used, which were not appropriate to test for this hormone within vaccine vials, leading to false positive results and further misrepresentation of the outcome by groups opposed to the tetanus vaccine campaign. Vaccines tested by reputable laboratories did not find presence of the hormone [54].

52. A. Wakefield
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Children’s Health Defense Films, United States (2022)
Google Scholar

53. Jarry J. Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda Is Anti-Vaxx Sleight-of-Hand Propaganda (2022). McGill University Office for Science and Society. Accessed at https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/infertility-diabolical-agenda-anti-vaxx-sleight-hand-propaganda on November 14, 2023.
Google Scholar

54. J. Milstien, P.D. Griffin, J.-W. Lee
Damage to Immunization Programmes from Misinformation on Contraceptive Vaccines
Reprod Health Matters, 6 (1995), pp. 24-28

 http://www.autismpolicyblog.com/2024/01/antivaxxers-push-infertility-myths.html

 

Antivaxxers Gain Ground in State Legislatures

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Before his presidency, Trump pushed the idea, hard and repeatedly.

Unfortunately, other Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

Lauren Weber at WP:

A wave of lawmakers who oppose vaccine requirements are winning elections for state legislatures amid a national drop in childhood vaccination rates and a resurfacing of preventable deadly diseases.

The victories come as part of a political backlash to pandemic restrictions and the proliferation of misinformation about the safety of vaccines introduced to fight the coronavirus.

In Louisiana, 29 candidates endorsed by Stand for Health Freedom, a national group that works to defeat mandatory vaccinations, won in the state’s off-year elections this fall.

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Louisiana’s shift is a sign of the growing clout of the anti-vaccine movement in the nation’s statehouses as bills that once died in committee make it onto the legislative floor for a vote.

Since spring, Tennessee lawmakers dropped all vaccine requirements for home-schooled children. Iowa Republicans passed a bill eliminating the requirement that schools educate students about the HPV vaccine. And the Florida legislature passed a law preemptively barring school districts from requiring coronavirus vaccines, a move health advocates fear opens the door to further vaccine limitations.

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In Michigan, the normalization of anti-vaccine views is also unfolding. Eleven lawmakers recently honored discredited anti-vaccine activist and former physician Andrew Wakefield, who is responsible for the retracted research falsely linking autism to vaccines. Nine of those legislators were elected after the pandemic began, including Angela Rigas, a hairdresser ticketed for protesting pandemic mandates at the state capitol.

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At a November conference held by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Michigan legislative aide cheered Rigas and her colleagues for taking a stand.

Measles Coming Back

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

Michael Hiltzik at LAT:

Forecasting the future is difficult. But here’s an easy prediction: The anti-vaccination movement in the U.S. and globally is going to result in the deaths of more children.

This grim portent comes to us courtesy of UNICEF, which is reporting that 30,601 confirmed cases of measles have been reported in Europe and Central Asia this year through Dec. 5.

That’s up from 909 cases in those regions in 2022, or an increase of 3,266%.

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It doesn’t take a very large decline in vaccine coverage to spur a surge in disease incidence. Consider the record in Britain. Through 1997, about 91% of British schoolchildren had received the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine.

In 1998, the Lancet, a then-respected British medical journal, published a notorious article claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and by 2004 the vaccine uptake had fallen to 80%. Measles cases soon surged from an average of about 100 a year through 2005 to 1,280 in 2008 and 1,920 in 2012. By then the vaccination rate had begun to recover, but as of last year it was still below 90%.

That article, by the way, was fully retracted by the Lancet in 2010 and its principal author, Andrew Wakefield, stripped of his medical license. He has since surfaced in the U.S. as a star of the domestic anti-vaccine movement, rubbing shoulders with Kennedy and his gang.

Anna A. Minta and colleagues have an article at MMWR titled "Progress Toward Measles Elimination — Worldwide, 2000–2022" Abstract:

Measles is a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease that requires high population immunity for transmission to be interrupted. All six World Health Organization regions have committed to eliminating measles; however, no region has achieved and sustained measles elimination. This report describes measles elimination progress during 2000–2022. During 2000–2019, estimated coverage worldwide with the first dose of measles-containing vaccine (MCV) increased from 72% to 86%, then declined to 81% in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, representing the lowest coverage since 2008. In 2022, first-dose MCV coverage increased to 83%. Only one half (72) of 144 countries reporting measles cases achieved the measles surveillance indicator target of two or more discarded cases per 100,000 population in 2022. During 2021–2022, estimated measles cases increased 18%, from 7,802,000 to 9,232,300, and the number of countries experiencing large or disruptive outbreaks increased from 22 to 37. Estimated measles deaths increased 43% during 2021–2022, from 95,000 to 136,200. Nonetheless, an estimated 57 million measles deaths were averted by vaccination during 2000–2022. In 2022, measles vaccination coverage and global surveillance showed some recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic setbacks; however, coverage declined in low-income countries, and globally, years of suboptimal immunization coverage left millions of children unprotected. Urgent reversal of coverage setbacks experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic can be accomplished by renewing efforts to vaccinate all children with 2 MCV doses and strengthening surveillance, thereby preventing outbreaks and accelerating progress toward measles elimination.

Measles and the Unvaccinated

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

Miranda Nazzaro at The Hill:

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that more than 90 percent of the children infected in last year’s measles outbreak in Ohio were unvaccinated.

The report published Friday looked at the 85 total confirmed cases, all among children located in central Ohio, and found 94 percent of them did not receive the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. Additionally, 80 out of the 85 cases were in children under the age of 5, according to Columbus Public Health.

Helen Branswell at STAT: 

[The] reality of measles as a disease that strikes almost uniquely in childhood is changing. The shift is driven in part by the fact that the first wave of children whose parents shunned vaccination in the late 1990s and early 2000s — in response to a fallacious, since-retracted study in the Lancet that linked measles vaccine to autism — are now in young adulthood.

A recent report from the United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency suggested the growing pool of non-immune adults — known as susceptibles in the lexicon of epidemiology — could fuel future measles outbreaks.

There is also a growing body of adults in this country who have no immunity against measles, experts say. In fact, since the year 2000, about 40% of measles cases in the U.S. have been in adults, with about one-quarter in people aged 20 to 29.

Bogus Claim about Vaccines and Autism in Vietnam

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

 Long Nguyen at AFP:

A video circulating on social media claims vaccines brought to Vietnam by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation led to a massive increase in the number of autism patients in the country. This is false; research shows no link between vaccination and autism, and Vietnamese experts said growing awareness and changes to diagnosis criteria have contributed to more people being identified with the neurodevelopmental disorder.

"No autism in Vietnam before Bill Gates," says text over a video shared July 17, 2023 on Instagram.
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"There is no link between vaccination and autism in Vietnam or other countries," said Quyet Minh Nguyen, a psychiatrist at the Vietnam National Children's Hospital.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability. Scientists are still researching its causes, which may include genetic or other factors, according to Nguyen.

"Saying vaccination causes autism is unscientific," he told AFP.

The footage shared online includes a watermark that indicates it was cut from the controversial documentary "Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe."

The film was directed by Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor whose medical license was revoked after he falsified data in a 1998 paper linking autism to the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The Lancet retracted the study years later, but it continues to fuel misinformation.

Scientists have repeatedly quashed claims that autism and vaccination are connected (archived here)