The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly revised a vaccine safety page on its website to introduce language that suggests uncertainty over whether vaccines cause autism, echoing ideas promoted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic.
Experts who spoke to Scientific American decried the changes as anti-science and potentially harmful. “This is a tragedy,” says University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.
The administration’s move rejects decades of evidence showing there is no link between vaccines and autism, he says, adding that the changed guidance poses a public health risk because it could discourage vaccine uptake.
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The website change “signals that truth carries no weight in the current and future discussions on vaccines,” and because of that, Osterholm says, “children will die.”
Previously, the CDC webpage cited decades of research showing that vaccines do not cause autism. The new version, which was apparently updated on Wednesday, states that the claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not evidence-based and that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Since 1998 researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving more than 5.6 million people that have investigated such claims and have found no link between autism and vaccines, said Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement. One 2019 study, for example, found no evidence of a tie between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in a group of more than 657,000 children.
“There is no link between vaccines and autism,” Kressly said. “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents.”
The CDC update also states that officials will start investigating early childhood vaccinations and autism.
“It will be hard for the public to trust anything the CDC has to say after this,” says Brian Lee, an epidemiologist at Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health.
The CDC did not immediately respond to Scientific American’s request for comment.