Vaccines don't cause autism. What does?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false claims linking autism to vaccinations are receiving new scrutiny now that President-elect Donald Trump has picked him to lead HHS.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false claims linking autism to childhood vaccinations are receiving new scrutiny now that President-elect Donald Trump has selected him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a sprawling agency with a budget of $1.7 trillion that oversees research into both autism and vaccines.

The myth that autism is caused by childhood vaccines — proposed in 1998 by a British doctor who was later banned from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom — has been thoroughly debunked. Hundreds of studies have found vaccines to be safe. The World Health Organization estimates that over the past 50 years, immunizations have saved 154 million lives around the world.

Kennedy, who espouses a number of health-related conspiracy theories, has pointed to vaccines to explain the substantial rise in autism diagnoses in recent decades, which have ballooned from an estimated 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 36 today. Research suggests that much of that increase is due to increasing awareness and screening for the condition; changing definitions of autism to include milder conditions on the spectrum that weren’t recognized in previous years; as well as advances in diagnostic technology.

“For a very long time, the anti-vaccine movement has been exploiting families of autistic people, promoting a market for pseudo-scientific treatments that don’t provide the answers they’re looking for and that can expose autistic people to real harm,” said Ari Ne’eman, co-founder of the nonprofit Autistic Self Advocacy Network and an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “More discredited conspiracy theories linking autism and vaccines are not the answer.”

Timothy Caulfield, research director at the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute in Canada, who studies health misinformation, said that people often are more willing to believe conspiracy theories about conditions such as autism, whose causes are complex and not fully understood, than diseases with clear causes. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/autism-vaccines-kennedy-cause-spectrum-rcna180837

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