One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism
Yesterday, Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, revived the myth that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders (ASD). During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about what role Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might play in a future Trump administration, Lutnick took a strange detour into the bogus claims that childhood vaccinations cause autism:
I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy and it was the most extraordinary thing because, let’s face it, we’ve all heard on the news all sorts of snarky comments about him. I said, “So tell me how’s it going to go?” And he said, “Why don’t you just listen to me?” And what he explained was that when he was born, we had three vaccines and autism was one in ten thousand. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines because in 1986, they waived product liability for vaccines. And here’s the best one, they started paying people at the [National Institutes of Health], right? They pay them a piece of the money from the vaccine companies. Wait a minute, let me finish. And so all of these vaccines came out without product liability. So what happened now is that autism is now 1 in 34. Amazing.
During a Fox News interview in 2023, Kennedy reiterated, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” Despite the claims by Kennedy, now being echoed by Lutnick, years of research have turned up no evidence that childhood vaccinations cause autism spectrum disorders. Of course, nearly any medical treatment will have some adverse side effects in some people. However, a 2021 comprehensive analysis of vaccine safety by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found “no new evidence of increased risk for key adverse events following administration of vaccines that are routinely recommended for adults, children, and pregnant women.”
Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. Howev
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