Mick Hartley

From Geoffrey C. Kabat at Quillette – “The Trump administration’s scientific illiteracy about rates of autism is going to have catastrophic results”:

At an Oval Office ceremony on 10 August, President Trump signed an executive order recommending an overhaul of the childhood-immunisation schedule that has been in place since the mid-1980s. The proposed changes will reduce the number of childhood diseases combatted by vaccination from seventeen to eleven. During the press conference, Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. both spoke at length about the vaccine schedule. Inoculations, they said, should be spaced out and the number of childhood vaccinations recommended by the government would now be reduced.

Both men repeatedly referred to potential links between childhood vaccines and increasing rates of autism diagnosis. Under the new directive, the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine (which has been administered in the US for 55 years) would be split into three separate vaccines, in order to diminish the burden that, according to Trump, the combined vaccine places on young children. (As the phrase “once such products are domestically available” in the executive order acknowledges, separate vaccines are not currently obtainable for these three diseases in the US.)

“And I saw this early on, and I’ve seen proof of it,” Trump declared, “where they have a vaccination thing, looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body. And bad things happen, in many cases—in too many cases—because this is an explosion. This is an epidemic. So at year one, you should have five separate visits for vaccines rather than giving them all in the same day.” 

So eloquent. “Bad things happen”. Further musings from the great man:

“Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today. In those times, people were much healthier and of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist. So there’s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism and we’re going to bring it back to much closer to where it was…

“Because I came in and I said, I want to find what’s going on with autism. It’s many, many times what it used to be years ago, and it gets progressively worse. And we had progressively more and more vaccines. So in a nutshell, and you can see it through this, we’re breaking up the vaccines and we’re breaking them up into two time periods. OK? Not so complicated. And we think we’re going to have a tremendous result from doing that.”

The scientific idiot-in-chief. Of course we know where all this nonsense started:

In 1998, the Lancet published a now-retracted study by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues linking the MMR vaccine to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.

It took the Lancet 12 years to retract the paper – another in the long list of triumphs from Lancet editor Richard Horton. [See here.] Wakefield has since become something of a celebrity in the US after leaving the UK in disgrace.

Since then, decades of high-quality scientific evidence has been published showing no such association (see here and here). Two major societies that promote high-quality research into autism and support families dealing with the condition have forcefully opposed claims of a causal link between vaccination and autism (here and here).

Also, the supposed increase in autism has been challenged by recent studies (for instance) which suggest that this was more to do with changes in diagnostic criteria.

Trump and RFK Jr. are perpetuating the misunderstanding that cases of autism have been increasing in the population at an alarming rate, whereas what has happened is that diagnoses of autism are increasing in people who, in the past, would have been diagnosed with other conditions or missed altogether. They are now using this misunderstanding to scare people about vaccines, asserting that the artifactual increase in autism rates constitutes evidence of an epidemic produced by the harmful effects of vaccines. The results of this scientific illiteracy could be catastrophic.