One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism

The Trump campaign is all in on RFK Jr.'s debunked anti-vax crusade.

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. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria "has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States." This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.

Piling on the anti-vaccine bandwagon, in his interview this week with podcaster Joe Rogan, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said that he had gotten "red pilled on the whole vax thing" when he felt ill for two days after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine shot. While his side effects were certainly no fun, research shows that such a strong reaction correlates with a robust immune response that produces greater quantities of longer-lasting protective antibodies.

What about Lutnick's point concerning waived liability? In his 1985 article, "Vaccines and Product Liability: A Case of Contagious Litigation" in the Cato Institute's Regulation magazine, University of Virginia law professor Edmund Kitch explained how the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.

And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that "among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion."

At his Madison Square Garden campaign rally, former President Donald Trump said he is going to let Kennedy "go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on the medicines."

Alarmingly, the Trump campaign appears to be all in on Kennedy's debunked anti-vax crusade.