The lies behind the fallacy that vaccines cause autism

I’m autistic. So are two of my six children. In my job with Little Lobbyists, I build community among parents of disabled children, including autistic ones. My M.A.Ed. is in autism education. I used to teach special education.

I share all this to share my bias up front: I am familiar with autism personally, parentally, and professionally. I don’t consider autism to be scary or broken or something to avoid at all costs. I celebrate autism most of the time, and I celebrate autistic people all of the time, because we’re pretty awesome.

That said, we were recently in D.C. to rally for Medicaid funding, and if we had some treatment to make the metro in DC less overwhelming for my autistic son, I’d take it. I’m not opposed to helps, aids, or strategies to survive and thrive in a world not designed with autistic needs in mind.

I am opposed, however, to wasting any more time or research dollars on looking for a cause in vaccines. Could autism use more research? Yes. But we’ve studied the link between autism and vaccinations in depth, and the conclusion is always the same: vaccines don’t cause autism.

President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kennedy disagree with me. Most recently, last week Trump and Kennedy stated that during a cabinet meeting. Trump said, “Maybe it is a shot.” Kennedy was firmer: “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.” He’s used the word exposures to mean vaccines in the past, so make no mistake: he’s following this same well-trod path, even though the end has proven to be the same again and again. Vaccines have been ruled out as a cause for autism.

How do I know this? Well, I studied it to find out for sure.

This vaccine-autism story started with a charlatan named Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, he published an article in The Lancet, a respected British journal of medicine, claiming a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. In an associated press conference, he called for the MMR vaccine to be suspended for all children. In 2010, the article – long disproven at that point – was formally retracted by the journal and Wakefield’s medical license was revoked for ethics failures.

But was he wrong? Yes.

Does he still claim he was right? Also yes.

We would all be fine and dandy if Wakefield was just a weird uncle, muttering to himself about the days when he was still a medical doctor and the study that made him (and his lies) famous, but the problem is that – much like measles – disinformation spreads virally. Unlike measles, we don’t have a vaccine to prevent bad science from being believed well after it’s been disproven.

More problematically for all of us in the U.S.A., Trump, Vance, Kennedy, and others in leadership caught the viral lies about autism and vaccines and think that they are truth.

How do we know the truth? Well, Wakefield’s study was motivated by money and a legal case. He was being paid by lawyers who were suing the makers of the MMR vaccine, so he was driven from the beginning to find a link. Furthermore, he held the patent for a competing vaccine, so if he could show that the current one was flawed, he would benefit. Finally, he stood to make millions from a diagnostic test for the autism-MMR link that he fabricated. He wasn’t a medical researcher; he was a businessman who started with an outcome and worked backward to prove the one finding that would be financially lucrative for him on multiple fronts, which isn’t how science is supposed to work.

But what about the research? Someone can, theoretically, have bad motivations yet discover true findings, after all. But that’s not what Wakefield did.

For starters, Wakefield’s study involved 12 children. That’s a small sample that’s rarely conclusive, but the size of the study had little to do with its lack of credibility. Rather, his credibility is damaged because he lied about the sampling, having cherry picked children for the study and excluded ones who didn’t fit the conclusion he wanted. His credibility is marred by the fact that he paid children at his son’s tenth birthday party in exchange for blood samples. His credibility is shattered because the parents of the children in the study give different accounts of medical history than the stories Wakefield fictionalized for his paper. His credibility is shredded by Wakefield’s doing lumbar punctures, colonoscopies, and other tests on the children, without approval from medical ethics boards, in violation of rules against unnecessary medical procedures on children. And his credibility is destroyed as the findings of medical tests in the paper were determined to be completely false, according to other researchers who examined the raw data and found no abnormalities for many of the children.

Now more research has been done about autism & vaccines — each time disproving Wakefield — than on other safety issues with vaccines or on effective supports & education strategies for autistic people. We might not know everything we’d like to know about autism, but we do know that vaccines don’t cause it.

Wakefield’s fraudulent and unethical “research” has led to rampant ableism and vaccine-preventable deaths. As a result of Wakefield’s lies 27 years ago, vaccine rates have dropped, outbreaks of measles have been more common (with two children dying recently), and autism is seen by some as worse than fatal illnesses.

Wakefield’s fraud led to a distrust of science that has led to climate change deniers and others who reject scientific data in favor of conspiracy. And Wakefield’s fraud has informed our leaders.

During presidential debates for the 2016 election, Trump said, "Just the other day, two years old, 2½ years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.” He never offered any family to prove this, none came forward, and no news agency found any evidence that this family existed. He tweeted something similar in 2014: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!” In August 2016, Trump met with anti-vaccine proponents, including the discredited Andrew Wakefield.

More recently, this year Kennedy appointed David Geier to conduct an analysis about autism and vaccines. Geier is another person who believes increased rates of autism are caused by vaccines, publishing papers to that regard and being disciplined by a Maryland professional board for practicing medicine without a license. Geier, like Wakefield did, is going into his analysis with a result predetermined, and this is worrisome, especially given Kennedy’s recent statement about knowing autism’s cause by September.

Autism rates in children are rising, but something else is rising too: autism diagnoses of adults. I’m one of those adults, only diagnosed in recent years. We weren’t diagnosed as children, which is why the rates were lower then, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have autism. No, we did, but now better diagnostic criteria, more frequent screenings, and more informed education systems mean that kids like me don’t have to wait until they’re 40 to get a diagnosis. It’s like left-handedness: after we stopped treating it as demonic or otherwise wrong, the rates increased, not because left-handedness became more prevalent but because it no longer had to be hidden or shamed away. (My mom wasn’t allowed to use her left hand at meals at her grandmother’s house, so this is recent; Mom didn’t change her handedness but she certainly ate with her right hand where that was required. I’m a lefty too, by the way, and that was encouraged for me and for my sister, also left-handed.)

Also? As I said earlier, I’m autistic. My two biological children are autistic. My other children, despite the same exposures, are not autistic. Anecdotes aren’t proof, but this is a common reality. Autism is genetic, which also means it’s a lie to call it an epidemic because autism is a lifelong developmental disorder and not an infectious disease.

We know from overwhelming research that autism is not caused by vaccines, and we know autistic people are not fearsome, don’t destroy families, can fall in love, and do pay taxes.

If only our leaders knew that too.

(As a final note, because this always comes up in the comments: I don’t deny that vaccine injuries happen. That’s why we have systems in place to evaluate those. Every medical intervention has risks. For example, two of my kids are allergic to penicillin; that doesn’t mean no child should get penicillin. The sort of systemic widespread vaccine injury leading to the diagnosis of a fake syndrome Wakefield called “autistic enterocolitis” was a fraud, one that led to dropping vaccine rates, rising rates of vaccine-preventable illnesses, and rampant ableism against autistic people.)