OARacle Newsletter

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is planning a large study to look into potential connections between autism and vaccines, according to a March 10 Reuters article, even though extensive past studies have found no links.

While the CDC has not provided details about the study, The Washington Post reported that the agency plans to analyze Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data. VSD records have been used to identify safety signals in real time, according to Medscape Today, such as higher rates of myocarditis or pericarditis with the COVID-19 vaccines, for example. Whether the data can be used to identify longer-term outcomes like an autism diagnosis is not clear.

NBC News reported that it is unclear where funding will come from, what the methodology will be, or when results would be published. Roughly $419 million is spent on autism research in the United States each year, the article noted.

“[The existence of a study] sends the signal that there is something there that is worth investigating, so that means there must be something going on between vaccines and autism,” said Dr. Wilbur Chen, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and former member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, in the Reuters article. 

As OAR readers know, autism rates have risen dramatically. According to CDC data, about one in 36 children in the United States have autism, compared to one in 150 in 2000. Researchers attribute the increase to more widespread screening and a wider range of behaviors to describe autism, Reuters noted. 

One of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and others have continued to link autism to the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, as noted in a USA Today article, due to a debunked study by Andrew Wakefield, a British physician who was latter debarred. His study looked at just 12 children in the United Kingdom with developmental delays. Reuters noted that it is unclear whether Kennedy will have a part in CDC study or how it would be carried out. 

The study announcement came amid one of the largest measles outbreaks in more than a decade, with Johns Hopkins reporting that as of March 19, more than 315 cases have been identified in West Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Two deaths have been reported, a child in Texas and an adult in New Mexico, both unvaccinated. Reuters noted that the outbreak is due in part to declining vaccine rates because parents have been falsely led to believe that the shots are harmful.

Kennedy initially downplayed the news of the school-age child’s death in Texas, Reuters reported, saying that such outbreaks are ordinary, not mentioning that vaccinations prevent measles.

“As President Trump said in his joint address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services, said in the NBC News article. 

Much larger studies that included hundreds of thousands of children, some of whom received the MMR vaccine and some of whom didn’t, found no association between vaccines and developing autism, the USA Today article said. 

Sherri Alms is the freelance editor of The OARacle, a role she took on in 2007. She has been a freelance writer and editor for more than 20 years.