US health secretary said he told agency to update website to claim the fact vaccines do not cause autism is not evidence based
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, said in an interview with the New York Times that he personally instructed the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism.
Countering decades of science showing vaccines to be safe, the US public health agency’s website was changed to say: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
In the interview, Kennedy said that while the large-scale epidemiological studies of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had found no link to autism, and that studies of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal had also shown no link, there are gaps in the vaccine safety science.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made’, is just a lie,” Kennedy said in his first interview with a major print publication.
