RFK Jr’s reckless war on vaccines

In a duplicitous move in November, US Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr admitted to personally directing a wording change to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine website. He had retracted the longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism.

During his confirmation hearings at the beginning of last year, Kennedy pledged that he would not remove that statement, but he has reneged. The wording on the website now reads: ‘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. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.’

Kennedy is doggedly advancing an anti-vaccine agenda here. His claim was rejected by public-health experts, but avidly supported by Kennedy’s followers. Neither camp is likely to amend its views, although they are not the intended target of his crafty messaging. Kennedy wants to convince the large uncertain middle, understandably concerned about their health and that of their children, that vaccines are more dangerous than they really are.

Causation in medicine is a different concept than it is in law, but it is a distinction Kennedy – himself a lawyer – seems to be unable to grasp. Consider the phrase ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. By medical standards, the primary cause of the camel’s broken back is the heavy weight it has carried for so long, causing it to become so weak that even a straw can break it. Alternatively, the law would posit that the straw, not the chronic weight bearing, is the cause of the camel’s misfortune – ‘but for’ the straw, the camel’s back would remain unbroken. Both interpretations are necessary for their respective professions, however the question of vaccines should be the domain of science and medicine, not law.

In the case of infant vaccines, medicine has focussed on the connection between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and the purported outcome – autism. Of the pediatric vaccines, MMR has long received special attention as a possible cause for autism. The link was originally promoted by the British physician Andrew Wakefield in the Lancet in 1999. But many studies have since demonstrated no evidence for this theory, and have also exposed Wakefield as a fraud (in 2010, he was struck off the British medical register, and his article in the Lancet was retracted). Even Kennedy endorses the MMR vaccine.

By an unknown mechanism, a few vaccines have been associated with rare neurologic syndromes in children, at an extremely low rate – a level approximating one in several hundred thousand vaccine administrations. Large population-based studies show the rare association could not possibly account for the current increasing incidence of autism.

Multiple reports from scientific agencies and the National Academy of Medicine have scrutinised the question of autism and pediatric vaccines. But they have failed to identify studies that can definitively claim that vaccines do not cause autism. Kennedy argues that the lack of absolute proof supporting the claim that ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ means the CDC website had to be modified according to the Data Quality Act of 2000. That law requires federal agencies to ensure the ‘quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of information they disseminate to the public’.

This is arrant sophistry, typical of Kennedy’s approach – employing the legal, rather than the medical, meaning of causation. ‘But for’ the vaccine, Kennedy is suggesting, the patient may not have developed autism. Kennedy knows it is virtually impossible to disprove a negative – the statement, ‘The Sun will not rise tomorrow’, for example, cannot be refuted, no matter how many millions of years the Sun has risen for each morning. We may not be able to say with absolute certainty that MMR vaccines do not cause autism, but that certainly does not make the opposite true.

The best example of Kennedy’s dishonesty is the new accompanying statement on the website, ‘Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities’. In point of fact, no potential cause of autism has been studied more carefully than infant vaccines, and by the same measure, infant vaccines have been scrutinised for autism more than for nearly any other potential complication.

Hundreds of studies involving hundreds of thousands of patients have been reviewed. An occasional, weak association between infant vaccines and autism has been discovered, which is not surprising when you consider that large numbers of patients are examined. Isolated associations are bound to crop up occasionally, but that nowhere near establishes proof of cause. As it happens, there are many more studies that refute any link. Some researchers have undoubtedly downplayed studies Kennedy cites, but his assertion that the entire medical community has ignored this issue is the stuff of The X Files.

The truth is that infant vaccines are a medication, and they have a risk-benefit profile just as any other medication has. The balance rests with the benefit – vaccines have saved millions of lives over the past century, while presenting a miniscule risk. A highly unfortunate few have succumbed to that risk, for reasons not yet ascertained. This may not be true of newer vaccines, like the Covid vaccine, where the benefits for children are less certain, and there is not as much data yet on long-term risks.

At the same time, this balance does not preclude individuals or religious groups from refusing to accept any risk, regardless of benefit. The public-health community must respect the principle of individual autonomy and freedom of choice when it comes to such decisions.

Kennedy is correct in one respect. Further study of the vaccine-autism question is essential. Rather than the continual opprobrium from medical experts and media pundits, future data will undermine Kennedy’s ignoble misrepresentations much more effectively.

Cory Franklin’s The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.