Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. testifies during a Senate Finance Committee hearing. Aaron Schwartz/AP
In an interview published Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times that he’d personally directed the CDC to put a new page on the agency’s website, casting doubt on the fact that vaccines don’t cause autism.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told the Times, lying. He added, “The phrase ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not supported by science.”
Kennedy employed confused logic in his conversation with the Times, telling journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg that he doesn’t believe there’s adequate proof to claim that vaccines don’t cause autism. “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism,” Stolberg wrote. “He is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”
Kennedy also claimed that he was merely offering a more accurate look at “the state of the science,” telling Stolberg, “I think the way to drive up vaccine utilization, ultimately, is to be honest with people,” he said, adding, “My job is not to gaslight Americans but to give them accurate information about the state of the science.”
It’s unclear what possible standard of evidence would satisfy Kennedy, who’s been a dedicated anti-vaccine activist since 2005. Dozens of studies both in the U.S. and internationally have made it clear that there’s no link between the aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and autism, including a landmark Danish study that followed 1.2 million children for 24 years. The study was published this summer in the Annals of Internal Medicine and also found no link between vaccines and a variety of other health conditions, including asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Kennedy has baselessly called for the study to be retracted, which he does not have the power to demand, and which the journal declined to do. According to Nature, the journal’s editor-in-chief Christine Laine wrote in a note on the study’s webpage that retraction “is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here.”
Kennedy’s directive has horrified CDC staffers, one of whom told my colleague Kiera Butler, “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” (As Butler wrote this week, the new “Vaccines and Autism” web page contradicts other information still available on the CDC website.) Public health experts told the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) that CDC’s guidance can no longer be trusted, creating an unprecedented challenge for Americans looking for accurate health guidance from their government.
While Kennedy’s version of the CDC focuses on reviving false claims about vaccines, the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status. Measles cases are at their highest level in three decades, with 45 outbreaks so far this year nationwide. According to—for now—the CDC, in 92 percent of those cases, the patient’s vaccination status was listed as either “unvaccinated” or “unknown.”