In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. And among those diseases could be COVID-19.
Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers. Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures.
The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory.
{My] greatest challenge in the public square has been countering a growing and increasingly audacious antivaccine lobby and movement. My involvement accelerated after the birth of youngest daughter Rachel, when she was diagnosed with autism and intellectual disabilities. At the time I was a junior faculty member at Yale University School of Medicine, and Rachel was diagnosed at the renowned Yale Child Study Center. At that time Ann’s parents, Don and Marcia Frifield, made frequent trips from their home in New Jersey to help us with Rachel. When Rachel was still very young girl, a paper was published in the Lancet claiming to show that 12 children who received their measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine progressed to a gastrointestinal condition associated with nonspecific colitis and intestinal lymphoid hyperplasia followed by developmental regression and pervasive developmental disorder or autism (Wakefield et al. 1998). Despite multiple epidemiological studies showing that there is no link between MMR vaccine and autism (and a retraction of the Lancet paper), the claims linking autism and childhood vaccinations persisted, eventually alleging it was thimerosal preservative, or spacing vaccines close together, or aluminum in vaccines that triggered neurodevelopmental degeneration and autism (Hotez 2018).
As a pediatric vaccine scientist and a parent of a daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities I noticed there was a vacuum or absence of senior scientists or scientific organizations defending vaccines. In response I wrote Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, a book which placed me front and center in the public defense of vaccines (Fig. 10).
I found this new public role meaningful although it became daunting and even scary at times, as antivaccine activists directed their online attacks against me through intimidating emails and efforts to discredit my science or me personally on social media. I also began to be stalked at meetings where I was scheduled to speak, or eventually at my home. These threats accelerated even further during the COVID pandemic when the antivaccine movement was adopted by a major political party in the United States and I became a target from members of the U.S. Congress and other elected officials, as well as a major cable news network linked to far-right extremism. In a subsequent book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning (Johns Hopkins University Press), I reported how 200,000 Americans needlessly died because they refused a COVID vaccine during the delta and BA.1 omicron COVID waves in 2021–22 (Hotez 2023a). In this new book I detail why so many Americans refused vaccines and how they became victims of a predatory and politically motivated antivaccine disinformation campaign (Hotez 2023a). The backlash to The Deadly Rise of Anti-science book accelerated the public attacks against me online or on cable news channels from elected officials, including at least two U.S. Senators, some members of the U.S. Congress, and two U.S. Presidential candidates, as well as several Fox News anchors. Even though I point out that my intention is to save lives and not to judge individual political leanings, my highlighting the unnecessary deaths from vaccine refusal is viewed as a casus belli from the far right and those with a political agenda.
Left: The author’s book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism (Johns Hopkins University Press); Right: A 2023 political cartoon from Dave Whamond
