In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
President-elect Donald Trump said in a new interview that he would consider altering childhood vaccination programs in the United States and questioned whether vaccines cause autism—a widely disproven claim.
When asked in an interview for TIME’s 2024 Person of the Year whether he would approve of an end to childhood vaccination programs, Trump said he would have a “big discussion” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine skeptic he has tapped to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible,” Trump continued. “If you look at things that are happening, there's something causing it.”
Trump did not explicitly say in the interview that vaccines cause autism, a false claim that traces back to a retracted study from the 1990s. When pressed on the issue, Trump said his administration will complete “very serious testing,” after which “we will know for sure what's good and what's not good.”
But merely by suggesting that there may be a connection between vaccines and autism, Trump has reaffirmed his alignment with the misinformation that has for years fueled anti-vaccine movements.
