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.
Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.
As a medical sociologist, I spent three years studying parents of autistic children, practitioners, and researchers who are convinced that early childhood vaccines cause autism. Like Kennedy, they believe that children are born non-autistic and then made autistic by vaccines and other environmental triggers.
This belief tragically portrays autistic people as having been born "typical" but then "broken." Although debunked, this causal theory is incredibly appealing to families because it suggests that autism can be reversed with alternative and experimental treatments that address vaccine "injury." Believing in a vaccine-autism link, parents access an ever-expanding market of questionable products that claim to mitigate autistic symptoms—specialized diets, supplements, and riskier treatments, like chelation and parasite therapy. For these consumers, the hope of autism “recovery” depends on vaccines causing autism.
