In The Politics of Autism, I write:
Many articles and blog posts arguing for the vaccine-autism link have the trappings of genuine academic research: tables, graphs, citations, and scientific jargon. Some of the authors have credentials such as M.D. or Ph.D. degrees. None of these things is a guarantee of scientific value, as the history of science is full of crackpot theories (e.g., AIDS denialism) that are the heavily-footnoted products of people with letters after their names. But most people will not be able to spot the scientific weaknesses of such work. Outside of academia, few understand concepts such as peer review. Jordynn Jack describes one dubious article that appeared in a non-peer-reviewed publication: “Regardless of the scientific validity of the article, though, the writers perform the writing style quite effectively. It would be difficult for the layperson to distinguish this article from any other scientific research paper, especially if one did not investigate the nature of the journal … or of the scientific response to the article.”
Near the end of the more than three-hour hearing, Cassidy confronted Kennedy with a 2014 meta analysis, reminding him of his promise that he would say vaccines do not cause autism if shown the data.
“The title tells it all,” Cassidy said of the study, which was published in the journal Vaccine by researchers in Australia. “Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies.”
“You show me those scientific studies, and you and I can meet about it,” Kennedy said. “There are other studies as well, and I’d love to show those to you. There’s a study that came out last week of 47,000 9-year-olds in the Medicaid system in Florida — I think a Louisiana scientist called Mawson — that shows the opposite. There are other studies out there. I just want to follow the science.”
Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that “there are other studies out there,” the literature on vaccines and autism is not mixed, unlike many other scientific topics. As David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, previously told us, “Every single rigorous study we have” shows “no association” between autism and vaccination.
The specific paper Kennedy cited — which claims to have found that “[v]accinated children were significantly more likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed” with autism and a variety of other neurodevelopmental disorders — is not rigorous.
“I have read this paper carefully, and it has so many severe methodological issues, it clearly should not have passed any legitimate peer review,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us.
The paper was published on Jan. 23 in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, an outlet that claims to be a peer-reviewed journal, but as we have noted before, is not available on PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health’s database of biomedical research, nor indexed on MEDLINE, which requires some evaluation of journal quality. The editor-in-chief and other board members, including the section editor for the paper, are well-known spreaders of vaccine misinformation.
The two authors, including lead author Anthony Mawson, are affiliated with Chalfont Research Institute in Mississippi, which does not have a website and appears to use a residential home as a mailing address, based on IRS records. Both authors have previously published work on vaccines that has been retracted. The paper was funded by the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine group.
