A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
He is now Trump's secretary of HHS. Trump has directed him to investigate autism.
Lena H. Sun and Lauren Weber at WP:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning a study into the potential connections between vaccines and autism, according to two people familiar with the plan, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that there is no link between the two.
The request for the study came from Trump administration officials, said the two people familiar with the plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy have repeatedly linked vaccines to autism.
Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has disparaged vaccines for years. A previous Washington Post examination found that since 2020, Kennedy has linked autism to vaccines in at least 36 appearances, despite the evidence to the contrary.
...
In a statement, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said: “As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening. The American people expect high quality research and transparency and that is what CDC is delivering.”
...
“I will watch carefully for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote,” [Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana)] said in February.
Cassidy’s office declined to comment Friday.
...
The CDC is planning to look at the connection between vaccines and autism using data from its Vaccine Safety Datalink, according to the two people familiar with the initiative, who described it on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it. Established in 1990, the database is a project to monitor the safety of vaccines and study rare and serious adverse events following immunization. The VSD uses electronic health record data from member sites to assess vaccine safety and detect adverse events in near-real time.
Uh oh. From a 2025 Annenberg Public Policy Center study:
Since the inception of VAERS in 1990 (CDC, n.d., About VAERS), its data have been mistakenly cited to suggest that the recording of an event in VAERS confirms that it was vaccine-caused. Long before COVID-19 was added to our working vocabularies, people falsely alleging that the MMR vaccine causes autism were backing that bogus claim with mischaracterized VAERS event report data.
Such problematic uses persist. So, for example, on June 18, 2021, lawyer, author, and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., tweeted, “Latest numbers from CDC VAERS is in… Data for 12- to 17-year-olds include 7 deaths + 271 serious adverse events following COVID vaccine” (Kennedy, 2021). The mental representation invited by that text: COVID-19 vaccination is endangering teens.
Some medical experts warned Reuters that the CDC's legitimization of the long-discredited theory could increase vaccination fears in the general public and a decline in pediatric vaccination rates.
"It sends the signal that there is something there that is worth investigating, so that means there must be something going on between vaccines and autism," said Dr. Wilbur Chen, who teaches at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
