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.
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.
In light of the Trump administration's dishonesty and threats to privacy, plans for an autism registry are most disturbing.
Ariana Eunjung Cha, Caitlin Gilbert and Fenit Nirappil at WP:
The Trump administration has retreated from a controversial plan for a national registry of people with autism just days after announcing it as part of a new health initiative that would link personal medical records to information from pharmacies and smartwatches.
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Scientists, privacy experts and advocates for people with autism acknowledged the potential of the data efforts to advance research — with or without a registry. But, they added, the initiative hinges on a single, critical factor that is declining in some communities: trust in the Trump administration.
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David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who focuses on autism, noted that the U.S. DOGE Service sought sensitive government information on individuals, including data from the IRS and Medicare program, as part of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
“We have really strong health data protections in our society for a really good reason,” Mandell said, “and this administration has given us no confidence that they will treat our data in the protected way that it should be treated.”
Even with privacy protections, the data would be problematic.
One of the biggest challenges is the fragmented U.S. health-care system. Unlike countries such as Denmark and Israel — which have national health systems and centralized databases used for pioneering autism research — medical data in the United States is scattered across separate systems run by hospitals, insurers, pharmacies and even individual doctors.
Merging data gathered for different purposes and maintained by different groups sometimes involves a lot of guesswork (such as matching up a billing address with the location where a smartwatch is registered). That is highly likely to yield duplicate entries, wrongly matched records and other errors that are difficult to account for.
That makes it difficult to trust findings, said researchers such as Catherine Lord, a psychologist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
