CDC Vaccine Website Promotes Antiscience Claims of Autism Ties
November 20, 2025
2 min reading
CDC Vaccine Website Promotes Anti-Scientific Claims About Autism Links
This week, the CDC quietly changed its official language to suggest that vaccines could cause autism, a claim that scientists say has no evidentiary basis.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly revised a page on vaccine safety on its website to introduce language suggesting uncertainty about whether vaccines cause autism, echoing ideas promoted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic.
Experts who spoke with Scientific American denounced the changes as unscientific and potentially harmful. “It’s a tragedy,” says Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.
The administration’s decision rejects decades of evidence showing there is no link between vaccines and autism, he said, adding that the new guidelines pose a public health risk because they could discourage vaccination.
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The website change “signals that the truth has no weight in current and future discussions about vaccines” and, because of that, Osterholm says, “children will die.”
Previously, the CDC webpage cited decades of research showing that vaccines do not cause autism. The new version, which was apparently updated on Wednesday, states that the claim that “vaccines do not cause autism” is not based on evidence and that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Since 1998, researchers in seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving more than 5.6 million people that investigated such claims and found no link between autism and vaccines, Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement. A 2019 study, for example, found no evidence of a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine in a group of more than 657,000 children.
“There is no link between vaccines and autism,” Kressly said. “Anyone who repeats this harmful myth is either misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. »
The CDC update also says officials will begin investigating early childhood vaccinations and autism.
“It will be difficult for the public to trust anything the CDC has to say after this,” says Brian Lee, an epidemiologist at the Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health.
The CDC did not immediately respond to Scientific Americanrequest for comment.
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