Vaccines might cause autism after all, CDC admits

America’s health agency, the CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention), has announced that its categorical assertion that autism isn’t caused by vaccines is unscientific and not based on any evidence.

On its website, the CDC has stated that the claim—which it has been making for many years—is not based on scientific evidence “because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism”, while trials that have detected a link to autism have been ignored by health authorities.

The United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) has launched a thorough review of the possible causes of autism, which has reached epidemic levels in the past 10 years or so, affecting one in 31 children in the US, the CDC has said.

The surprising volte face is in response to America’s Data Quality Act (DQA), which requires federal agencies to ensure the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information they disseminate to the public.

Although some scientific studies haven’t ruled out an association with autism, the CDC admits it has promulgated the idea that vaccines were not responsible because it did not want to affect take up rates.  Even so, surveys have found that half of all American parents believe that vaccines play some part in the development of autism, usually because they have seen their child’s behaviour deteriorate rapidly within days of them receiving a shot.

The CDC also notes that the rise in cases of autism correlate to the increasing numbers of vaccines that small children are given—by the age of five, the average American child will have been given 44 shots—but it also believes that the causes of autism are likely to be multi-factorial, and not only the result of an intensive vaccine programme

Although the CDC says it is responding to the DQA, some believe they are falling in line with the views of US health secretary Robet F Kennedy Jr who has been sceptical about vaccines, and especially the preservatives in them, such as aluminium-based thimerosal, for years.

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