When Fear Spreads Faster Than Facts – Autism, Vaccines, and Measles

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It’s a really bad year for measles (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/index.html) . Cases are spiking in countries (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/...) where children should have been fully vaccinated, such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico. More than 1,000 cases (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-rese...) have been reported in the United S (https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/measles/us...) tates just in the first half of 2025, with at least 3 deaths. The death of a child in Texas early in 2025 was the first time a child had died from the infection in the United States since 2003. It’s even worse in Canada, with more than 2,500 reported cases (https://health-infobase.canada.ca/mea...) . 


Measles was declared eliminated (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/his...) in the United States in 2000, thanks to vaccination, but this very infectious virus has come roaring back because of a decline in vaccination. The decline is overwhelmingly linked to fears and false rumors about vaccines – especially the hard-to-kill notion that the measles vaccine might somehow cause autism.


Now, one of the leading proponents of this thoroughly disproven idea (https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the...) , Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and he’s bent on both casting more doubt on vaccines, and on renewing fears about autism.


He got more ammunition in the spring of 2025 with the latest surveillance report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that about 1 in 31 (https://www.cdc.gov/autism/data-resea...) , or 3.2 percent, of children aged 8 years old has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. This is up from 1 in 36 in 2020 and 1 in 54 in 2008. Kennedy has called for (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/23/auti...) collecting more data (https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-...) on people with autism while also shedding even more doubt on the safety of vaccines in general.


The CDC itself still says vaccines do not cause autism (https://www.cdc.gov/autism/faq/index....) , but Kennedy, widely blamed for stoking vaccine hesitancy that helped fuel an outbreak of measles in Samoa (https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-sam...) in 2019 that killed 83 people, is in a position to further weaken vaccination efforts while spreading misinformation (https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/sci...) about autism.


“It takes 10 minutes to create a vaccine scare and at least 10 years to overcome it,” says Dr. Judith S. Miller, a psychologist in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a senior scientist and training director in the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.


Better screening and broader criteria are likely the main reason autism diagnoses are on the rise, says Dr. Miller, who is also Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.


Listen as Dr. Miller discusses why it’s a waste of time to re-examine the disproven links between vaccines and autism, why establishing new government databases may actually hold back research, and what autism professionals really need from the federal government.