(Reuters) -Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview with the New York Times that he personally instructed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism.
Countering decades of science showing vaccines to be safe, the U.S. public health agency’s website was changed to say, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
In the interview, Kennedy said that while the large-scale epidemiological studies of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had found no link to autism, and that studies of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal had also shown no link, there are gaps in the vaccine safety science.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy said in his first interview with a major print publication.
Public health experts, doctors and scientists have decried the update as the kind of misinformation the CDC has fought for decades as it promoted the use of life-saving childhood vaccines both in the U.S. and abroad.
(Reporting by Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)
