RFK Jr.: Vaccines Cause Autism

What we know

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent close to two decades leading Children's Health Defense, an organisation that systematically promoted the idea that vaccines cause autism and other chronic illness. According to data compiled by the American Council on Science and Health, Kennedy was paid substantial sums by his own organisation for this advocacy work, a combination of financial interest and ideological conviction that helps explain his sustained engagement despite the accumulated weight of contrary evidence built up since the 1998 Wakefield paper was retracted.

The WHO, the CDC, the European Medicines Agency, and national scientific academies on every continent have reached the same conclusion after reviewing the available evidence: there is no causal link between vaccines and autism. Dozens of large studies involving tens of thousands to millions of children across multiple continents find no increased risk of autism in vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated children, including a 2019 Danish cohort of more than 650,000 children. Senator Bernie Sanders raised this body of evidence directly with Kennedy at his 2025 confirmation hearing for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kennedy declined to accept the scientific consensus on the record.

The Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) has documented concrete harm linked to Kennedy's activism: his organisation's messaging was connected to a disinformation campaign about the measles vaccine in Samoa that contributed to collapsing immunisation rates and a 2019 epidemic which killed 83 people, most of them children under the age of five. The Lancet published a commentary in December 2024 warning of the "public health dangers" posed by Kennedy's appointment as Secretary of Health, and the global number of confirmed measles cases rose by more than 20 percent in the year following his confirmation, according to WHO surveillance data cited by multiple outlets.

The most consequential episode came in November 2025, when Kennedy personally directed the CDC to revise its longstanding public position that vaccines do not cause autism. The CDC website was updated to state that the claim "lacks a basis in evidence," reversing decades of settled public health communication built on the studies described above. Reuters, the New York Times, and the WHO all characterized the change as a form of misinformation originating from political pressure rather than new scientific findings. At a subsequent press conference, Kennedy stated that "the entire story about vaccine safety testing is simply a lie," a claim at odds with a research base spanning tens of millions of children across multiple countries and decades.

Medical organisations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued formal statements rejecting the CDC's revised language and reaffirming that no new peer-reviewed evidence had emerged to justify the change. Public health researchers have warned that the episode illustrates how a single well-placed official can alter official communication about settled science even when the underlying evidence base has not shifted, with potential downstream effects on vaccination rates and disease outbreaks in the years that follow. Kennedy has also promoted related claims that the childhood vaccination schedule itself is excessive and untested as a whole, despite the fact that every vaccine on the schedule underwent individual clinical trials before approval and that safety monitoring systems such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System continue to track outcomes after widespread use.

Common claims

• Vaccines cause autism.False - not one of the dozens of large-scale studies has found a causal link
• Kennedy ordered the CDC to change its position on autism and vaccines.Supported - confirmed by Reuters and the New York Times
• Kennedy's anti-vaccine activism contributed to measles outbreaks.Supported - documented by MCRI research on the 2019 Samoa epidemic

Evidence hierarchy

All sources

• US CDC adopts Kennedy's anti-vaccine views on recast websiteReuters · 2025
• Kennedy Says He Told CDC to Change Website's Language on Autism and VaccinesNew York Times · 2025
• The dangers of vaccine misinformation: Robert F Kennedy JrMCRI · 2023
• The perils of RFK Junior's anti-vaccine leadership for public healthThe Lancet · 2024
• How RFK Jr is systematically undermining vaccines around the worldUniversity of Manchester · 2025
• RFK Jr.'s history of medical misinformation raises concerns over HHS nominationBrookings Institution · 2025

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