Vaccines don't cause autism. Here's what does.

“And they pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it’s a disgrace. I don’t see it. I think it’s very bad. They’re pumping — it looks like they’re pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines …” — Donald J. Trump

President Donald J. Trump recently used his bully pulpit to call for an overhaul to how children get vaccinated—because these, according to him and our Secretary of Health, are the causes of autism.

I am an NIH-funded scientist and expert in the causes of autism. I am also a mother of a child who is fully vaccinated. Because I know that vaccines do not cause autism.

You see, we already know the cause of autism spectrum disorder: it’s in your DNA.

Autism’s onset often occurs during early childhood, overlapping with the recommended window of many childhood vaccinations.  But correlation is not causation. Our kids experience lots of “firsts” during these years: first bites of solid food, first teeth, first steps, not to mention first colds, coughs, and fevers.  We don’t blame vaccines for any of these.

During my childhood, and even more so during my parents’ childhood, kids with autism were often labelled as odd, slow, distracted, fidgety, and a slew of more derogatory terms.  Today, parents and doctors are highly motivated to correctly diagnose autism as early as possible.  They know that early diagnosis provides access to resources, such as occupational therapy, that help many kids achieve their best possible outcomes.

Our Secretary of Health says that rates of autism are soaring, presumably (he implies) because of vaccines.  But that is misleading.  While it is true is that autism is diagnosed more frequently in America today, its numbers have only been tracked since 2000.  In fact, it was not until 1980 that autism was named as a possible diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the definitive manual used by mental health professionals. The first precise diagnostic criteria were only added to the DSM in 1994.

Before that, children with autism symptoms were overlooked.  There were no specialist clinical teams, no diagnoses, and no reporting of cases. If fact, researchers in Britain found that if you screen adults using the same diagnostic criteria used on children, then rates of autism are nearly identical across generations.

To create space for his vaccine conspiracy theories, RFK claims that we don’t know a lot about the causes of autism.  But here again, he is wrong.  Genetic studies of tens of thousands of children with autism, plus their parents and siblings, have generated mountains of evidence.

Studies of twins and other pairs of siblings reveal that our genetics explain the overwhelming majority of risk for autism.  Some of this risk runs in families—so you are more likely to show symptoms of autism if your immediate family members do as well. It also can occur spontaneously.  Much like Down syndrome—which is also not caused by vaccines—autism sometimes results from new mutations that sometimes occur in eggs or sperms, even though neither parent carries genetic risk factors. In fact, by comparing the DNA of people with and without autism, genetic studies have already found more than 100 genes that, when mutated, cause autism and other developmental disorders.

Kennedy and his followers put a lot of faith in a single British study of twelve children that claimed a link vaccination and autism. But the data in that study, like most of the others finding the same link, was falsified, funded by anti-vaccine groups, and retracted. Earlier this year, a study of 1 million children in Denmark found no association between rates of vaccination and autism.

Just as scientists and physicians agree that the causes of autism are genetic, we also agree that vaccines are highly safe and very effective. Vaccines are estimated to have saved over 154 million lives in the last fifty years. According to the World Health Organization, vaccination is one of the best ways to prevent diseases.

We have nearly a century of results to show that vaccines save lives.  Now, as vaccination rates fall nationwide, cases of measles and whooping cough increase, and the CDC debates the childhood vaccination schedule, the number of preventable deaths is rising.