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Dozens of studies have failed to find evidence of a link. The decision to re-examine the question comes as a measles outbreak, driven by low vaccinates rates, widens in Texas.
- March 7, 2025, 9:08 p.m. ET
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday.
Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has vowed to revisit the data.
“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. C.D.C. will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement Friday. He did not offer details about the scope or methods of the project.
The news comes in the midst of a rapidly spreading measles outbreak in West Texas, driven by low vaccination rates, that has infected nearly 200 people and killed two. Last year, about 82 percent of the kindergarten population in the county most affected had received the measles vaccine, far below the 95 percent needed to stave off outbreaks. According to Texas health officials, 80 of those infected were unvaccinated and 113 had “unknown vaccination status.”
Asked in an interview about the C.D.C.’s plans to re-examine whether autism is connected to vaccination, Xavier Becerra, health secretary to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said, “All I’ll say is that C.D.C. can do many things. They can walk and chew gum, but I would hope C.D.C. is being used to help us get a grip on measles before another life needlessly dies, perishes.”
The rate of autism diagnoses in the United States is undeniably on the rise. About 1 in 36 children have one, according to data the C.D.C. collected recently from 11 states, compared with 1 in 150 children in 2000. Researchers attribute most of the surge to increased awareness of the disorder and changes in how it is classified by medical professionals. But scientists say there are other factors, genetic and environmental, that could be playing a role, too.
