Yesterday, Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, revived the myth that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder (ASD). During a interview With CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on the role Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could play in a future Trump administration, Lutnick took a strange detour into false claims that childhood vaccinations cause autism:

I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy and it was the most amazing thing because, let’s face it, we’ve all heard all kinds of sarcastic comments about him on the news. I said, “So tell me, how’s it going to go?” And he said, “Why don’t you listen to me?” And what he explained was that when he was born, we had three vaccines and autism was one in ten thousand cases. Today a baby is born with 76 vaccines because in 1986 they waived product liability for vaccines. And here’s the best part, they started paying people at the (National Institutes of Health), right? They pay them some of the vaccine manufacturers’ money. Wait a minute, let me finish. So, all of these vaccines came out without product liability. What has happened now is that autism now affects 1 in 34 people. Unbelievable.

During a Fox News interview in 2023, Kennedy reiterated“I believe autism comes from vaccines.” Despite Kennedy’s assertions, now echoed by Lutnick, years of research have arrived no proof that childhood vaccinations cause autism spectrum troubles. Of course, almost all medical treatments will cause unwanted side effects in some people. However, a comprehensive 2021 analysis on vaccine safety by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality find “no new evidence of an increased risk of major adverse events following administration of routinely recommended vaccines to adults, children and pregnant women.”

Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have resurrected substantially. If not vaccination of children, what explains this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorders who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “have been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the past 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the probability of overdiagnosis and a change toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.

Drawing on the anti-vaccine movement, in his interview this week with podcaster Joe Rogan, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance said that he was given “a red pill on this whole vaccine thing” when he felt sick for two days after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine shot. While its side effects certainly weren’t fun, research shows that such a strong reaction correlates with a robust immune system response that produces greater quantities of longer-lasting protective antibodies.

What about Lutnick’s point about exemption from liability? In his 1985 article, “Vaccines and Product Liability: A Case of Contagious Litigation” in the Cato Institute’s Regulations magazine, Edmund Kitch, professor of law at the University of Virginia explain how the accountability system failed to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines and their private harms. The result of this imbalance has killed innovation and vaccine production. So, a year later, Congress chose to change the vaccine liability system in 1986 with the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which compensates people injured by certain vaccines.

And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 review from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention find that “among children born between 1994 and 2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented an estimated 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.”

At his campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, former President Donald Trump said he’s going to let Kennedy “run amok on health.” I’ll let him go wild on food. I’m going to let him go wild on the drugs.”

Alarmingly, the Trump campaign appears to be all about Kennedy’s debunked anti-vaccination crusade.