The re-emergence of old bad ideas such as that vaccines cause autism (they don’t!)

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In 1998, the Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, published a study by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield that claimed to have located a significant relationship between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and the rising rates of autism. The study was fraudulent. Wakefield only tested 12 children and falsified his data. Wakefield was paid by lawyers suing MMR vaccine makers. He was even developing his own measles vaccine to sell.

Twelve years later, the Lancet retracted the article, Wakefield lost his medical license, and every study since — including a series of massive investigations by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — has demonstrated no link between vaccines and autism.

But as I wrote last year, parents of newly diagnosed children are highly vulnerable to misinformation and lies, and plenty of other people see ways to profit off parental fear. Still, I guess I really thought that the zombie myth had been mostly defeated, confined to fringe actors and people selling snake oil.

I was wrong. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under the new leadership of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now planning a study to re-examine whether vaccines cause autism, never mind that they already did that. Here we go again.

Over the past few months, I keep encountering the same feeling of discovering something that I thought was settled, some small gain in a larger struggle that should have been locked in, now reopened for debate. I’m a historian and I should know better. When I teach students about so-called “golden ages,” or for that matter what folks think of as “the dark ages” (they weren’t: Read my book “The Bright Ages”), I always lead them to ask, “Golden for whom?” “Dark for whom?”

Vaccines are part of the story. There have been skeptics about the safety of vaccines and the need for mandatory vaccinations since the smallpox vaccine was introduced in 1796, but specific false claims about vaccines have been defeated often enough. For example, a few weeks ago, the measles outbreak prodded even Kennedy to publish a case for vaccinations (and now Texas is suddenly running short of MMR vaccines). But the autism myth, a myth for which there is literally no actual evidence, is back in mainstream conversation again.

Another example emerges out of the attacks on transgender rights, which I recognize is a relatively new topic for many Americans. Still, as I argued last month, the attacks on trans rights are being used to undermine Section 504, a law from the 1970s providing protections for disabled people that I thought we all agreed was pretty good!

Not only that, but the very same arguments being used against trans rights are now being leveraged to try to overturn Obergefell v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. We spent so much of the 2000s and 2010s arguing for marriage equality. I celebrated the court decision and thought we had really achieved a milestone. Now some Republicans want to push that milestone back down the hill.

When I was a kid in the ’80s, I have to admit I used disability-related slurs like “retard” all the time, just one of the common insult kids would toss around. Even through the ’90s, an outlet like NPR would broadcast a comedy program using the r-word. It showed up casually in TV programs all the time. But effective mobilization on a bipartisan basis, led by groups like Special Olympics and Spread the Word, drove that slur out of public discourse. At the very least, someone prominent using it would quickly apologize or experience significant social and professional consequences.

But now Elon Musk regularly tweets it at people he dislikes (often actual experts who challenge Musk’s errors and lies), and the ripple effect is measurable, with its use tripling on his social media network just in January. Musk continues to use it all the time. It’s making a full comeback. As the father of an autistic boy with Down syndrome, I have plenty of new fights to take on (like helping protect Medicaid), but I guess we’ve got to do this one again, too.

Or even locally, that it was good for Minnesotans to learn the full history of the state — good and bad. But Minnesota Republicans are trying to roll back the social studies standards we just got approved.

I’m startled, but not surprised. The “again” in MAGA has always been a battle cry for nostalgia, a return to an American past that never existed but sounds awfully nice to conservative white people. But to get to that “again,” every victory of the past century has to be torn up, even literal victories like World War II. I guess we have to argue, once again, that the Holocaust was real and Nazis are bad.

But flip this around; there’s also good news. Right now, those of us who hate Nazis, but love equal rights and not catching measles, are losing. But we won before. We can win again. Because whatever people like Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. say, vaccines save lives. And, once and for all, they don’t cause autism.