4 results for “Disease X”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Secretary of Health and Human Services since February 2025, has promoted vaccine-autism and vaccine-injury claims since the early 2000s, founding the World Mercury Project (later Children's Health Defense) to advance those claims. The foundational vaccine-autism link derived from Andrew Wakefield's 1998 Lancet paper, which The Lancet retracted in February 2010 after the UK General Medical Council's findings; the BMJ's editors called the paper fraudulent in 2011, and Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register in May 2010. The thimerosal-mercury hypothesis Kennedy championed was addressed by the 2004 IOM report and by Hviid et al. (2003, JAMA) among many subsequent studies, all finding no causal link. In November 2025 the CDC's autism-and-vaccines page was rewritten under HHS to say that the claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is "not an evidence-based claim"; the AP reported that the page cites no new research, and the large cohort studies continue to find no link.