For the past two days, the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met to discuss various topics related to vaccination. At this meeting, ACIP members continued to spread false information about vaccine ingredients and autism.  ACIP members and presenters falsely claimed that these claims haven’t been disproven. This is not true. Studies have demonstrated over and over again that vaccine ingredients do not cause autism.  ACIP members are ignoring the facts to misinform the public about vaccines, and lying about autistic people to do it.

ACIP members also voted to eliminate recommendations that most newborns receive a Hepatitis B vaccine at birth.  Hepatitis B infection causes liver disease and liver cancer later in life, and by recommending that parents of newborns delay this vaccine for two months or more, ACIP will cause thousands of children to needlessly get a preventable disease that causes lifelong illness and death.  With this vote, ACIP is cutting away a safety net that has protected newborns for more than 30 years. 

Both the rampant disinformation about vaccines and autism and the decision to delay newborn Hep B vaccinations represent a continuing, dangerous shift by US public health officials toward pseudoscience and policies that fail to protect the most medically vulnerable people in our country. The presenters at the ACIP meeting claiming that vaccines need to be “depoliticized” are the very same charlatans placed on this committee to serve as puppets for  HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr ‘s anti-science, conspiratorial, anti-health agenda that endangers all of us.

Vaccines are important for protecting the public from dangerous infectious diseases. Claiming that vaccines cause autism discourages parents from vaccinating their children, resulting in the unnecessary spread of infectious diseases and the resurgence of illnesses that have long been controlled by the widespread adoption of vaccines. Peddling vaccine disinformation will not stop people from being autistic, but it has and will result in the injury and death of autistic children. 

Vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccines let autistic children live long enough to become autistic adults.  Autism is not a tragedy to be prevented; it is a way of being, deserving of support and respect. ASAN will continue to call out and unequivocally condemn any claims to the contrary.

Autistic Self Advocacy Network

PO Box 66122
Washington, DC 20035

 

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