Medical experts have said for years there is no evidence linking vaccines to autism, but a new poll has found that a growing number of Americans, particularly those who support President Trump, disagree.
An Economist/YouGov poll released Thursday found 22 percent of respondents said they agreed with the unfounded claim that “vaccines have been shown to cause autism.” Participants who said they voted for Trump were significantly more likely to believe in such a link at 38 percent, compared to just 7 percent of those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall.
A YouGov poll in 2015 on the same topic though phrased differently reported just 13 percent of Americans said they think “early childhood vaccinations can cause autism.” Republicans a decade ago were slightly less likely than Democrats to believe that the two could be linked, that survey found, at 11 percent to 13 percent, respectively.
The shift comes as Trump’s administration, under the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has vowed to find out what causes autism spectrum disorder.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects nearly 5.5 million Americans, according to the most recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine critic who helped found one of the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine organizations, has said he expects the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have preliminary findings by this fall and “definitive answers” in a year.
“We are going to farm out grants to 15 groups, teams of the top scientists in the world, and we are going to look at all of the possible culprits,” Kennedy said in a Fox News interview Tuesday. “This is a crisis. This is 20 times worse than COVID-19 in terms of the economic impact, the social impact, the moral impact on our country.”
Kennedy — who has long promoted the theory that childhood vaccines have led to a spike in autism diagnoses despite hundreds of studies showing there is no relationship — during a separate Fox News interview last week included vaccines among the potential factors that will be examined in the HHS’s review
“We’re going to look at mold; we’re going to look at the age of parents,” he said. “We’re going to look at food and food additives; we’re going to look at pesticides and toxic exposures; we’re going to look at medicines; we’re going to look at vaccines.”
CDC researchers released a report earlier this month that said about 1 in every 31 children were diagnosed with autism in 2022, continuing a steady increase in the rate of recorded cases that researchers said reflects better childhood screening.
But Kennedy publicly disagreed with the agency’s screening conclusion and has challenged research showing a genetic link to the condition.
“This is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics. It can provide a vulnerability. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said at a news conference at the HHS a day after the CDC released its report.
The latest poll from The Economist/YouGov surveyed 1,625 U.S. adult citizens April 19-22. It has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.