President-elect Donald Trump refused to say definitively that vaccines do not cause autism at a press conference.
Trump spoke alongside the chief executive at SoftBank, who pledged to invest $100 billion in the United States, as they addressed reporters on Monday.
During the press conference, Trump repeated misinformation that he has previously espoused about vaccines and autism. He also said that he had met with the heads of Pfizer and Eli Lily, as well as Mehmet Oz, his nominee to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Robert F Kennedy Jr., his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, who has repeated the debunked claims about vaccines and autism.
“So 30 years ago, we had, I’ve heard numbers of like one in 200,000, one in 100,000,” he said in terms of how many children are diagnosed with autism. “And now I’m hearing numbers of one in 100. So something’s wrong. There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it.”
Trump also said he supported the vaccine to prevent polio, but said he did not like mandates when he was asked if he believed schools should require to children to be vaccinated.
Roughly one in 36 children is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in the United States. There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism.
Andrew Wakefield, the British physician who published the 1998 study that claimed a link between autism and vaccines in The Lancet, later had his medical license revoked and The Lancet later retracted the study.
Autism diagnoses have increased in the past decade. But that has largely as a result of diagnostic criteria expanding throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 2013, numerous types of diagnoses were placed under the larger umbrella of autism conditions.
In addition, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that schools report the number of students with disabilities they serve, which led to an increase in diagnoses.
Trump has regularly promoted suspicion about vaccines causing autism going back to before he ran for president in 2015. In 2014, he tweeted, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!”
The future president has nominated numerous figures who have promoted the link between vaccines and autism, including not only Kennedy, but also Dave Weldon, a former congressman and doctor, whom he nominated to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy will be on Capitol Hill to meet with senators on Monday as he prepares for the confirmation process.
