CDC’s Autism Reversal: Inside the Collapse of a 25‑Year Public Health Narrative
The webpage has a single error - a disturbing political concession that speaks volumes.
Nov 20, 2025
Shared with Permission.
James Lyons-Weiler, for Popular Rationalism
On November 19, 2025, quietly and without ceremony, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its website and rewrote one of the most politically charged sentences in modern American medicine. A sentence that had been treated as gospel—“Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism”—was suddenly recast as something far more fragile. In the CDC’s own words, the slogan “is not an evidence‑based statement” because available studies “have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines contribute to the development of autism.”
Yet the headline still sits atop the page. Not because the CDC stands behind it, but because a U.S. Senator demanded it stay. CDC states plainly that the headline remains only due to an agreement with the chair of the Senate HELP Committee. A mandated political slogan now presides over a scientific reversal.
The body of the page reads like a confession. It acknowledges that key infant vaccines—including HepB, DTaP, Hib, PCV13, IPV, rotavirus, and influenza—have never been studied for autism outcomes. It admits that earlier studies used to justify the categorical claim were incapable of ruling out causation. It concedes that mechanistic and associative findings were ignored by health authorities. And it promises, for the first time, an HHS‑led effort to conduct “gold‑standard science” to evaluate whether early‑life vaccination can contribute to autism.
This moment did not arise in a vacuum. It is the final surface rupture of a 25‑year fault line running beneath CDC’s public messaging—a story of suppressed signals, discarded testimony, unpublished findings, internal dissent, FOIA‑released emails, whistleblower documents, and a lawsuit that forced CDC to walk back its own claim once before.
