"Proposed Presidential Autism–Vaccine Panel Could Help Spread Disease"

"Committee mentioned in a Trump meeting last week could scare people away from protective immunizations, scientists say".

"A White House panel that questions vaccine safety and attacks immunization standards set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control—a possibility raised last week in meetings with incoming president Donald Trump—could actually lead to increased disease outbreaks. Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who suggests inoculations are linked to autism, met last week with Trump to discuss a panel to examine what Kennedy called “vaccine safety and scientific integrity.” Although the autism–vaccine claim has been studied and debunked, the president-elect has also suggested a connection. His team later hedged about the panel, saying that nothing had been decided. (Kennedy’s office declined an interview request.) Nevertheless, public health experts and autism advocates are deeply worried that an effort with presidential backing could undermine public confidence in vaccines and trigger epidemics of all-but-eradicated diseases.

“We have dozens of studies examining autism and vaccines, and they don’t show a link,” says Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit that supports autism research. The original 1998 Lancet article purporting to tie vaccines to autism was found to be based on fraudulent data and retracted; its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, has been barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. “My fear is that people will think that we have not done these studies. That fear alone could lead people to withhold vaccines from their children,” Singer says."

John McQuaid reports for Scientific American January 19, 2017.