The CDC updated its estimates for the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. Predictably, antivaxxers blame the increasing prevalence of ASDs reported, particularly in Black children, on “environmental factors,” which is antivax code for, “Vaccines are to blame.”
Since COVID-19, in the antivax world everything old is new again. That’s right, Gary S. Goldman and Neil Z. Miller are back to defend their 2011 infant mortality “study” and RFK Jr. is flogging it as slam-dunk “evidence” that vaccines kill babies.
After using old antivax tropes against COVID-19 vaccines, antivaxxers are pivoting to reuse them to attack measles vaccines again. Everything old is new again—and old again.
In 2008, I tried to answer the question: How do doctors become contrarians, quacks, and antivaxxers? A Twitter encounter suggested to me not just answers but that an update to that post is massively overdue.
Recently, antivaxxers were all over social media after Tucker Carlson touted a “revelation” that the phase 3 clinical trial used to support licensure of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine didn’t examine its ability to block transmission as meaning that its inability to block transmission had been “covered up”. It wasn’t, and antivaxxers are ignoring everything we’ve learned over the last two years to make the claim that vaccines “don’t prevent transmission”.
