Copyright talkingpointsmemo
In 2007, Oprah Winfrey featured Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model turned anti-vaccine activist, on her show to talk about her son Evan’s autism diagnosis. “The University of Google is where I got my degree from,” she said during that appearance. McCarthy would go on to become one of the most visible purveyors of disinformation around vaccines and autism, encouraging countless parents to believe that vaccines give children developmental disabilities. Before she embarked on this dangerous new path, McCarthy was like other moms — and a majority of caregivers for autistic people are women, particularly moms — trying to figure out how to help their children through the diagnosis. The medical community has a history of marginalizing and discrediting women’s health concerns, and for many years, scientists blamed autism on unloving mothers. So it’s understandable that women like McCarthy went online to try to learn more about the complex, largely misunderstood condition. McCarthy is an easy target given her large media profile. But throughout the 2000s and through the 2010s, scores of less famous families and solo bloggers spread misinformation through their smaller platforms. These so-called “mommy bloggers” frequently focused on autism and vaccines, even as scientists repeatedly debunked the theory that vaccines played a role in autism. All of this made mainstream media efforts to push back against the lies around vaccines and autism all the more difficult. The field tilled by disinformation mongers created the perfect soil for sowing doubt about vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. It even meant that despite the fact the Trump administration conducted the successful Operation Warp Speed, many right-wing online activists pre-empted the rollout of the vaccine. We now take it as a given that the Internet is a breeding ground for medical disinformation, with people self-diagnosing conditions based on TikToks and modern-day snake-oil salesmen hawking bogus cures on X. Conspiracy theories about autism have proven particularly dangerous, providing fodder for the Trump White House and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to defund vaccine research. The story of how autism disinformation spread from obscurity to the top of the U.S. government’s public health apparatus is a story about the erosion of trust in institutions, how sticky disinformation can spread like wildfire online, and just how dangerous the “do your own research” philosophy of social media can be. The tale begins in 1998, when Andrew Wakefield, a British physician, released his initial study of 12 children postulating a link between the Measles, Mumps Rubella vaccine and autism. Later, it would be discovered that lawyers involved with lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers had paid for some of Wakefield’s research. He would later lose his medical license and, in 2010, The Lancet would retract the initial study. By then it was too late. Wakefield’s work would proliferate and find an ample platform online. On anti-vax Facebook groups, users spoke of “moral outrage and structural oppression by institutional government and the media,” according to one study. As the internet became a staple of American households and awareness of autism spread, a new feedback loop was created. Parents and loved ones would search for information about autism, and come across a piece of woefully inaccurate misinformation. Then those parents would amplify the misinformation on social media, immunizing society from being able to discern truth and fact. The disinformation machine truly kicked into high gear in recent years. In 2014, a measles outbreak hit Disneyland. To counteract this, California proposed legislation to ban a personal belief or religious exemption for vaccines. But Stanford professor Renee Diresta found that a handful of loud anti-vaxxers amplified their message on X to intimidate legislators. Diresta also found that the anti-vaccine messaging took a more right-leaning tone, moving from conspiracy theories to talking about “safe” vaccines and about parental choice. America’s political foes sought to exploit the strife around vaccines and autism for their own gain. A 2018 study showed that Russian troll bots on Twitter used hashtags to sow discord around vaccination as a wedge issue. “Russian trolls and sophisticated Twitter bots post content about vaccination at significantly higher rates than does the average user,” the study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, said. “Content from these sources gives equal attention to pro- and antivaccination arguments. This is consistent with a strategy of promoting discord across a range of controversial topics — a known tactic employed by Russian troll accounts.” These strategies are meant to undermine public health by normalizing these types of “debates,” the study found, and lead to the questioning of longstanding scientific consensus rejecting a connection between childhood vaccination and autism. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. While many heralded the rapid development of the vaccine as a miracle of modern medicine (that occurred largely under the Trump presidency), a handful of loud voices used the internet to sow doubt and promote anti-science rhetoric. Over time, as Media Matters for America documented, anti-vaxxers like Wakefield began appearing on QAnon-aligned programs to spread disinformation on COVID vaccines. Chief among them was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental lawyer-turned anti-vaccine activist. Kennedy had long used the internet as a way to promote his ideas around autism. In 2005, Rolling Stone and the liberal website Salon.com co-published an article by Kennedy titled “Deadly Immunity” that postulated that “the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real.” The article would later be retracted after being discredited. He also railed against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention atop his perch as a blogger for Huffington Post (now called HuffPost), one of the early liberal blogs. Indeed, the website featured plenty of posts from celebrities like McCarthy and her ex Jim Carrey discrediting vaccines. The advent of Twitter would allow for misinformation around autism and vaccines to proliferate. Few did more to promote it on Twitter than Donald Trump. The oft-repeated Trumpism “many such cases” stems from a 2014 tweet where he said “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM.” When Trump was asked about it in one of the early 2016 presidential debates, he did not waiver in his belief that vaccines played a role in the condition. Anti-vaccine sentiment seeped into the right-wing media. Glenn Beck compared the persecution of anti-vaxxers to the plight of Galileo. When Bill Shine left his role as a Fox News executive to become Trump’s White House communications director, his wife was tweeting “Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases” and about the role of vaccines and autism. The Washington Post reported that hedge fund manager Bernard Selz and his wife Lisa funded numerous anti-vaccine groups, including the Informed Consent Action Network, led by Del Bigtree, who ran a live stream broadcast and would go on to work on Kennedy’s presidential campaign. During the pandemic, Kennedy jumped at the opportunity to push these theories on the American public. The Center for Countering Digital Hate listed Kennedy as one of its “Disinformation Dozen,” 12 individuals who created 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter between Feb. and March 16 2021 alone. Shortly after baseball legend Hank Aaron died, Kennedy said the COVID-19 vaccine was the cause of death. He would later have his Instagram banned and eventually his Facebook, but both would be reinstated after Kennedy launched his presidential bid. In the spirit of the larger anti-vaccine movement on social media, Kennedy started off as a Democrat running against Joe Biden, later ran as an independent, and ultimately endorsed Trump. Now, Kennedy not only has his social media accounts, but the biggest bullhorn of all: the position of Health and Human Services Secretary, from which he has continued to spread disinformation about vaccines and autism. Since Kennedy took the helm of HHS, he’s pledged to find the cause of the “autism epidemic.” He’s dismissed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). (TPM reported how HHS plans to scrape Americans’ data and track autism despite privacy concerns.) And the Trump administration purged its own hand-picked director for the Centers for Disease Control Susan Monarez, triggering an exodus of other experts at the CDC, for refusing to comply with Kennedy’s directives on vaccine policy. In the past, Kennedy and others had been dismissed as cranks with no grounding in scientific fact. But now, the cranks control the levers of government.
