From Anthony D. Cox, via LinkedIn:
A Huge Danish Study Found No Link Between Vaccine Aluminum and Autism
Now RFK Jr. is Pressuring the Journal to Retract It
RFK Jr's ever-evolving claims of a link between vaccines and autism keep getting contradicted by data, and it's making him really mad. First, he embraced Wakefield's claim that MMR caused autism, only to face multiple large studies showing no association between MMR and autism. Then, he started saying the real culprit was thimerosal (though MMR never contained thimerosal), prompting large studies that showed no association between thimerosal and autism. Still, thimerosal was dropped from virtually all childhood vaccines >30 years ago in Sweden, and >20 years ago in US, but neither country saw autism diagnoses drop. Undaunted, he started claiming that aluminum adjuvants (used in vaccines since the 1930s) were the REAL culprits, despite the fact that the amounts of aluminum in childhood vaccines are so small and absorbed so slowly, that a study of preterm infants found NO increase in infants' serum aluminum levels after receiving multiple aluminum adjuvanted vaccines.
Then, the coup de grace: Last month, a study of 1.2 million Danish children spanning 21 years found zero association between aluminum adjuvanted vaccines and autism (or any of the other serious harms claimed by RFK Jr. and his acolytes). Since then, RFK Jr. has desperately tried to discredit the study, and (of course) launched personal attacks on the authors' integrity, calling the research "a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry," despite the fact that the study received no industry funding, but was instead funded by the Danish government.
And now, despite his supposed opposition to "censorship," Kennedy is trying to wield the power of the Federal government to suppress research findings he doesn't like, pressuring Annals of Internal Medicine to retract the study.
In 2023, RFK Jr. said the following: "A government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity. It is the beginning of totalitarianism.”
Well said.
The study RFK Jr. doesn't want you to read:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
Reuters article about his efforts to suppress it:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/medical-journal-rejects-kennedys-call-for-retraction-vaccine-study-2025-08-11/
RFK Jr.’s previous views on government censorship and totalitarianism:
https://www.c-span.org/clip/house-committee/user-clip-rfk-jr-censorship-is-the-beginning-of-totalitarianism/5078690
Original post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7360752109589282816/
#publichealth #censorship #antiscience