US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that health officials covered up a study that found vaccinating newborns elevated their risk of autism.
Kennedy made the stunning allegation during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, days after promising to re-evaluate the recommended schedule for vaccines for children and teenagers, including for measles and hepatitis B.
During their lengthy conversation, Kennedy claimed that babies who received hepatitis vaccines during their first 30 days of life had a ‘1,135 percent elevated risk of autism’ compared to those who received the vaccine later or not at all.
‘[The] CDC did that study in 1999,’ he told the former Fox News host as the conversation turned to vaccines and a prospective link to developmental disorders.
‘They brought in a team of scientists under a Belgian researcher named Thomas Versraten, and they looked at the data.
‘They looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within the first 30 days of life and compared those children to children who had received the vaccine later or not at all, and they found an 1,135 percent elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children.
‘And it shocked them.’
The study he had been referring to – published in November 2003 in the medical journal Pediatrics – found no evidence of such a link.
‘They kept the study secret,’ Kennedy claimed during the interview. ‘And then they manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link.
US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr . has claimed that health officials covered up a study that found vaccinating newborns elevated their risk of autism
Kennedy made the stunning allegation during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, days after promising to re-evaluate the recommended schedule for vaccines for children and teenagers, including for measles and hepatitis B
‘And you know we know how they did it? They got rid of all the older children,’ he continued of the study, which analyzed more than 140,000 US children born between 1992 and 1999 for several years.
Kennedy further claimed the study’s final version ‘just had younger children who were too young to be diagnosed.
‘And they stratified that – stratified the data,’ he said.
‘And they did a lot of other tricks, and all of those studies were the subject of that kind of trickery.’
The secretary promised to stamp out such alleged corruption, adding that his stance on the issue was supported by ‘over a hundred [nongovernment] studies.’
‘But, um, what we’re going to do now, is we’re going to do all the kind of studies that the Institute of Medicine originally recommended,’ he went on.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee found in 2001 that a link between popular vaccine ingredient thimerosal and increased rates of autism was ‘biologically plausible.’
At the time, the committee acknowledged a lack of clear evidence to support the link and recommended a series of studies be conducted by the CDC.
‘CDC never did those,’ Kennedy told Carlson, alleging the agency instead commissioned the creation of six epidemiological studies that all ‘use[d] fraudulent techniques.
During their lengthy conversation, Kennedy claimed that babies who received hepatitis vaccines during their first 30 days of life had a ‘1,135 percent elevated risk of autism’ compared to those who received the vaccine later or not at all
The study Kennedy had been referring to – published in November 2003 in the medical journal Pediatrics – found no evidence of such a link
‘You know, they say statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do,’ he said, framing epidemiological studies as ‘very easy to manipulate.’
‘None of those studies did what you would do if you wanted to find the answer, which is to compare outcomes in a fully vaccinated group to health outcomes in an unvaccinated group.’
‘Within six months we’ll have definitive answers, after September,’ Kennedy eventually promised.
The CDC and many others maintain no links have been found between any vaccine ingredients and autism spectrum disorders.
The Daily Mail has reached out to the agency for comment.
A new panel of vaccine advisers appointed by Kennedy will re-evaluate the recommended schedule for vaccines for children and teenagers after meeting in Atlanta, its new chairman, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, said last week.
