If you have concerns about vaccines and autism, please know that I’m here to reassure you, and answer your questions. I understand being consumed with fear and skepticism after being told a medical procedure might have hurt your child. It’s why I’m going to tell you my story of becoming—but then un-becoming—a passionate anti-vaxxer autism parent.
But first—and please don’t skip this part—I want you to know that the idea of an autism-vaccine link has been researched exhaustively, and thoroughly debunked. Even Autism Speaks, which was founded by the family of a hardcore anti-vaxxer, rejected the theory of a vaccine-autism link in 2014. There is now a “’wide consensus’ in the autism and medical science communities that genetics is a powerful determinant of autism,” meaning that autistic people are born with autistic brains, so autism cannot be not caused by vaccines.
You should also know that Andrew Wakefield, the researcher who manufactured the autism-vaccine panic via a 1998 press conference, had his autism-vaccine research formally retracted and his medical license taken away. You should know that the mainstream media, after a decade of “considering both sides” as a direct result of Wakefield’s vaccine-autism hoax, now recoils in horror at politicians’ attempts to link autism with vaccines. You should consider that decreased vaccination rates put our children’s health at risk; and that when anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spread anti-vaccine information, children can and do die from vaccine-preventable diseases:
“Kennedy visited Samoa in June 2019 and spread anti-vaccine rhetoric, and the island nation subsequently experienced a measles outbreak that infected more than 5,700 people and killed 83, many of whom were young children.”
Still, no amount of evidence seems to satisfy parents who continue to believe in vaccine-autism causation. Again, I want to let you know that I understand these worries, and that I’ve been there. This was back in the stone age of 2003, after my two-year-old son had been diagnosed with autism and was falling further and further behind his peers’ developmental milestones. I came from outside the autism and disability world, so I was primed to want what “normal” parents want: a “normal” son. To help my boy be that son, I wanted options that would help him catch up, and fast.
I started exploring alternative autism theories like vaccine causation.
Indeed, I found several alt-autism professionals who encouraged me to look past the sweet, loving, autistic boy I already had, and instead focus on a theoretical “Recovered Normal Boy” of the future. I also found myself looking past their promotion of scientifically questionable approaches while stomaching their wallet-numbing fees, because I was obsessed.
Those anti-vaccination people were passionate about “curing” autistic children. I was passionate! I wanted to cure my autistic child! I did what they told me. I doused my son with the dietary supplements they prescribed. I put him on the special limited diets they endorsed.
And I stopped vaccinating my kids.
My youngest child was born in 2004, eighteen months after my son’s diagnosis and during the thick of my alternative autism treatment frenzy. Since every alt-autism activism resource I came across proclaimed that my son’s autism was caused by an injected environmental factor, I decided there was no way in hell my new baby was getting a shot of anything. Not even vitamin K.
As that fortunately healthy baby grew and thrived, so did the rates of preventable and potentially lethal diseases; I wasn’t the only parent who’d been scared into tossing aside my kids’ vaccine schedules.
Even I couldn’t ignore the mounting evidence rejecting any association between vaccines and autism. But I still wanted answers about what caused my son’s autism, so I enrolled him in a MIND Institute study on autism and regression. The MIND researchers tracked the emergence of my son’s autism traits by poring over our home videos, medical records, and my own journals.
Their verdict? They found no evidence my son had regressed into autism after being vaccinated. Like many small autistic children, his autistic traits emerged gradually but steadily. And while his autism became more obvious around the same time as he was getting most of his vaccines, there was zero evidence of a regression or an autistic traits explosion after the shots. The timing was a coincidence. Nothing more.
I had my answer. So I thought long and hard. And decided that it was time to restart vaccinating my children.
I resumed slowly, under the supervision of a patient pediatrician who was willing to talk through my residual fears. My youngest child initially got only one shot at a time, only when healthy, and with a cautionary month between doses. After everything went well, I worked on getting the baby and my eldest child caught up with the standard pediatric vaccine schedule. I also resumed vaccinating my son—you know, the autistic one.
All three kids are now healthy adults who, thankfully, have never had a vaccine-preventable disease.
And I now know that the real problem—the reason I was so scared in the first place—was that I feared and misunderstood what being autistic means. My son’s disabilities are not novel or rare. And he is not broken. But he does need very specific supports, and it shouldn’t have been so hard for me to learn to be the parent he needed, or to find the supports he deserves.
And that’s the crux of autism-vaccine fears, the root of the rot: It’s not enough to let people know that vaccines don’t cause autism. We also have to affirm that autism is not something to fear, that autistic lives are worth living and supporting, and that autistic people deserve to exist and be loved. I know this now. I wish I had had earlier exposure to resources and people who could have helped me have this attitude from the moment my son was diagnosed. I am grateful those resources now exist.
Unfortunately, despite my and other parents’ awakening to vaccine-autism misinformation, the effects of the autism-vaccine panic did not simply fade away. A few years after I re-embraced vaccinating my kids (and even became a pro-vaccine advocate), measles erupted at Disneyland, and became an epidemic. People started wising up about vaccine-preventable disease risks. California, where I live, quickly banned personal and religious vaccine exemptions. The media stopped hedging on vaccine concerns, and started reminding readers and viewers that vaccines are incredibly safe and well-tested. And I thought we’d entered a post anti-vaxxer era.
Except the COVID epidemic of 2020 brought on a new torrent of vaccine misinformation-mongering. And now we have the incoming administration of 2025, in which both the president elect and his Health and Human Services secretary nominee are not only openly hostile to vaccines, but have resurrected the settled autism-vaccine topic as somehow worth renewed scrutiny. This is not a time for pro-vaccine complacency.
Too many people make critical health decisions for their children based on the opinions of celebrities and regressive, conspiracy theory-flogging politicians rather than pediatricians. I’m asking you to help right the balance, to ensure that science-based viewpoints counter earnest but misinformed sensationalism in the autism—and parenting—communities’ information flows.
I know that some people will never vaccinate their kids, no matter the argument or evidence. I also know some kids can’t be vaccinated due to health issues, or because they’re too young. Herd immunity will compensate, will keep the unvaccinated kids safe from disease if enough other children get vaccinated. That is why we must reach out and talk to parents who are still formulating their vaccines opinions, to educate with facts rather than furor, to have the confidence to spread the word about what we know, and to topple the wall of harm that anti-vaccinationists have erected.
This essay was originally published in 2010. It was rewritten out of shock and horror over the vaccine misinformation spewing from the incoming 2025 U.S. administration.
