SACRAMENTO, Nov 26 (Xinhua/APP): California Governor Gavin Newsom and the West Coast Health Alliance declared Tuesday that vaccines are not linked to autism, reaffirming science-based health guidance after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) altered its position on the contentious issue.
The West Coast Health Alliance, comprised of California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, emphasized that “rigorous research of millions of people in multiple countries over decades provides high-quality evidence that vaccines are not linked to autism,” said Governor Newsom’s office in a statement.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally instructed the CDC to revise its website on Nov. 19. The updated CDC page then asserted that the claim “vaccines do not cause autism” was “not evidence-based.”
Kennedy has opposed vaccines since at least 2005, when he published an “error-laden story” in Rolling Stone and Salon claiming that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in vaccines caused autism, said the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Salon retracted the article on Jan. 16, 2011, acknowledging multiple inaccuracies. According to STAT News, Kennedy’s thimerosal theory “defies logic because the MMR vaccine never contained thimerosal.”
“Americans deserve public health guidance grounded in science, not opinions,” Governor Newsom stated. Kennedy cited gaps in vaccine safety research as justification for the change, but The New York Times reported that he acknowledged that “extensive epidemiological research has found no connection to autism.”
Medical experts expressed serious alarm about the CDC’s new instruction. According to KFF Health News, doctors and scientists said the latest change “sparked a torrent of anger and anguish” and that Kennedy was “wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence.”
Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people, reported KFF Health News, all concluding there is no connection between vaccines and autism.
Measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000 following successful vaccination efforts, according to CDC data. However, as of Nov. 18, 2025, a total of 1,753 confirmed measles cases were reported nationwide, marking the highest number since 1992. Among reported cases, 92 percent of patients were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.