The Record
Reporting, posts and video from the researchers, physicians and organizations leading this fight, in one place. Every item links to the original. Items marked AJF Original are our own reporting.
12 stories from CDC
The administration promised a hard look at what causes autism. The money is now committed, and it is worth being precise about where it went: the largest federal award pool of the year funds thirteen projects, and not one of them studies vaccines. The vaccine question sits with a separate, much smaller contract that has yet to report anything.
The autism-vaccine question is no longer confined to advocacy conferences. It now surfaces in sworn testimony before House and Senate committees, and how the Secretary and other nominees answer under oath goes straight into the public record.
The birth-dose recommendation has been a fixture of the U.S. schedule since 1991. Rolling it back is the most concrete change yet to the schedule the reform movement has spent decades questioning, and it happened through the reconstituted ACIP.
For years the CDC's flat statement that vaccines do not cause autism anchored the mainstream position. The agency editing that page, while keeping the old header under an asterisk, is a concrete institutional shift, and the fight over the wording is itself the story.
Reform advocates point to 1999 as the moment the government itself conceded there was a mercury-exposure problem worth acting on, the historical foundation of the modern causation argument.
The first concrete schedule change from Kennedy’s reconstituted advisory committee, evidence that the personnel changes at CDC are already reshaping what shots children are recommended to receive.
The vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparison is the study design the reform movement has demanded for years. In 2025 that line of research was placed directly into the congressional record.
The clearest public account, under oath, of how far Kennedy has moved to remake the federal vaccine-advisory apparatus, and of the bipartisan resistance he faces.
WatchThe film is the Foundation’s central public-outreach vehicle, the piece screening at its launch, and the most widely seen argument for reexamining the 2004 CDC MMR data.
A single-source federal contract to re-examine vaccines and autism prevalence signals how far the administration’s research agenda has shifted, and puts a named principal investigator on the record.
This press conference set the administration’s frame: that the autism rise is not an artifact of better screening but a preventable epidemic with environmental causes, the premise behind every action that followed.
The prevalence number is the factual backdrop to the entire debate. Whether one reads the rise as better detection or a real increase, 1 in 31 is the figure the reform movement and its critics are arguing about, so the Foundation reports it precisely.