Hello, everyone. I'm JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Jonathan Cohn, and something happened over at the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, yesterday.

The CDC changed a page on its website about the link between vaccines and autism. And this page said previously,

vaccines do not cause autism.

And the new page says,

the claim, quote,

vaccines do not cause autism is not an evidence-based claim

because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant

vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.

It goes on from there.

Jonathan Cohn, I get pretty worked up over stuff like this.

So why don't you give, give me your non-worked-up view of what the fuck is going on with this thing?

I mean, it's hard not to get worked up about this.

So, I mean, there's the how this decision got made and there's the substance of what they said.

Well, let's start with the substance.

The claim that studies have been ignored, not paid attention to is just wrong.

You know, all of this, this whole discussion about autism and vaccines goes,

you know, if there's sort of the beginning of this, right, or the real sort of intellectual basis

for this was a paper by a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield that was published in The Lancet

that sort of set off this

whole, you know, it's kind of, you know, everything that has flowed since then has come,

you know, traces back, a lot of it traces back to there. And that paper was retracted. You know,

Dr. Wakefield had his medical license in Britain stripped. Nevertheless, it set off such a so much concern that over

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