CDC Plans Contract with Rensselaer Polytechnic to Study Vaccines, Autism Link

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) plans to award a sole-source contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to study a potential link between vaccines and autism, a theory widely debunked by scientific consensus. The CDC highlighted RPI's unique ability to connect children to maternal cohorts through proprietary databases, enabling advanced statistical analyses within project timelines. This move bypasses the usual competitive bidding process, which is unusual for the CDC, and the contract's financial details and timeframe have not been disclosed. The initiative aligns with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s continued advocacy for investigating vaccine-autism links, despite overwhelming evidence against such a connection. Kennedy has pushed for combining federal health data to better understand autism causes and has not dismissed vaccines as a possible factor. The CDC, HHS, and RPI have yet to provide further comments on this decision.