No link between National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, rise in autism rates | Fact check
The claim: National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act linked to increase in autism rates
A May 11 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a graph that depicts a decades-long rise in the rate of autism. The graph's title claims the rate of the condition has increased "277–fold" since 1970.
The graph includes a red arrow labeled "1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act," which points to an area on the graph that precedes a sharp rise.
"When something increases over 200-fold, it is not accidental," reads the post. "Such significant changes in a short span are intentional."
The post was liked more than 2,500 times in a week.
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Our rating: False
The increase in autism rates is a result of changes to diagnostic criteria and more public awareness, an expert said. It isn't related to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which limited manufacturer liability and created a program to compensate people for injuries caused by vaccines.
Autism rates up due to diagnostic changes, awareness
In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers led several to halt production, resulting in a shortage that concerned public health officials. It created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which pays people for injuries caused by vaccines and protects manufacturers from litigation in a no-fault system separate from the civil courts.
The program has paid about $5 billion in response to more than 10,000 vaccine-related injury claims, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which also states that "Being awarded compensation for a petition does not necessarily mean that the vaccine caused the alleged injury."
The reported autism rate in the U.S. has indeed increased in recent decades, rising from 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 36 children in 2020, according to the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, a program funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC says the explanation for that change isn't easy to pin down.
"It is unclear how much this is due to changes to the clinical definition of ASD (autism spectrum disorder), which may include more people than previous definitions, and better efforts to diagnose ASD, which would identify people with ASD who were not previously identified," the agency says in a note accompanying the year-to-year data. "However, a true change in the number of people with ASD is possible and could be due to a combination of factors."
Christina Corsello, director of clinical services for the University of North Carolina's TEACCH Autism Program, attributed the growing number of cases to the changing definition and growing awareness.
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In 1994, the DSM-IV became the first edition of the diagnostic manual to categorize autism as a spectrum, according to The Transmitter, a publication that covers neuroscience. When the DSM-5 was released in 2013, it introduced the term ‘autism spectrum disorder,’ which combined what had been multiple separate diagnoses.
"Those revisions have allowed us to capture and include children who might have more mild difficulties, more subtle difficulties and less comorbid cognitive delays or intellectual disability," Corsello said.
There is much more information about autism available to the public now than in the past, and doctors are more regularly screening children for autism, which all adds up to more children being diagnosed, she said.
Studies show no link between vaccines, autism
The post attempts to blame the autism increase on legislation that reduced liability for vaccine manufacturers, but that line of reasoning falls short since an array of studies have found no proof vaccines have any link to autism.
USA TODAY has repeatedly debunked the claim that vaccines are somehow linked to autism. Multiple studies have found no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism, according to the CDC.
The agency cites its own study that looked at the number of antigens given to children during their first two years of life. It found the number of antigens – the "substances in vaccines that cause the body’s immune system to produce disease-fighting antibodies" – was the same in children with or without autism.
In 2014, a meta-analysis of multiple studies determined that "vaccinations are not associated with the development of autism."
The post offers no proof of a connection, and the user who made it didn't respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY. It presents data on autism cases back to 1970 in making its claim of a 277-fold increase, but the CDC says there was little awareness or tracking before the 1980s, when the term autism "was used primarily to refer to autistic disorder and was thought to be rare, affecting approximately one in every 2,000 (0.5%) children." The CDC's autism monitoring program didn't start until 2000.
Corsello also said there is no link between vaccines and autism.
"There's no scientific evidence, and there have been many scientific studies to say that's not the case," she said.
Our fact-check sources:
Christina Corsello, May 15, Phone interview with USA TODAY
CDC, accessed May 15, Vaccine Safety
CDC, accessed May 15, Data & Statistics on Autism Spectrum Disorder
CDC, accessed May 15, Autism and Vaccines
CDC, accessed May 17, Autism Data Visualization Tool
Health Resources and Services Administration, accessed May 15, About the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
The Transmitter, May 9, 2018, The evolution of ‘autism’ as a diagnosis, explained
National Library of Medicine, May 9, 2015, Vaccines are not associated with autism: an evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Awareness, diagnostic changes led to rise in autism rates | Fact check
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