The head of the National Institutes of Health admitted that he doesn’t think vaccines cause autism, unlike his boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, 58, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday. There, ranking member Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank, “Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?”
After trying to hedge and say he did not believe the measles vaccine causes autism, he finally admitted, “I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism.”
The statement is a stark contrast to the beliefs of HHS Secretary Kennedy, who has spent much of his first year leading the Department of Health and Human Services pushing unproven theories that vaccines cause autism (Kennedy has also baselessly claimed that circumcision and Tylenol cause autism).
Kennedy has made combating autism one of the major focuses of his reign as HHS Secretary, though his critics have said his focus is based on anti-vax conspiracies rather than established science around the condition.
Last week, Kennedy overhauled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, a federal advisory board on autism research, filling it with various vaccine skeptics. Alison Singer, the head of the Autism Science Foundation, told the New York Times that the new committee “disproportionately, excruciatingly so, represents an extremely small subset of families who believe vaccines cause autism.”
Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya was vocally pro-vaccine during Tuesday’s hearing. Discussing the measles outbreak in the United States, he said, “I am absolutely convinced that the measles epidemic that we are seeing currently is best solved by parents vaccinating their children for measles.”
The United States is currently facing measles outbreaks in states with low vaccination rates. In March, 2025, Kennedy, 72, trashed the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine to Sean Hannity, saying its effectiveness “wanes” over time and said it is the cause of “all cases” of the illness. Then, in May, he ordered the Centers for Disease Control to investigate taking vitamin A to treat the disease. Doctors have said vitamin A can only be a supplement to help with measles, not a miracle cure.
Bhattacharya raised his national profile among conservative politicians by downplaying the severity of COVID-19 and criticizing COVID-19 health protocols, like lockdowns. His conservative-friendly theories earned him the praise of MAGA figures like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and tech moguls Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
As NIH director, he praised rolling back COVID vaccine guidelines for healthy children and pregnant women, calling it “good science.”
Kennedy has already purged health agencies of doctors who have dared oppose his conspiratorial ideas. In June last year, he fired the entire Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on vaccine efficiency, and stuffed it with anti-vax members. He also demanded CDC head Susan Monarez back his vaccine policies and purge those who refused. Monarez was fired in August for resisting Kennedy.
