The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has hired anti-vaccine activist and author Mark Blaxill as a senior adviser, according to three current and former senior CDC officials and an internal profile reviewed by MSNBC.
Neither a physician nor a scientist, Blaxill claims without evidence that every child who takes vaccines is in some way injured, and has written books and articles promoting the disproven claim that childhood shots cause a broad range of health conditions and that autism is a consequence purely of environmental exposures. Blaxill once helped lead the advocacy group, SafeMinds, which funded research aimed at proving a link between vaccines and autism and served as editor-at-large of the anti-vaccine website, Age of Autism. Blaxill has long and wrongly blamed thimerosal, a preservative in some vaccines, for what he calls an autism “epidemic.” His claims have been refuted by decades of rigorous research. The Institute of Medicine officially rejected any causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism in 2004.
Blaxill’s quiet hiring is the latest in a series of staffing moves by Kennedy aimed at reshaping federal vaccine policy.
Blaxhill’s role and remit at CDC is unclear. The internal profile showed he will be working directly under CDC chief of staff Matthew Buzzelli. One of the senior CDC officials said Blaxill’s name had been floated for weeks as a potential leader for a program that tracks autism within the Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
The current and former CDC officials were granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.
Blaxill’s employment began last week, according to his internal profile. His hiring comes before the expected release of a report on autism and on the heels of President Donald Trump signaling that autism, its causes and treatments, would be a defining policy of the administration. On Monday, flanked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump made false claims linking autism to childhood vaccines and Tylenol use during pregnancy.
Blaxill’s quiet hiring is the latest in a series of staffing moves by Kennedy aimed at reshaping federal vaccine policy by ousting experts and installing former employees and longtime allies from the anti-vaccine movement.
“So Blaxill will join RFK Jr.’s inner circle,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and a vocal critic of Kennedy. “These are people who believe what Kennedy believes, that want to to promote an agenda, that vaccines cause autism. And so Mark Blaxill will be perfect, right?”
Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, previously worked for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded. In February, Stuart Burns, a former congressional aide and key ally of the anti-vaccine movement in the 1990s, was named senior adviser to the CDC director and has been managing Kennedy’s vaccine-related projects inside the agency. David Geier, an anti-vaccine researcher who alongside his physician father conducted experiments on autistic children, was hired in March to review vaccine safety data. In June, Lyn Redwood, a former president of Children’s Health Defense, joined the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Office with the title of “expert.”
Senior CDC officials who recently resigned in protest have said Kennedy doesn’t speak with career CDC officials or receive expert briefings. When asked who he consults, Kennedy named Bill Thompson, a longtime agency scientist inside the CDC’s division of viral hepatitis. Thompson is well known in the anti-vaccine movement for claims he made in phone calls to a Children’s Health Defense researcher that were recorded without his knowledge and made into the central thesis of the film “Vaxxed.” The CDC did not respond directly to the allegations in “Vaxxed”: that scientists had conspired to hide evidence of a vaccine-autism link. The primary author of the study that Thompson objected to has defended their research. “Did the CDC water down the original results?” Dr. Thomas Verstraeten asked of their work in the journal, Pediatrics, “It did not.”
Blaxill is also featured in the film, which was directed by Andrew Wakefield, a British physician whose retracted 1998 study in The Lancet helped launch the modern anti-vaccine movement.
Senior CDC officials who recently resigned in protest have said Kennedy doesn’t speak with career CDC officials or receive expert briefings.
Kennedy’s recent hires have already helped enact stark policy shifts around vaccines. According to former senior CDC leaders, Kennedy told the CDC director to work solely with his appointees, who set the agenda and determined the working groups for recent meetings of an advisory committee deciding which vaccines the CDC will recommend and on what schedule. That committee was gutted and remade with vaccine critics and activists who recently voted against flu shots containing thimerosal and declined to recommend universal Covid shots.
Blaxill, the chief financial officer for a Minnesota company that buys and sells computer servers and IT equipment, is the self-described “warrior dad” of an autistic daughter. He ran as a Republican for Congress in Minnesota in 2022 but ultimately suspended his campaign.
Blaxill did not respond to emails and voicemails requesting comment. Health and Human Services declined to respond to questions about Blaxill’s hire.
In 2012, testifying before the House Oversight Committee as a SafeMinds board member, he accused the CDC of “a cover-up” and a misplaced focus on genetics. “The Federal agencies responsible for the health of our children have failed in their duty,” Blaxill told the committee. “CDC’s negligence has led the way. Many of us believe CDC has actively covered up evidence surrounding autism’s environmental causes.”
In 2017, Blaxill urged parents in a Minneapolis Somali community in the midst of a measles outbreak not to vaccinate their children and warned them against trusting public health officials. “When you hear people from the state public health department saying there is no risk, that [vaccines] are safe, this is the sort of thing that should cause you to be skeptical,” Blaxil said, according to The Washington Post.
In a video interview posted last year by Children’s Health Defense, Blaxill asserted that “of the children that receive the recommended childhood vaccine schedule, the rate of injury is 100%,” and linked vaccines to anxiety, food allergies and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Though not a statistician or epidemiologist, Blaxill authored a 2021 paper titled “Autism Tsunami,” which projected a trillion-dollar cost to treat autism in the U.S. by 2030. Kennedy cited the paper at a recent press conference, where he exaggerated the severity of autism and parroted Blaxill’s argument that “genes do not cause epidemics.” Kennedy failed to mention that the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders had retracted Blaxill’s paper in 2023, citing misrepresentation of the incidence in autism, unrepresentative data, unjustified assumptions that inflated costs, and undisclosed conflicts of interest. Blaxill has publicly said the paper was retracted for “no good reason” and, in a formal response, said it was targeted for “ideological” reasons.
A formal report on the causes and answers to what Blaxill and Kennedy describe as the “autism epidemic” was expected this month. After Trump’s rushed news conference to blame Tylenol and vaccines, it’s not clear whether an official report is coming. But with Blaxill on board, any report would likely include the same disproven theories that anti-vaccine activists have spent decades promoting — this time under the CDC seal.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.