Personal vaccine may reduce risk of pancreatic cancer returning after surgery, small study finds

(NEW YORK) — Meta — the company that operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp –announced on Tuesday it was ending third-party fact-checking.

Some social media policy experts and public health experts are worried that the end of fact-checking could lead to the spread of medical and science misinformation and disinformation. This is especially worrisome as the U.S. is in the throes of respiratory virus season and is fighting the spread of bird flu.

“There’s going to be a rise in all kinds of disinformation, misinformation, from health to hate speech and everything in between,” Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics and open-source intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told ABC News. “[Health] is supposed to be a nonpartisan issue, and … we do see people trying to leverage health [misinformation], in particular, toward a political end, and that’s a real shame.”

“I’m hopeful, but I’m also concerned that this new structure that all the Meta properties are embarking on, it’s just not going to end well,” she added.

The social network giant said it was following the footsteps of X, replacing the program with user-added community notes.

In a press release of the announcement, Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer for Meta, said that the choices about what was being fact-checked showed “biases and perspectives.”

How fact-checking, community notes work

Meta started fact-checking in December 2016. Meta’s fact-checking works by Meta staff identifying hoaxes or by using technology that detects posts likely to contain misinformation. The fact-checkers then conduct their own reporting to review and rate the accuracy of posts.

If a piece of content is identified as false, it receives a warning label and the content’s distribution is reduced so fewer people see it.

Fact-checkers put in place following Donald Trump’s 2016 election win were found to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted by the company.

By comparison, community notes work by a user adding context to a post that may be misleading. It is then upvoted or downvoted by other users.

Zeve Sanderson, executive director of NYU Center for Social Media Politics, said after the 2016 election, there was immense pressure for social medial platforms, including Meta, to commit resources to combatting misinformation.

Following the election, most posts being fact-checked were to combat political misinformation, according to Sanderson. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this was expanded to combat medical misinformation, he said.

Sanderson said there were a lot of claims going unchecked online because Meta has not had enough fact-checkers to check every post. Additionally, he said some people didn’t trust fact-checkers.

“There were groups of people online who didn’t trust fact checkers, who saw them as biased, often in a liberal direction,” he told ABC News. “This crowd-sourced content moderation program … it’s going to do different things well and different things poorly. We just don’t know how this is actually going to work in practice.”

Meta referred ABC News back to its Tuesday announcement in response to a request for comment on plans for its community notes or potential spread of misinformation.

Spread of misinformation during COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions were exposed to a deluge of information including news, research, public health guidance and fact sheets, which the World Health Organization referred to as an “infodemic.”

People were also exposed to misinformation and disinformation about what treatments work against COVID-19, how much of a risk the virus poses to children and whether COVID-19 vaccines are effective.

A 2023 KFF survey found that most Americans were not sure if health information they had encountered was true or false.

A report from the U.S. Surgeon General in 2021 found that misinformation led to people rejecting masking and social distancing, using unproven treatment and rejecting COVID-19 vaccines.

Experts told ABC News that members of the general public often do not have enough health literacy to determine if they should trust or not trust information they encounter online or on social media.

Squire said sometimes government agencies do not put out information in an “interesting” format, which may lead people to click on “entertaining” content from misinformation and disinformation peddlers.

“Some of these YouTube videos about health misinformation are a lot more entertaining. Their message just travels faster,” she said. “When you’re presenting scientific information — I know this firsthand as a former college professor — that’s a struggle. You have to be pretty talented at it and, a lot of times, where the expertise lies is not necessarily where the most expedient, fun videos are and stuff.”

How to combat health misinformation

Meta’s change comes as the U.S. faces an increase in bird flu cases and continues treating patients falling ill with respiratory illnesses.

As of Jan. 8, there have been 66 human cases of bird flu reported in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s also flu season. As of the week ending Dec. 28, 2024, there have been at least 5.3 million illnesses, 63,000 hospitalizations and 2,700 deaths from flu so far this season, according to CDC estimates.

Meanwhile, health care professionals have been encouraging Americans to get their flu shot and other vaccines — including COVID and RSV — to protect themselves against serious disease.

Experts are worried that with the change from fact-checking to community notes that misinformation could spread about the effectiveness of vaccines or how serious an illness is.

“I am concerned about the sheer amount of inaccurate information that’s out there,” Dr. Brian Southwell, a distinguished Fellow at nonprofit research institute RTI International and an adjunct faculty member at Duke University, told ABC News. “That’s something that you know ought to bother all of us as we’re trying to make good decisions. But there’s a lot that could be done, even beyond, you know, the realm of social media to try to improve the information environments that are available for people.”

Southwell said one thing that public health experts and federal health agencies can do is to get an idea of the questions that users are going to have about medical topics — such as bird flu and seasonal flu — and be ready with information to answer those questions online.

To combat being exposed to information, the experts recommended paying attention to where the information is coming from, whether it’s a respected source or someone you are unfamiliar with.

“There are various skills that are important, things like lateral reading, where rather than just evaluating the claim, you do research about the source of that claim and what you can find out about them to understand what some of their incentives or track record might be,” Sanderson said.

“This is obviously something that, sadly, social media platforms are not designed in order to incentivize this sort of behavior, so the responsibility is thrust on users to sort of look out for themselves,” he added.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — In his first public comments on the measles outbreak hitting West Texas and New Mexico, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic whose first steps in combatting the outbreak will be closely watched, said his department was monitoring the situation daily but called it “not unusual.”

“Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year there were 16. So, it’s not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year,” Kennedy said Wednesday at the White House.

However, some public health experts were quick to point out that the outbreak in Texas has defied America’s recent history with highly contagious disease.

Prior to this outbreak, the U.S. had not seen a death from measles since 2015. And in 2000, years after the U.S. implemented a two-dose vaccine schedule, measles was declared eliminated from the U.S., meaning that the disease had stopped spreading within the country.

Only in recent years have cases and outbreaks been rising, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico is already drawing close to the halfway mark of total cases seen nationally last year, when there were at least 285 cases of measles – which were also the highest numbers since 2019, according to the CDC’s latest figures.

And while there were 16 outbreaks last year, that was a four-time increase from the number of outbreaks in 2023, when there were just four outbreaks. The U.S. has nearly hit that 2023 number already, just two months into 2025.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called Kennedy’s comments about measles cases happening “every year” an attempt to normalize an outbreak that has been anything but normal.

“First of all, we eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000. The reason measles have come back is because a critical percentage of parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children, because they’ve gotten misinformation and disinformation from people like him and his Children’s Health Defense,” Offit told ABC News.

Children’s Health Defense, a group founded by Kennedy, advocates against the recommended vaccine schedule for children.

“It’s unconscionable enough that he’s done that, but that he sort of glibly says, well, measles outbreaks occur every year — the point is they don’t have to occur at all, because we’ve shown we could eliminate this disease,” Offit said.

ABC News has reached out to HHS about RFK Jr.’s comments.

The increase in cases and outbreaks over the last few years coincides with decreasing vaccination coverage for measles among kindergarteners nationally from 95.2% during the 2019-2020 school year to 92.7% in the 2023-2024 school year – leaving about 280,000 kindergartners at risk, according to the CDC.

Kennedy, prior to taking his role as HHS secretary, said the measles vaccine is effective at preventing measles, but has also suggested that it’s not necessary because people who die from measles are typically malnourished or have other comorbidities.

“The measles vaccine definitely eliminates measles, or, you know, close to eliminates it,” Kennedy said in 2022.

But he went on to question the deadliness of the disease.

“In 1963, it was killing only 400 kids a year. Mainly, they were kids who had malnutrition, or had some other devastating co-morbidity,” Kennedy said. “Those were the kids who were dying.”

Kennedy has also questioned that the deaths of 83 people – mostly young children – in Samoa in 2019 were caused by measles, despite widespread evidence that the deaths were due to an outbreak of the disease caused by under-vaccination in the American territory.

“Nobody died in Samoa from measles. They were dying from a bad vaccine,” Kennedy told an interviewer last year.

20% of kids with measles in the U.S. require hospitalization, said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, often for measles pneumonia, measles diarrhea, measles encephalitis or deafness from measles otitis, an ear infection — many of which can be life-threatening conditions.

“This is a bad, bad actor. And I’m really concerned that this thing is continuing to accelerate and expand,” Hotez said Wednesday night in an interview on MSNBC.

Doctors in West Texas have described shock and feaver-treating a disease they thought was something of the past.

“This is the first time I’ve had any professional experience with a measles outbreak,” Dr. Lara Johnson, pediatrician and Chief Medical Officer at Covenant Children’s and Covenant Health in Lubbock, who is currently treating measles patients from the outbreak in West Texas, told ABC news.

“I saw one travel-related case when I was in medical school, very briefly, but at that time, back in around 2000, we really thought that we’d eradicated measles from the United States and didn’t have any anticipation of seeing any outbreaks here,” she said.

The outbreak in Texas is a prime example of the risk posed to unvaccinated communities. Vaccine exemptions among children in Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, have grown dramatically in the past few years. Roughly 7.5% of kindergarteners had filed an exemption for at least one vaccine in 2013. 10 years later, that number rose to over 17.5% – one of the highest in all of Texas, state health data shows.

As the response to the outbreak in Texas and New Mexico continues, with cases expected to significantly rise, public health experts like Hotez and Offit say they’re watching Kennedy, as leader of the nation’s health department, to encourage swift surveillance and widespread vaccination.

“I want him to say to the American public that there’s a safe way to prevent these outbreaks from happening so that we don’t have the tragedy like what just happened in West Texas,” Offit said. “There’s so much in medicine you don’t know. There’s so much we can’t do. This we know. This we can do.”

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — During his confirmation hearings two weeks ago to lead the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeated several unfounded claims about autism.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has made money through books, speeches and lawsuits while sharing vaccine skepticism, refused to say that vaccines don’t cause autism despite many high-quality studies finding no such link.

He stated during the hearing that autism rates have “have gone from 1 in 10,000 … and today in our children, it’s one in 34.” His claims have been repeated by President Donald Trump on Truth Social.

It’s unclear where Kennedy got his 1 in 10,000 statistic. In 2000, approximately 1 in 150 children in the U.S. born in 1992 were diagnosed with autism compared with 2020, during which one in 36 children born in 2012 were diagnosed, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some psychiatrists and autism experts told ABC News it’s important to highlight the rising rates of autism, and that at least Kennedy is putting a spotlight on it.

“On the bright side, I think it is really important to place an emphasis on these very high rates, it’s kind of great putting a spotlight on autism, these increased rates,” Dr. Karen Pierce, a professor in the department of neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego and co-director of the UCSD Autism Center of Excellence, told ABC News. “We need more funding. We need more infrastructure to support everybody who is now recognized as on the spectrum. So, I think that that’s actually a really good thing.”

However, the experts said Kennedy and others are missing important context about why autism rates are increasing. They say reasons may include a combination of widening of the definition of the spectrum and of types of symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as people having children at older ages, better awareness and access to diagnostic testing.

“With the rates increasing, there certainly are valid reasons for that,” Pierce said. “There’s better awareness, and doctors can find autism a lot easier than they could before in the past…. and I think a very big reason is just better record keeping nowadays and easier access to reviewing records.”

What is autism?

ASD is a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain, according to the CDC.

People with ASD often communicate, interact, behave and learn differently, the CDC says. ASD symptoms typically begin before age 3 and can last a lifetime, although symptoms may change over time.

“There can be differences in how one is reading social cues and interpreting them, and then there’s also certain behaviors that we see,” Dr. Anna Krasno, clinical director of the Koegel Autism Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told ABC News.

“So those include a preference for sameness, a difficulty with transitioning, some cognitive and behavioral rigidity,” she continued. “We also see intense interests, so topics that people are super, super into and want to research, repetitive speech and motor movements. And then we also see really significant sensory differences as well.”

ASD is a spectrum, which means symptoms vary by person — some need little support in their daily lives and some may need a great deal of support in performing day-to-day activities. Some may have advanced conversation skills and others may be nonverbal.

Wider recognition, better understanding

Experts told ABC News there is a wider recognition and a better understanding of what is now understood as autism/ASD.

In the early 1900s, autism was described as a symptom of the most severe cases of schizophrenia, and it was considered a psychiatric disorder for many years.

Traits of what is now known as ASD are built on early observations in the 1940s from Austrian-American psychiatrist Dr. Leo Kanner and Austrian physician Dr. Hans Asperger.

A 1943 paper from Kanner described 11 children who presented with “inborn autistic disturbances of affective contact” while Asperger’s 1944 report focused on boys who had marked social difficulties; unusual, circumscribed interests; and good verbal skills.

It was not until 1978 that autism was recognized as a developmental disorder distinct from schizophrenia by the World Health Organization. It was also in the 1970s that psychologists and psychiatrists first came to describe autism as a spectrum.

“When autism was first described, it was new to people understanding that there was a condition that included social communication difficulties and restricted and repetitive behavior, and people primarily only recognized it when it was at its most extreme,” Dr. Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele, division director in child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University, told ABC News.

“And so, if you go back and read the initial descriptions today, those are kids who we would recognize in the waiting room, recognize in the grocery store, in whom autism would be very obvious and would not require much assessment in order to diagnose,” he continued.

Better diagnostic tools

Experts say another reason for the increase in rates is having better diagnostic tools than what was available decades ago.

There is no single tool used as the basis of an ASD diagnosis. Typically, tools rely on descriptions from parents or caregivers of a child’s development and a professional’s observation of a child’s behavior, according to the CDC.

Currently, the Autism Society encourages all children to be screened for signs of autism by their family pediatrician three times by the age of three — at nine, 18, and 24 or 30 months. If a child shows symptoms of ASD, more rigorous diagnostic testing can be carried out by a specialist including a full neuropsychological exam.

Additionally, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) provides standard criteria for helping diagnose autism.

Under DSM-5, a child meets the criteria if they have deficits in three areas of social communication and interaction and at least two of four types of restricted, repetitive behaviors.

While the first edition of DSM came out in 1952, it was not until the third edition, DSM-3, in which autism was listed under an entirely new “class” of conditions — the Pervasive Developmental Disorders.

Veenstra-VanderWeele said the change in the criteria is another reason why the number of those diagnosed with autism rose. He likened it to changing the definition of what it means to be tall.

“To just use a crude example, if you would define somebody as tall if they were over six-foot-six, and then 30 years later, say that somebody is tall if they’re over five-foot-10, you’d get very, very different numbers, and that’s part of what’s happened here,” he said.

Pierce added that because of limited knowledge and awareness in the past, there may have been many children who were underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed.

“It’s understandable that people wouldn’t even necessarily think that somebody has autism, because nobody knew what really autism was,” she said. “So, you know, large numbers of people were just put in the books as just having special education needs, maybe as a language delay or of having a cognitive impairment.”

Older reproductive age

Some studies have suggested that people who become pregnant at an older age have an increased risk of giving birth to a child with autism.

A 2012 review and meta-analysis of 16 papers from researchers in New York, London, Israel and Sweden found an association between advanced maternal age and the risk of autism.

Advanced paternal age may also be a risk factor. A 2006 study conducted jointly by researchers in New York, London and Israel found that men who were above age 40 were 5.75 times more likely to have a child with ASD compared to men younger than age 30 after controlling for other factors.

However, questions still swirl about whether or not there is a risk from the age of parents, and not all researchers are convinced.

“I know that there is some research looking at maternal and paternal age with regard to autism, and there’s research around environmental causes,” Krasno said. “I think where I always firmly land is that it is inherited, and it is genetic. So, I don’t know the exact correlation between age and diagnostic rate, but we do know that genetics are highly associated with diagnosis.”

Environmental risk factors

Researchers are also divided over whether or not environmental risk factors play a role in causing autism.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says the “clearest evidence” involves events before and during birth, including prenatal exposure to air pollution or pesticides; maternal obesity or diabetes; extreme prematurity; and periods of oxygen deprivation to the brain during birth.

“But these factors alone are unlikely to cause autism. Rather, they appear to increase a child’s likelihood for developing autism when combined with genetic factors,” NIEHS states on its website.

Pierce said from the studies she’s read, evidence suggests autism is a genetic condition. She added the environmental factors may play a role but “to a small degree.”

Myth that vaccines cause autism

The myth that vaccines cause autism was born out of a fraudulent 1998 study, hypothesizing that the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine caused intestinal inflammation, which, in turn, led to the development of autism.

The paper has since been discredited by health experts, retracted from the journal in which it was published, and its primary author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license after an investigation found he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research.

More than a dozen high-quality studies have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.

However, Kennedy has held fast to this claim, saying during a 2023 interview on Fox News that he believes autism comes from vaccines.

During the HHS confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he was not “anti-vaccine” but “pro-safety.” At the same time, Kennedy repeatedly refused throughout the hearings to say that vaccines were not linked to autism, while still insisting he supports vaccination in general.

Experts told ABC News there is no evidence to suggest a link between vaccines and autism, and perpetuating the myth can be dangerous.

“Once there’s a lie and it’s spread, it doesn’t matter that it’s a lie. Once people hear it, then they believe that it’s true despite all of the Herculean efforts to disprove it and debunk it,” Pierce said. “There’s no evidence for it whatsoever, and there’s actually extremely, as far as scientific evidence is concerned, there’s extremely strong evidence to suggest absolutely not.”

Christopher Banks, president and CEO of the Autism Society of America, said the false claim that vaccines cause autism can divert financial resources from much-needed research.

“Instead of advancing support and therapies, time and funding are wasted disproving a debunked theory,” he said. “This misinformation also fuels stigma, implying that autism is something to be feared rather than understood and supported, leading to discrimination against autistic individuals.”

ABC News’ Dr. Jade Cobern, Cheyenne Haslett and Will McDuffie contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.