Vaccines, Autism, and the Truth

Dr. Jessica Edwards is a board-certified family medicine physician, entrepreneur, and founder of Zahra Medical, a hybrid telehealth company improving access to affordable, high-quality primary care. A mom of two—including a son with autism—Dr. Edwards brings a powerful combination of clinical expertise and lived experience to conversations about public health, parenting, and the importance of evidence-based medicine. 

In this deeply moving and eye-opening episode of The Humanity of Fame, host Kali is joined by Dr. Jessica Edwards to discuss the resurgence of vaccine-autism myths, the dangerous impacts of misinformation, and the human cost of medical disinformation. The conversation explores the CDC’s decision to revisit a long-debunked study on vaccines and autism—despite a wealth of scientific evidence disproving any link—and how that decision impacts public trust, healthcare funding, and the lives of families like Dr. Edwards’.

Key Topics:
 • Debunking the Vaccine-Autism Myth: Why the original study linking vaccines to autism was fraudulent, and how its prolonged existence continues to fuel misinformation.
 • Public Health at Risk: How misinformation contributes to measles outbreaks, vaccine hesitancy, and preventable deaths in children.
 • Personal Journey as a Mom & Physician: Dr. Edwards shares her emotional story of her son’s autism diagnosis, navigating fear, misinformation, and ultimately choosing advocacy and science.
 • The Cost of Rehashing Debunked Science: Why revisiting discredited claims drains funding from meaningful medical research and complicates healthcare providers’ work.
 • Healing Through Advocacy: How Dr. Edwards transformed grief into empowerment, helping other parents and advocating for better autism care and awareness.

Potential Questions:
 1. Why is the CDC reexamining a vaccine-autism link that has already been debunked?
 2. What are the real dangers of vaccine hesitancy for children and public health?
 3. How did Dr. Edwards handle her child’s autism diagnosis—both as a physician and a mom?
 4. What can parents do to separate fact from fear when it comes to vaccines and health decisions?


References and Links:
 • Connect with Dr. Edwards & Zahra Medical: ZahraMedical.com
 • Learn more about autism screening and early intervention: CDC Autism Info

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Final Thoughts:
Dr. Edwards reminds us that science doesn’t need to be revisited—it needs to be respected. When misinformation circulates, lives are at risk. And when advocacy is rooted in both love and facts, real change is possible.

Find out more about Kali and the show HERE: https://humanityoffame.com/

Transcript

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So we have money to spend on revisiting a study that has already been extensively studied, but we don't have enough money to fund research on the science that actually matters.♪♪Welcome to Humanity of Fame. I'm your girl, Callie. Thank you for joining me. All right, so let's get into today's topic. Based on the initiative influenced by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed uncertainty about vaccine safety, the CDC is planning a large-scale study to reexamine the potential link between vaccines and autism, with previous studies finding no connection. This decision follows increasing measles outbreaks in Texas due to low vaccination rates. Sorry, so let's get into the article really quick. So this is according to the New York Times, okay, as it says here, CDC will investigate debunked link between vaccines and autism. In regards to chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Senator Bill Cassidy, who said that further research into any supposed link between vaccines and autism would be a waste of money and a distraction from research that might shed light on the true reason for the rise in autism rates. Goes on further to say it's been exhaustively studied, okay? And he continued and said, the more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. I have a guest here, a doctor, all right? Let me bring her up on the stage as I introduce her, okay? Dr. Jessica Edwards is a board-certified family medicine physician, entrepreneur, and founder of Zara Medical, a hybrid telehealth company transforming access to primary care, all right? Passionate about making healthcare more affordable and convenient, she's on a mission to break down barriers like long wait times and confusing insurance rules. Beyond medicine, she is a mom of two, including a child with autism, a wife, and a business leader who loves real conversations about everyday challenges in healthcare, all right? Welcome to Humanity of Fame, just Dr. Edwards, okay? How are you? I'm doing well, thank you. How are you? Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, no problem. Thank you for joining me. I wanna get into this topic because we've heard things going back and forth and the conversations about autism and vaccines, all of these things we hear about every now and then. And now here we are again under this current administration. So I sort of wanna talk, not sort of, I wanna talk about that as well as things that can be considered misinformation. That's dangerous, especially when it comes to our children, right? So that, excuse me, multiple studies have found no link between vaccines and autism. What is your take on the CDC revisiting this issue? Yeah, I think the CDC revisiting this issue really reflects the fact that, I feel like in certain administrations such as this one, oftentimes, it's very disappointing when you see that the government sort of shifts focus. It either happens every four to eight years, you see the focus just completely shift. And so, I'd probably say before 2008, mid 2000s, the government agency stayed, the government agencies really, no matter who was in office, the major things that kind of changed were, defense, immigration, crime, those were kind of like the big three, they were really focused on healthcare was not usually on the table. Health policy wasn't really on the table because there wasn't a lot of confusion about that. But I would say, with this being re-evaluated, I would totally agree with Dr. Cassidy when I say that this has been studied extensively. I think you also have to go back to the root of the issue and follow the money. So, listen, I, I think that's what the FDA brings out because I would say, the study that was published back in 1998 was the Wakefield study. And it was 12 children that were studied in the US. It was in the Lancet. And basically, he studied 12 children and he was actually paid by lawyers that were trying to sue vaccine pharmaceutical companies. He didn't have a control. He manipulated the data, the follow-up studies that were done after he published his paper with over 600 plus thousand Danish children. There's no link. Wow. No link. And so, I think part of the problem happened in three ways. One, it took the Lancet almost, how many years was that? Like 10, 12 years to retract that paper. To do what? To retract it? Retract it. It was published in 1998. First of all, who even allowed that to be published? If I tried to publish something in, I don't care what medical journal it is, they're gonna wanna know my research methods, all the things that I did, and it shouldn't have even been studied. But it took 12 years for it to be fully retracted. This doctor lost his license. He sued, all of this sort of stuff. Because of that long period of time where things just lapsed, where nothing was done, there was no real rebuttal or anything like that, there was all of these conspiracy theories that started to come out from non-scientists trying to compare vaccines causing autism rather than causation when it came to screening for autism more. The other thing that I look at is in 2010, that's when the MCHAT, which is the autism screen that's done for children at 15 months, and I believe again at 30 months, was created to actually start screening for autism earlier. So as more screening was done, more autism was identified earlier. And so a lot of people have started to associate that with, oh, my child got their vaccine or their MMR vaccines at 12 months, now they have autism three months later. Wow. So we're good. The fact that that paper, that study was allowed to exist for 12 years without being retracted or it taking 12 years for it to be retracted, that information just sat there for years. Years. For those who were invested in that type of information to pull from and use it as some sort of evidence and factual data. Wow, wow. Okay, okay. All right, let's keep going. All right. When some of these investigations are put out there, how does it influence our perception? I think it influences our perception by thinking something is wrong. If I was not in the medical field and I had a child with autism and I'm sitting here looking at, oh, they're studying the MMR vaccine versus, oh my gosh, do you think the MMR vaccine caused my, and you know what happens is we start asking friends and family and internet and doctors. Yes. Yes. You can diagnose yourself, you can diagnose yourself real fast, Dr. Google. You already get, I tell my patients, listen, if you have a medical question, I would much rather you come to me with it because by the time you go on Google and talk about, you know, even in chat, you go in there and you type, you know, what does this symptom particularly mean? You're already like dead. They're gonna say dead. They're gonna mention that cancer, death. And I'm like, it's not, it's sometimes too much information is not good, right? So when you start to have a focus on a vaccine that's been around since the seventies, extensively studied, has not caused any deaths, has saved lives and prevented outbreaks like the ones that are happening now. And you see people like RF Kennedy double back and say, you've got to send them vaccines. Duh, they should have had them from the beginning. But then you also have people that are so blinded by the fact that this one study, compared to all of the other ones, like I was reading the article about, I guess one of the young children in the, I think it's the Ammonite population in West Texas that didn't believe in vaccine. And that's where it kind of ramped up. Their parents said, oh, they're in a better place now. We still don't change our mind about vaccines. So sometimes you can't fix people's opinions. And once that information is out there, you can't reverse it and it's dangerous. And so what happens is you happen over time, more generations are born and people are passing down this information. You have celebrities, I'll leave them a name. I don't want to be sued, no smoke. People are like, yeah, vaccines caused my child's autism. And even before social media, they had a lot of people listening to them. They're telling this on dates. Shows talking about it. It creates mistrust. And so it basically, in addition to all of the insurance issues, we can talk about that another day, happy to get on and talk to you about that, are a harder job for healthcare providers. Because you're sitting up here talking to people and you're like, hey, your child's gonna be going to daycare. They're 12 months. They should get these vaccines. I've always been a part of the proponent. You don't have to get all of them at one time if you don't want to. It's not my job to try to tell you when you have to get them. This is what's recommended. If you have hesitancy about getting too many at one time, let's make a plan together. It's making our jobs harder, to be honest with you. You have a lot of patients who are sending in questions and asking this sort of stuff. And so it continues to fuel baseless, wasteful spending when NIH grant funding is being cut. I was just reading an article today that five of the largest academic hospital systems in Massachusetts, which has some of the best healthcare outcomes in the country, are having to lay off people because the NIH grants are being funded. So we have money to spend on revisiting a study that has already been extensively studied, but we don't have enough money to fund research on the science that actually matters. I'll circle back, I guarantee you. As we keep going, let's move on. Okay, so with rising measles cases due to low vaccination rates, what are the real risks of vaccine hesitancy? The real risk of vaccine hesitancy is catching things too late. I'm in a lot of physician groups on Facebook. You see a lot of people like, hey, my child has this red dot on their arm. They go to daycare and then they post a picture two days later, it's football and measles. And they're like, measles. So people wait too late. They wait too late to take their child into the doctor. You have children that are dying from it. And we know that measles kills. We know that the mumps can actually cause infertility in men, it can actually cause infertility in women. Let me pause there, mumps. If they don't get the vaccination as a child, later in life, it can cause levels of infertility or cases of infertility. It can cause orchitis basically. So if you get a case of the mumps virus and it can be a complication where the testicle gets inflamed and it can cause an infection that can cause infertility. Wow. Okay, I didn't mean to stop you. That just caught my ear. Go ahead, go ahead though. And same thing with rubella. So rubella is a congenital disease. When I was in medical school, there were the torch diseases that can be passed from mother to child. And so with rubella, it can cause blindness. It can cause deafness. It can cause all other sort of things, toxic lesbians, like it's insanity, the type of neurologic changes that can happen in children because of that. And so while these methods of transmission are all sort of like different, it's still the same. There's a big risk of taking a chance of having a lifelong or even potentially life ending complication because people waited too late. They didn't get it. I've heard a lot of people talk about, oh, vitamin A is helpful. Yes, vitamin A is helpful in an indirect way because it helps the immune system to help fight back, but it's not enough. It's not a treatment. We haven't discovered a cure for the measles. So back to my point, we're studying the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. I'm wondering if there was any sort of parent groups that are anti-vaccine that might have advocated. It's been, I've said this on multiple podcasts, it's been pay to play since January. To be studying that, but not how do we cure measles? How do we prevent measles? It's a problem. Then I'm thinking about what the article stated that, I mean, it's been debunked over and over several, several times and we're going back to, we are revisiting something that has already been investigated and debunked, but then we have the rising measles cases and where is the funding for that or toward that or investigating that versus going backwards to something that has already been debunked. Right. I will tell you this too. And this is not any shade to RFK Jr., nothing but respect for him and his family, but he does have a nonprofit that was led, the Children's Health Defense. They filed over 30 in federal, no, sorry, 30 federal and state lawsuits challenging vaccines. He did that before he was confirmed. This has been done since 2020. So you're filing lawsuits against, I'll just leave that there. Sometimes you have to visit, you say it and just let it sit there and just let it marinate and just let it cook. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that. So now as a doctor and a parent of an autistic child who is vaccinated, how do you process the ongoing debate about the vaccines and autism? You know, I would say every parent has a moment when they find out that their child is diagnosed with autism. I had that moment. My son was diagnosed right as the COVID pandemic was starting. I remember his teacher called me and he always had issues sleeping when he was younger. We were like, man, like we just couldn't get any sleep. And then, you know, his eye contact was fine, but then his language was babbling. And so, you know, we also noticed that as he started to get closer to like one and a half when he started walking and talking, he started walking around his first birthday. So he was meeting his milestones and then once he got to that like 15 month mark, his M chat was abnormal. So then as you know, cause it was verbal basically. Okay. So his doctor was like, hey, start reading to him every night. So we were doing all this stuff and it didn't work. And then when he turned 18 months, his daycare moves him to, I guess what he was in the, I don't know, maybe he was in the bumblebee class, the newborn class. I can't remember. They moved him to like the, I think it was the monkey class. I can't remember, whatever. It was one of those little classrooms, you know, where it's for the babies that are up and moving and walking, but not quite big enough to be pre-K. Okay. So his teacher had been with him since he was an infant. I think he was like nine months old when he started going there. She said, hey, I think you should probably talk to your doctor about him. He can't seem to sit down. He's not able to participate in this stuff. I'm not a doctor. I'm not here to tell you what to do. And at the time, I just remember being irritated with her. Okay. I'm going to be fully transparent. I remember like, you're saying is wrong with my child, but deep down, I knew something wasn't right. Okay. Okay. So at the time I react and I'm like, you know what? Well, if you handle my child, we're going to take him out of this daycare. We're going to, you know, and so we. Keep going. Miss Cece, I apologize on air today to you. I appreciate it. You know, so, you know, so we started looking into all of this other stuff and really we ended up finding out like, hey, we took him to speech therapy. She's like, you know, I think he needs to be evaluated for autism. And so when I heard it from somebody else, I said, you know what? She's right. Then for I'm not sure what's going on. We weren't sure if it was a proxy or a speech autism. So, you know, and I think it's a lot of people don't talk about the privilege that you have being a doctor because when I was scared, I went to a group of women physicians. It was a Facebook group in the Hill Country area. We were living in the San Antonio area at the time. Posted, hey, does anybody know any developmental pediatricians who can get my son in? He doesn't need to be seen tomorrow, but I'd really like to get this going. We called a couple of places. They said 18 months. I was able to connect directly with the doctor to get us scheduled. And maybe a couple days after our appointment was scheduled, we were scheduled to go, COVID started. We got to the Children's Hospital of San Antonio. So she calls and she's like, hey, are you sure you want to bring him? You know, there are a lot of sick kids here. We're dealing with COVID. It's like, you know, ramp, you know, wrecking havoc. You know, do you? And I told her, I was like, you know what? I've heard so many mixed messages about what's going on with my child. I get COVID and I pass away tomorrow. As long as he has a good life and I know what needs to be done to help him, my husband knows what needs to be done to help him, I'm cool. I don't care at this point, right? So we go in, you know, she does all the testing. You know, they have us wait in the room and it's taken a while. So I already know what that means. You know, I'm a doctor. I'm like, oh, you know, they're putting reports, tell me what's going on. So she comes in and the moment she says autism, fine. It dropped. I cried. I remember that moment to this day. It was one of the lowest moments. And I just cried and I cried. And this was kind of right around the time that some of the, I think it was, I forgot, someone had just been killed by the police. And I was like, my son can't talk. Like, so scary. Like how, you know, it's like all these things start going through your mind. Yeah. So she let me cry for about two minutes. Okay. And she just rubbed my back. She said, I got you. You're my sister, doc. I got you. And she said, if you don't listen to anything else that I say today, take today to grieve. Okay. And tomorrow you wake up as an advocate. Well, okay. No matter what. Yeah. Cuss out whoever you got to cuss out. Yeah. You get on whoever you got to get on. Yeah. If you have to, whatever you have to do to make sure that he has the best life possible. And I did that. I love that. Love how she sort of, she gave you a sense of direction immediately. Correct. A sense of direction immediately, which switches your focus, which switches, which is sort of, she took your sadness and fueled it towards something else. When she said, grieve, but then you become an advocate. Right? Okay. So that night, well, we got in the car. He was sleeping. We were driving back. We had to drive like 45 minutes to get there. So we got on the phone with our family. We told them. And it reminds me, we just started doing research and kind of research, drinking wine, trying to listen to some, trying to just around everything. And of course I had those thoughts in my mind, like he was okay until he got the, when did things change and this and this and that. And that next morning, when I stepped outside of my own feelings, I stopped deflecting and thinking of what could I have done different? You know, maybe we shouldn't have had, you know, reproductive treatments to help get pregnant with him. Maybe we should, you know, we started thinking about this sort of stuff. Maybe he could have lived in New Jersey and Newark, you know, when we got pregnant with him or, you know, cause New Jersey has a high autism rate, et cetera. But once I really started focusing on the facts, Yeah. that left my mind instantly. And a lot of people don't get to the actual facts. They stay in the feelings. Yeah. And they start focusing on, well, you don't know my child and no, we're not taking any more vaccines and we're not going to do this. Then the child can't go to school. Then the parents frustrated because they're at home with the child all day long. They don't know how to do them. They don't have the training for it. You have states that have really crappy insurance coverage for children on the spectrum. However, I will say Texas, despite some of its flaws, I'm a born and raised Texan, I'm from Dallas. I don't live in Texas anymore. I don't plan on moving back. But one of the things I will say changed our lives is the fact that we learned that children can actually have their own health insurance plan in Texas. Wait, separate from the parents under age? Separate from the parent. We were able to buy an ACA plan for him under the marketplace insurance. And so he had a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan. It was an HMO plan. So we had to go back and forth to our doctor for everything or whatever. But he was able to get ABA therapy immediately. What is that? What type of therapy? Applied behavioral analysis. I would say in a sense, it's a bit controversial depending on where you go for it. If it's play-based, kids tend to do really well. They learn how to kind of redirect their emotions. There's a lot of sensory stuff that happens with autism. And so my child benefited from it. I can't speak on what other people's experiences were, but I also was able to give recommendations. Like I said, it wasn't always fair. I was able to get recommendations from really good ABA centers, from other doctors, pediatricians in the area, all from just a Facebook post, right? So I knew where to take my child where he was gonna do well. And he did really well. But we turned that frustration, that sadness, that just feeling this pit of guilt in our stomach, feeling like we did wrong, to just focusing. And once he was getting ready to start pre-K, we're like, listen, we've gotta figure out, we can't just have him go somewhere and we're at work all the time and we can't check on him. And so when it came time for him to go to pre-K, I made the decision while I was pregnant with my daughter. We're like, you know what? We're gonna move to a state where there is great pre-K. There's free pre-K, they have autism-specific pre-K, they've got OT, all this sort of stuff. So we moved back to New Jersey. I did residency in New Jersey. And we've been making things happen for him ever since. Okay, okay, wow. Wow, thank you for taking me through that, just hearing about your journey. Because although you are a medical doctor, you are a parent first. And you're gonna feel things. And because you're human, your mind is gonna go back and think the same thing every parent would go through, right? What could I have done? Could it have been this? Could it have been that? So again, I really like how the doctor that you consulted with put you immediately, changed your focus or switched your focus, to becoming an advocate. And so now you're dealing more with the facts and you're putting your emotions back into the facts. I was able to, I would say two things that came out of this that really aren't even related to my son. But one, one of my best friends called me, he was panicking. His son was diagnosed with autism. And I was able to have that same conversation with him, walk him off the ledge. So we ended up finding out, I was, I feel like something positive, something negative happens and something positive happens. My husband's father passed away. And they weren't really close, but he went to go to the, to meet his sister, he found out he had a sister, he didn't know he had a sister. He found out that autism runs in their family. On that side. On your husband's side of the family. Husband's side, yeah. So we were like, okay, we didn't do nothing wrong. Specifically, it's the only link to genetics, not anything that could have really prevented, right? Right, and so my husband, I felt such, I remember him calling me one night, he was out there. He's like, man, he's like, you know, I'm hanging with my sister. You know, he was like, you know, her youngest son has autism and he and I are here playing the video game. He's kicking my butt. So I'm gonna stop playing. You know, he's like, her older son has autism. He was like, they're doing fine. And you know, he was talking to his sister about, you know, just sort of like, she's like, listen, we don't treat them any different. We put them in sports, we put them in everything. And just to hear that gave me such a sense of relief, even all those years later, cause my son was probably like six at the time he was diagnosed when he was two, but it was relief. And so those things came from that, but I feel like had we gone in another direction and turned our back on the healthcare system and said, you know, we're just gonna homeschool them and we're just gonna, and I'm not saying homeschooling is wrong for anybody. I'm saying for my son, a structured learning environment in a school setting where he's in a smaller classroom size, where he's got a teacher, she is the baddest, the greatest teacher in the New York City Department of Education for first graders, for children with autism. You know, he had all the resources that he needed. And so we were, like I said, we were able to take that initial pain and turn it into something positive by just saying, you know what? We're gonna move across country. I think my daughter was like two weeks old. We drove across country in our minivan to make sure Franklin was in New Jersey by the summertime so that he could start pre-K in the fall. Wow, wow. As parents, we do what we gotta do. So we gotta go across country. That's what we're gonna do, even with a two week old baby. This was so good. I so appreciate you joining me. And for those of you who would like to contact Dr. Edwards, you can reach her at www.zahramedical.com. For those of you who are listening on the podcast that is spelled Z-A-R-A-M-E-D-I-C-A-L.com. All right. Thank you again for joining me. All right, you all have a good rest of your day. Thank you for joining me with Humanity and Fame and peace and blessings, y'all.♪♪