Two federal autism developments landed on the same day, and they point in different directions. On August 27, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee voted to adopt a strategic plan that would nearly double federal autism research funding from about $390 million to about $747 million a year. Hours earlier, the journal Science published the largest molecular map of autism assembled to date, produced by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
During the committee meeting, several members and public commenters raised vaccines as a potential cause of autism, a link that large epidemiological studies have repeatedly failed to find. Vaccines do not appear in the plan that the committee adopted.
