By Ahmed Aboulenein and Robin Respaut
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intends to award the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute a single-source contract for investigating the association between vaccines and autism prevalence, a government website posting showed.
The posting to the U.S. government’s official website for posting and managing federal contracting opportunities, SAM.gov, was made by the CDC Office of Acquisition Services and went up late on Thursday. Single-source contracts are those issued without a competitive bidding process.
“The vendor has (the) unique ability to link children to maternal cohorts using proprietary databases and de-identified data sets, enabling advanced statistical analyses within the project’s timeframe,” the posting said.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, and RPI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has for years promoted a theory, contrary to scientific evidence, that childhood vaccines are a cause of autism.
Kennedy has promised a report this month that will reveal new information about autism’s causes. The report is part of a wider push that aims to identify the cause involving the CDC, as well as a $50 million National Institutes of Health study, and a data initiative involving Medicare claims data.
RPI’s past work includes an experimental blood test to detect autism in children. Its developers say the test can detect the condition in more than 96% of cases, speeding up diagnosis. It has also conducted a project on using artificial intelligence to analyze autism data.
Both were led by Juergen Hahn, director of the Jackson Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI and a professor in its Department of Biomedical Engineering. The contract notice did not say who would lead the work.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington and Robin Respaut in San Francisco; Editing by Mark Porter, Rod Nickel)
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