Overview

• A federal notice states the CDC intends to issue a sole-source, fixed-price contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to examine the association between vaccinations and autism prevalence.
• The procurement cites RPI’s unique ability to link children to maternal cohorts using proprietary and de-identified datasets to enable analyses within the project timeframe.
• RPI acknowledged the prospective award and named biotechnology engineer Juergen Hahn as the intended lead, saying he plans to publish results if the project is funded.
• HHS did not answer questions about the contract amount or methodology, and autism researchers questioned both the need to revisit the topic and RPI as an obvious choice.
• Access to CDC vaccine-safety datasets may constrain the work because legacy contracts give multiple outside organizations control of the underlying data, according to reporting.