Autism was so narrowly defined that only 2-4 in 10,000 children received the diagnosis

Evidence

The person responsible for expanding the definition of autism, leading to a huge uptick in diagnoses, was the English child psychiatrist Lorna Wing. When she began her work in this area in the late 1950s, autism was considered such a rare, extreme, and debilitating condition that only two to four in ten thousand children received the diagnosis. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1943 by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner and, according to his definition, autistic children, though “unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities,” lived in their own worlds, engaged in repetitive motions, became obsessed with objects, often had limited speech, and struggled to perform the basics of self-care. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 668

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did the widening of the autism definition itself — a genuine diagnostic expansion — feed the perception of an ‘epidemic’ that anti-vax rhetoric then exploited?