I wonder if there’s a cross-section of parents who want their kids to be engineers (or learn to code) but not autistic, or parents who think vaccines cause autism but are fine with it because they know autistic people in their life that are doing OK. It seems like the fear response strengthens the belief, but also causes them to reject autism that isn’t very high support needs.

That said, there’s no correlation between vaccines and autism. I haven’t met a neurotypical engineer or programmer though