In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
On Thursday, RFK Jr. pledged to find the cause of autism by September. Christina Jewett at NYT:
Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and expert on environmental toxins, pointed to the current mass layoffs and cutbacks for research at Mr. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services as one reason for doubting such quick progress.
“Given that a great deal of research on autism and other pediatric diseases in hospitals and medical schools is currently coming to a halt because of federal funding cuts from H.H.S.,” he said, “it is very difficult for me to imagine what profound scientific breakthrough could be achieved between now and September.”
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“We are launching requests to scientists from all over the country and all over the world,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview on Fox News. “Everything is on the table: our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”
In the interview, Mr. Kennedy also said an important part of the effort would be to compare autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated children. It’s an angle that many scientists dismiss, saying that parents who vaccinate their children are also more likely to get a diagnosis, given higher rates of interaction with health providers.
“We find that unrealistic and misleading,” President and CEO of The Autism Society of America Christopher Banks told The Hill.
Banks and The Autism Society of America’s Chief Marketing Officer Kristyn Roth agreed that there is a “significant need” for more investment and credentialed research to better understand autism spectrum disorder.
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The speed at which Kennedy is promising to find the cause of the disability is harmful to those struggling during an autism diagnosis as well, Roth added.
‘It’s giving people a lot of false hope,” she said. “True, rigorous, peer-reviewed science takes time to find quality answers.”
A top federal health official ousted by the Trump administration denounced Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s claim that he would be able to determine the cause of autism by September, warning against offering "false hope" to families.
"There are people, probably, who are hearing me now who know that I cared for leukemia patients for a significant number of years. Giving people false hope is something you should never do," said Dr. Peter Marks, in an interview Friday with "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."
Adam Cancryn, Lauren Gardner and David Lim at Politico:
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s visit to the FDA Friday was supposed to introduce him as a trusted leader to agency employees. It did anything but.
Over the course of 40 minutes, Kennedy, in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the “Deep State” is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a “sock puppet” of the industries they regulate.
“Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school,” Kennedy said, in a reference to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded in Wassaic, New York. “So I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism.”
The remark jolted several FDA employees in the audience, who misheard the reference and thought he was making a derogatory remark about people with intellectual disabilities, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
By the end of the event, billed as a welcome from the new commissioner, Marty Makary, several FDA staffers had walked out of the rooms where the speech was being broadcast at the agency’s headquarters in White Oak, Maryland, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
In an interview Wednesday with CBS News, Kennedy said the Trump administration was focused on finding ways to treat people who choose not to get vaccinated. However, there are no approved treatments for measles, which kills almost 3 out of every 1,000 people diagnosed.
Many medical experts have taken issue with his approach to the current measles outbreak, which has included emphasizing unproven treatments and framing vaccination as a personal choice (which some doctors view as a nod to his anti-vaccine supporters).
Kennedy also suggested that measles cases are inevitable in the United States because of ebbing immunity from vaccines — a notion doctors say is false.
U.S. measles cases topped 700 as of Friday, capping a week in which Indiana joined five others states with active outbreaks, Texas grew by another 60 cases and a third measles-related death was made public.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed in a televised Cabinet meeting Thursday that measles cases were plateauing nationally, but the virus continues to spread mostly in people who are unvaccinated and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention redeployed a team to West Texas.
