In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. And among those diseases could be COVID-19.
Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.
At NBC, Brandy Zadrozny reports on the Autism Health Summit:
The conference room at the Town and Country hotel was already abuzz with Kennedy’s latest bombshell. While rattling off his department’s early endeavors at a televised Cabinet meeting last week — they included getting “bad chemicals” out of food and “good food” into school lunches — he stated plainly that he would, in five months, discover the cause of autism. “By September,” he had said to the president, “we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. And we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”
“That would be so big,” Trump replied.
And it would — if it weren’t so unlikely. Kennedy later told Fox News that National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya had only just begun soliciting proposals from scientists around the world, and HHS hasn’t said more about the timeline. Even if they handed out grants immediately, it would give them barely more than a season to solve a puzzle that has preoccupied researchers for over 80 years.
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Outside the ballroom were the vendors, about 50 tables packed together, all offering the same message: healing was possible — for a price.
Each table pushed a product or service promising some pathway to wellness. There were water filters — one to detoxify, another to “alkalize”— and a nearly $6,000 electromagnetic gadget that claimed to improve circulation.
Contraptions emitted infrared light or pulsed electromagnetic fields. Supplement kits promised to flush out mold, heavy metals and microplastics. Vibrating plates were pitched as neurological reset tools. And there were countless devices — necklaces, patches, laptop shields, pet collars and full-body blankets — meant to block 5G, electromagnetic fields and radiation, including the Wi-Fi all around us.
