Last April 16, the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended a press conference that was for a new CDC report on Autism. During it he made statements that were not just wrong, but also deeply offensive and totally crazy.
- Here is the full CDC report – Prevalence and Early Identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 16 Sites, United States, 2022
- You can also find that full Press Conference on YouTube – here.
As a bit of background, RFK Jnr has a long history of pseudoscientific quackery when it comes to Autism …
- In addition to his promotion of the chemtrail conspiracy theory, and HIV/AIDS denialism, he has also promoted the scientifically disproved claim of a causal link between vaccines and autism.
- From 2015 to 2023, Kennedy chaired the Children’s Health Defense. This was formerly known as the World Mercury Project, and is an anti-vaccine advocacy group that has promoted the discredited claim of a link between autism and mercury in vaccinations.
- When promoting the crank film Trace Amounts, he falsely called the increased diagnosis of cases of autism (which he calls an “autism epidemic”) a “holocaust”.
- He is also listed as a producer of Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth, the 2019 sequel to Wakefield’s and Bigtree’s anti-vaccination propaganda film Vaxxed.
… and I’m just skating on surface with the above. Basically scratch and sniff anything said or done by this lunatic and you will find it is bullshit and crackpottery all the way down.
The CDC report found that cases of autism had risen to 1 in 31 among 8-year-olds, so as was anticipated by many, RFK Jnr used it as an opportunity to promote his bogus claims.
“But is was a rise in autism, what if he was right“, some might quip.
Seriously no, this is a guy who uses scientific reports like a drunk uses a lamppost – for support and not illumination.
So now here I am writing to debunk RFK Jnr’s Bullshit. If he was indeed just some crank in a basement he could perhaps be ignored, but unfortunately, Trump, as he also does, manages to find the stupidest and most incompetent individual available and then proceeds to appoint them to a position of very serious responsibility, one that has dire consequences for us all.
OK, let’s get into it.
RFK Jnr BS Claim
He claimed that autistic children were “fully functional” and “regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
FFS … no no no, he is not just slightly wrong, there are multiple layers of fractal wrongness here.
Normal people never ever regress into Autism, this is just not how it works. The claim that a normal 2 year old will regress into Autism is factually wrong.
As for his description, “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball“, while it is true at one very extreme end of the scale, it is a very large scale. Let’s be very very clear about this, what he is saying is bullshit – The VAST MAJORITY of people on the spectrum do not have those severe challenges.
Autism is a very wide spectrum that may indeed have people with challenges at one extreme, but at the other end you also have people who are above average in intelligence, completely functional, very successful in life, doing all the things he says that people with autism will never do, yet they are neurodivergent.
Why is RFK Jnr taking such a stance?
He has an agenda, an anti-vaccine agenda. He is also a lawyer and behaves like a lawyer would by starting with the conclusion and then working backwards from there to lay down a path that takes you directly to his conclusion.
From his viewpoint, Autism is a disease that is surging and has a cause that can be cured. To get you there he will cherry pick bits of scientific data to act as stepping stones. His is a narrative where perfectly healthy young children get vaccinated and then are supposedly “damaged” or “injured” by the vaccine.
He uses the word “regression” because it was plucked from a scientific study, but he then fails to explain what the word actually means in the context it was used, and instead grossly misrepresents it. What it does not mean is that a perfectly healthy 2 year old developed autism. Instead it means that a child with autism will find it harder to engage socially as they age. In other words it is a reference to an ability to adapt and life places increasing demands on some.
He also talks about a surge in Autism.
What is true is that there have been increasing numbers of cases diagnosed over the decades, but this is not because there has been an increase in the actual instances of it, but instead it is because we are getting better at diagnosing it. The cases were always there. In past decades diagnostic substitution was in play and often it was labelled as something else such as schizophrenia or for the more extreme end of the scale mental retardation.
Like any good crank and conspiracy theorist who lacks an understanding of what is really going on, he gets in all so very very wrong. He has started with the conclusion that it is really all about vaccines, and so this latest stunt was one step on the road that is all about laying the foundation for the rigged study he has coming up.
The Rigged Study
He has previously announced that he is going to figure out what what the cause of autism is by September.
What I previously flagged up a couple of weeks ago was him appointing vaccine skeptic David Geier for that.
- See here for: RFK Jnr — Let’s do Vaccines and Autism again!
You can see it coming a mile away – this study will be a rigged hit job. He already has a conclusion (vaccines cause Autism) so RFK Jnr has appointed a crank who will find that link for him. Just to be clear Mr Geier is not a scientist and not a medical doctor. The only qualification he has is that he believes vaccines cause autism and has previously published articles claiming that.
“But we need to study this“, some might quip
No we don’t. We have been there and done that again and again and again, and every single damn time the conclusion is confirmed – we know with a very high degree of certainty that vaccines do not cause autism. Via the Autism Science Foundation we have this page: “Autism and Vaccines: Read the Science” — At that link you will find a very long list of peer-reviewed studies that all universally confirm that there is no link.
RFK Jnr Myth: We know nothing about what causes Autism
Wrong.
We might not have a definitive answer, but we do now know a great deal. It is cranks like RFK Jnr who reject such insights because it conflicts with their narrative about the bogus link between autism and vaccines. Via Daniel H. Geschwind, MD, PhD, Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor of Precision Health in the UCLA Health System and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (DGSOM), director of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), and the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry (who also won a National Academy of Medicine prize for investigating autism’s genetic underpinnings), puts it:
Autism is hereditary and therefore does run in families. A majority (around 80%) of autism cases can be linked to inherited genetic mutations. The remaining cases likely stem from non-inherited mutations.
There’s no evidence that children can develop autism after early fetal development as a result of exposure to vaccines or postnatal toxins.
“Everything known to cause autism occurs during early brain development,”
Further Reading
- Dr David Gorski – MAHA and “soft eugenics” revisited: The “autism tsunami,” Dr. Oz, and your “patriotic duty” to stay healthy
Quote from the above …
The extinction-level threat to US federal biomedical and public health policy that I predicted is here, and each week seems to bring new evidence that, if anything, my first prediction five months ago when RFK Jr. first suspended his independent Presidential campaign and bent the knee to Donald Trumpin return for a prominent role in his administration on health was insufficiently pessimistic.
So yes indeed, the term “extinction-level threat to US federal biomedical and public health policy” truly is an excellent factual observation when you consider RFK Jnr.