Survey on Vaccines

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.  Trump has long spread antivaccine misinformation. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

A release from KFF:

A new KFF-Washington Post partnership survey of parents explores their experiences with and views about vaccines for their children, including a look into how they make decisions related to vaccines and where they are uncertain or confused about their safety.

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While most parents say they keep their children up to date on recommended childhood vaccines, about one in six (16%) say that they have delayed or skipped at least one vaccine for their children (other than those for flu and COVID-19). Those most likely to report delaying or skipping vaccines include Republican parents (22%), especially those who identify with President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement (25%), parents under age 35 (19%), and those who homeschool their child (46%).

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Most favor school vaccine requirements. A large majority (81%) of parents say that public schools should require students to get the measles and polio vaccines, with exceptions for medical and religious reasons. Among all parents, 8% say that they had requested an exemption to vaccine requirements so a child could attend school or daycare.

Many are uncertain about false claims. When asked about several false claims about vaccines and measles, relatively few parents believe the untrue statements, but larger shares are uncertain what to believe. One example: While relatively few (9%) parents believe the false claim that the MMR vaccine can cause autism in children, nearly half (48%) say they don’t know enough to say.

Views of parents with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder are somewhat more likely than other parents to believe the false claim that vaccines cause autism (16% vs. 9%).

The Physical and Mental Health of Autistic Adults

In The Politics of Autism, I write about the everyday struggles facing autistic people and their families.

Lay Abstract:

Autistic adults often face a range of physical and mental health conditions, but the relationship between these two types of health issues is not well understood. Our study looked at how often physical and mental health conditions in autistic adults occurred. We also examined the relationships between these conditions using a method called psychometric network analysis. We surveyed 327 autistic and 274 non-autistic adults, aged 30–90 years, about potential health conditions they faced and the perception of the quality of their health, also known as health-related quality of life. We found that autistic adults had a lower health-related quality of life and reported higher rates of all mental health conditions. Mood (45%), anxiety (22%), and personality disorders (21%) were most common. Autistic adults were between six and 34 times more likely to have these mental health conditions compared to non-autistic adults. In terms of physical health, autistic adults reported higher rates of bowel conditions (27%), allergies (48%), hypothyroid conditions (6%), and less robustly of strokes (CVA/TIAs; 3%), and rheumatic conditions (31%)— and a two- to four-times higher risk than non-autistic adults. Using psychometric network analysis, we found that mental health conditions in autistic adults are closely linked, showing how complex their health challenges are. While there was no single condition that connected physical and mental health in particular, we found several links between the two. These findings emphasize the need for improved healthcare and broader societal changes to enhance the well-being of autistic individuals.

From the article:

In the physical health domain, bowel conditions, respiratory conditions, and allergies showed most connections to other conditions in the network, suggesting they may be key targets for intervention. Hypothetically, they add to the stress that autistic adults already face and deteriorate other physical and mental health problems (Grant et al., 2022). Evidently, such conditions might also be a consequence of stress and MHCs (Ohrnberger et al., 2017). In both cases, improved medical care might reduce the burden for autistic adults. As noted by others, it is essential to take away existing healthcare barriers (Malik-Soni et al., 2022; Mason et al., 2019; Walsh et al., 2020; Warreman, Ester, et al., 2023). The SPACE framework (Sensory needs, Predictability, Acceptance, Communication, and Empathy) highlights principles for making healthcare more accommodating (Doherty et al., 2023). First steps can be in simple solutions such as increasing consultation time to adapt to longer processing time, securing consistent healthcare providers to accommodate a need for consistency and familiarity, and embedding e-Health solutions to ease communication (Mason et al., 2019; Warreman, Ester, et al., 2023). In addition, addressing the “triple empathy problem”—the mutual misunderstandings between autistic individuals and healthcare providers—might reduce healthcare avoidance and improve interactions (Shaw et al., 2024).

 

CDC to Fund Study of Already-Debunked Vaccine Link

 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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

He is now shutting down funding for productive autism research but blowing taxpayer money on the vaccine myth.

Nathaniel Weixel at The Hill:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is funding a study on the widely debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, according to a government funding notice.While numerous large studies have disproved a connection between autism and vaccines — a cornerstone of the anti-vaccine movement — Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to promote the possibility of a link.

Kennedy has promised that the federal government will release a report detailing the causes of autism later this month, though Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary said the HHS has not started writing the report.

The CDC on Thursday posted a notice of intent to award a sole source, fixed price contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y., to examine the “association between vaccinations and autism prevalence.” The agency did not specify the amount of the award.

Other universities and research institutes are allowed to apply for the grant within a 15-day window, but the Trump administration does not have to consider the bids.

Trump's Antivax History

 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 have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

Questioning a move by Florida to end its childhood vaccine mandates, the president said vaccines work, “pure and simple.” But he also posted a video on social media promoting the idea that vaccines are linked to autism — a theory he has espoused for nearly two decades despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

The video focused on a mercury-based preservative that has been removed from nearly all childhood vaccines. It featured David Geier, who has been hired by Mr. Kennedy to work on a study on the causes of autism that is expected later this month.

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Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Trump appears to have been influenced by a 1998 study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, asserting that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was linked to autism. The study was eventually retracted, though not until 2010, and its lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license.

In 2007, Mr. Trump held a fund-raiser for Autism Speaks, a parent advocacy group, at Mar-a-Lago. He theorized that babies were getting too many shots at once, and said that he and his wife, Melania, had slowed down the vaccine schedule for their son Barron, then almost 2.

“What we’ve done with Barron, we’ve taken him on a very slow process,” Mr. Trump said then. “He gets one shot at a time, then we wait a few months and give him another shot, the old-fashioned way.”

RFK's Acetaminophen Whisperer

 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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.  He is also pushing other questionable theories.

Tom Bartlett at The Atlantic:

For nearly a decade, the immunologist and biochemist William Parker has tried, with little success, to persuade other scientists to take seriously his theory that acetaminophen—better known by the brand name Tylenol—is the primary cause of autism. Researchers have long failed to find a causal link between autism and any medication, and these days, most of them believe that a change in diagnostic criteria is largely behind the dramatic uptick in autism rates over the past 30 years. But late last month, Parker received a phone call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wanted to learn more about his work. In fact, he’s heard from Kennedy several times since then. Parker also spoke recently with Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health. To hear Parker tell it, the nation’s top health officials have taken great interest in his ideas.

Over the past few weeks, Kennedy has reportedly been looking into an alleged connection between autism and Tylenol use during pregnancy. Parker’s preoccupation is slightly different: He believes that children’s use of Tylenol causes autism. Parker has for years operated on the fringes of academia. He runs his own small, independent laboratory, which he started after he lost a lab at Duke University’s medical school. (Duke did not renew Parker’s contract after he began focusing on autism in his research, though an email that an administrator sent to Parker in 2021, which I reviewed, said only that keeping the lab open wasn’t in his department’s “strategic best interest.”) Parker’s attempts to publish in academic journals have regularly been rebuffed. One reviewer tore into a recent submission from Parker, writing in their assessment that his hypothesis was “outrageous” and “illogical”; the paper was rejected. The past couple of weeks have been a wild reversal for Parker. “Nothing was happening and—boom!” he told me. “It’s beautiful.”

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Parker acknowledges that his work has not been embraced by mainstream autism researchers. Viktor Ahlqvist, the author of a 2024 Swedish study that concluded that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with autism, told me that developmental outcomes in early life are “notoriously difficult to study,” and that many apparent correlations—say, acetaminophen use and autism—don’t hold up to scrutiny. When I asked Parker to give me the names of scientists who support his theory, he couldn’t think of anyone. (He said Kennedy asked him for names too.) I contacted several longtime autism researchers, none of whom had heard of Parker. His 2023 paper trumpeting the dangers of acetaminophen has been cited a mere 11 times, according to Google Scholar. (By contrast, a 2007 paper Parker wrote on beneficial bacteria in the appendix has been cited 500 times.) For someone who is 99.99 percent certain he knows what causes autism and how to end it, Parker has hardly made a mark.

  Allison Parshall at Scientific American:

For acetaminophen, for example, researchers can’t fully separate the effects of the medication from the effects of the underlying conditions that may lead people to take pain relievers during pregnancy, explains David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry studying autism at the University of Pennsylvania. Overall, “the evidence [from these studies] was really mixed, and the effects were really small,” he says. Acetaminophen is also usually used as a fever reducer, which pregnant people might take if they are fighting an infection. Both infections and uncontrolled fevers during pregnancy have been linked to higher rates of autism. “We know that the neurodevelopmental outcomes of having an uncontrolled fever are worse than what we’re observing for acetaminophen,” Mandell says.

There Is No Single Cause of Autism

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss various ideas about what causes the condition. 

Allison Parshall at Scientific American:

[In] the 1970s studies of twins revealed that autism is highly heritable, not something that develops after birth. Thus began the search for the genes responsible. “We had rather simple views about what it might be” that caused autism, says Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor emerita at Boston University. The idea in the 1990s, she recalls, was that “we’re talking about six to 10 genes.” Instead researchers found hundreds.

No simple theory of autism has ever panned out, and the scientific community has moved on from the search for a simple answer. Researchers now know that autism develops from a staggeringly complex interplay between genes and factors that can influence development in utero. But attempts to pin the condition on one root cause abound, most famously in the disproven idea that vaccines cause autism. And earlier this year U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that he will reveal the “interventions” that are “almost certainly causing autism” in September.

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Untangling genetic factors from nongenetic ones (which scientists call “environmental factors”) can be tricky. For example, studies have consistently shown that parental age at conception can play a role, with older parents being more likely to have autistic children. But that could be because of the effect of age on genes: people accumulate mutations with age and can pass these on to their kids. Other factors that have been linked to autism include people being bornprematurely or through cesareansection, as well as pregnant people having obesity, using certain medications (such as the antiseizure drug valproate) and the pain reliever acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) and being exposed to air pollution. The strength of the evidence for these links varies, though, and the increases in risk tend to be small. The evidence is also only correlational, meaning it can’t establish what caused what.

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A large portion of autism research funding has gone toward searching for causes of the condition. And while this research is crucial, it seems unlikely to improve the lives of autistic people and their loved ones in the short term.

“The average autistic person, or their average family member, doesn't wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Oh, have they discovered a better mouse model [for simulating autism in laboratory research]?’” explains Ari Ne’eman, co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and a health policy researcher at Harvard University. What autistic people and their loved ones most need is research into kinds of support that effectively address their day-to-day needs. A rebalancing of our research priorities, he says, is “long overdue.”

Trump Posts Antivax Video

 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 have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

Megan Messerly at Politico:

President Donald Trump on Monday posted a video to his social media account promoting the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.

The decades-old video, in part, features David Geier, who Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped this spring to investigate links between vaccines and autism, alongside his father, Dr. Mark Geier, whose medical license was suspended following claims he endangered children with autism. The anti-vaccine activists have published numerous studies on the topic and discuss some of their ideas in the video, which circulated around the internet Monday after Trump shared it.

 

Trump has been pushing the vaccine theory for nearly twenty years.   In 2007, Josh Hafenbrack reported at The South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

At a news conference Thursday in a gold-trimmed Mar-A-Lago ballroom, Trump's wife, Melania, noted her 22-month-old son, Baron, and said: "I cannot imagine what the mothers [with autistic children] and mothers all around the world go through. ... Let's get rid of autism."

In an interview, Donald Trump said he thinks the rising prevalence of autism is related to vaccinations of babies and toddlers.

One in 150 children is now diagnosed with autism, with the prevalence higher among boys.

"When I was growing up, autism wasn't really a factor," he said. "And now all of a sudden, it's an epidemic. Everybody has their theory, and my theory is the shots. They're getting these massive injections at one time. I think it's the vaccinations."

Cracks in RFK Jr. Support

 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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYT:

People across the political spectrum are alarmed. In recent days, Mr. Kennedy’s sister Kerry and his nephew Joe Kennedy III called for him to step down. Three former surgeons general, including Dr. Jerome Adams, who served during the first Trump administration, wrote in an essay for USA Today that Mr. Kennedy was jeopardizing the integrity of the C.D.C. and public health.

President Trump, who promised to let “Bobby go wild on health” — and who, like Mr. Kennedy, has rejected scientific evidence in asserting that vaccines are linked to autism — has not criticized Mr. Kennedy.

President Trump, who promised to let “Bobby go wild on health” — and who, like Mr. Kennedy, has rejected scientific evidence in asserting that vaccines are linked to autism — has not criticized Mr. Kennedy.

But Mr. Trump did contradict him and like-minded officials, such as the Florida surgeon general, who announced last week that the state would end all vaccine mandates, including for children. A memo from the Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward warned Republicans before the hearing that limiting access to childhood vaccines could hurt them politically, citing “sky-high” approval for routine vaccinations among swing voters.

“It’s a tough stance,” Mr. Trump said, when asked about Florida’s action. “You have vaccines that work. They just pure and simple work. They’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be used.”

Dan Diamond, Theodoric Meyer and Rachel Roubein at WP:

Seven months after they voted to confirm longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary, some Republican senators are having second thoughts.

“I’m a doctor. Vaccines work,” Sen. John Barrasso (Wyoming), the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, told Kennedy at a hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill. “Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”

Barrasso’s warning, which Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) echoed at Thursday’s hearing, was the latest and perhaps most significant sign of growing GOP doubts about the merits — and political wisdom — of Kennedy’s agenda.

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Officials from Trump’s first administration are also increasingly condemning Kennedy in public remarks. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health in the first Trump administration, told The Washington Post on Friday that Kennedy’s decision to end nearly $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development was “going to make the country vulnerable” and that the health secretary’s broader vaccine agenda was doing “tremendous damage” to public health.

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It is also not clear if the growing GOP concerns will have a material effect on Kennedy or his team’s agenda. But his recent moves have exposed the political fault lines over vaccine policy, which could be further exacerbated by the health department’s upcoming moves to issue an autism report and potentially further limit access to coronavirus vaccines.

 

Demographics and Experience of Discrimination

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the civil rights of people with autism and other disabilities.

Menezes, M., Linde, J., Howard, M. et al. Associations Among Demographic and Clinical Characteristics and Discrimination Experiences of Autistic Youth. J Autism Dev Disord (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-025-07019-z.  Abstract:

Purpose

Autistic individuals experience discrimination as a neurominority. Nonetheless, there has been limited research on characteristics or factors contributing to discrimination against autistic people. Therefore, this study sought to examine demographic and clinical predictors of discriminatory experiences of autistic children and adolescents utilizing a large, population-based sample. 

Methods

Data were obtained from the 2021 and 2022 National Survey of Children’s Health, a nationally distributed caregiver-report questionnaire. Participants included 2,297 autistic youth (6–17 years old). Two separate binary logistic regressions were conducted for the prediction of race or ethnicity discrimination and health condition or disability discrimination. Predictors were child age, sex, race, ethnicity, autism “severity,” behavior problems, and intellectual disability, and household income.

Results

Results demonstrated a relationship between minoritized racial and ethnic background and increased likelihood of discrimination due to race/ethnicity and health condition/disability. Relationships between older age and greater odds of race/ethnicity and health condition/disability discrimination experiences were also found. Furthermore, “more severe” autism, intellectual disability, and challenging behavior were associated with increased odds of health condition/disability discrimination.

Conclusion

This study highlights characteristics of autistic youth that may increase their risk for experiencing discrimination and should inform practices and policies to reduce discrimination against autistic people.

Discussion:

This study examined demographic and clinical predictors of discriminatory experiences of autistic youth. Results demonstrated an association between minoritized racial and ethnic background and likelihood of discrimination due to race or ethnicity and health condition or disability. Relationships between older age and greater odds of race/ethnicity and health/disability discrimination experiences were additionally found. Furthermore, “more severe” autism, ID, and challenging behavior were related to an increased likelihood of an autistic young person having experienced discrimination due to health condition or disability.

Aligned with hypotheses, increased odds of race or ethnicity discrimination were found for autistic youth identifying as Black, Asian, multiracial, and another (non-White) racial identity (i.e., American Indian/Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander), as well as for Hispanic or Latino autistic children and adolescents. These findings align with previous research on racial discrimination experiences of the general population of marginalized youth (Datu, 2018; Lee et al., 2019) and marginalized youth with special health care needs (Helton et al., 2023). Results further previous research by demonstrating an association between minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds and increased risk for race/ethnicity discrimination within the autistic community, which should prompt the implementation of policies and practices to address the complex vulnerabilities autistic youth from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds experience.

An increased likelihood of race or ethnicity and health condition or disability discrimination was found for older age, which was not predicted. This could result from bullying, harassment, and other forms of victimization and discrimination increasing as youth have more contact with external discriminatory systems as well as individuals in older childhood and adolescence (Fisher et al., 2000; Greene et al., 2006). In addition, victims may become more aware of their differing treatment. Peer victimizers may also become more perceptive of differences in characteristics (e.g., social differences associated with autism), and the general population may be less tolerant of social and behavioral differences in older children and adolescents than younger children (Locke et al.,2017; Rotheram-Fuller et al., 2010).

 

RFK's "Smoking Gun"

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss various ideas about what causes the condition. 

If you listened to Sirius XM in recent years, you may have heard radio ads about a class action lawsuit alleging that acetaminophen causes it.  A judge nixed it. From the ruling: "the plaintiffs do not have admissible evidence to demonstrate that prenatal exposure to acetaminophen causes either ASD or ADHD in offspring."

Azeen Ghorayshi at NYT:

For more than a decade, scientists have asked whether acetaminophen — the active ingredient in the painkiller Tylenol — could affect fetal brain development, causing problems in children like autism and A.D.H.D. Some studies have suggested that there is a link; others have found none.

Now the latest study, a scientific review by researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has been swept into a larger, politically fraught debate about the causes of autism, spurred in part by the views of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary.

There has been speculation that Mr. Kennedy may cite Tylenol use during pregnancy, among other environmental factors, as a potential cause of autism in an upcoming report.

The review that began the latest round of controversy, which examined 46 existing studies, eight of them looking specifically at autism, found there was evidence for a connection between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders.

But the researchers who conducted the review cautioned that their conclusion did not mean acetaminophen caused autism, which mainstream scientists overwhelmingly agree is a result of a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors.

And the findings, other experts said, would not alter the advice doctors routinely give pregnant patients about acetaminophen use.

The conclusion of the review “doesn’t change a thing,” said Dr. Nathaniel DeNicola, an OB-GYN who advises the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on environmental issues.

“The conclusion of the paper is that Tylenol should be used judiciously in the lowest dose, least frequent interval,” he said, “which is exactly the current standard of care for Tylenol and for so many medications, and really so many things we may encounter in pregnancy counseling.”

RFK Jr Lies About Forthcoming Announcement

 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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

Sarah Owermohle at CNN:

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged in April that there would be answers on the causes of autism this month. Since then, he has ousted public health officials, publicly rebuked studies showing no link between vaccines and autism, and said “interventions” are “almost certainly” responsible for causing rising autism rates.

And the proposed autism studies have not started.

Thousands of researchers hailing from the top universities and institutions in the country have applied for the federal funding that Kennedy announced in April. The US National Institutes of Health is expected this month to announce up to 25 awardees for the $50 million “massive research and testing effort.”

...

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged in April that there would be answers on the causes of autism this month. Since then, he has ousted public health officials, publicly rebuked studies showing no link between vaccines and autism, and said “interventions” are “almost certainly” responsible for causing rising autism rates.

And the proposed autism studies have not started.

Thousands of researchers hailing from the top universities and institutions in the country have applied for the federal funding that Kennedy announced in April. The US National Institutes of Health is expected this month to announce up to 25 awardees for the $50 million “massive research and testing effort.”

...

“It’s highly unusual to announce you have the results of a study before the study even begins,” said Alison Singer, founder of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation. At least four foundation-supported researchers have applied for the Autism Data Science Initiative grants.

Kennedy Before the Senate Finance Committee

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 top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

AT NYT Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports on RFK Jr's testimony before the Senate Finance Committee:

Kennedy claimed that Black boys who receive the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine have a higher risk of autism. This claim, which has never been verified, stems from a decade-old controversy around the so-called C.D.C. whistleblower, an agency scientist named William Thompson.

He said in 2014 that the C.D.C. had published a study that omitted evidence of the increased risk. Thompson made his assertion in tape-recorded conversations with Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer who has a son with autism and is now chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy founded to question vaccine safety. Hooker published his own study reanalyzing the C.D.C. data, but his study was retracted amid concerns over the validity of his methods.

Apoorva Mandavilli at NYT:

Senators have repeatedly read Kennedy’s words from previous hearings back to him, noting that he had promised not to take anyone’s vaccines away, and that he would empower agency scientists to do their work. Several contend that he has done neither. Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, said Kennedy had made contradictory statements depending on his circumstances.

“When were you lying, sir?” she said. “When you told this committee that you were not anti-vax? Or when you told Americans that there’s no safe and effective vaccine?”

Kennedy replied, “Both things are true.”

  NARRATOR: ACTUALLY, NEITHER THING IS TRUE.

 

 

Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

Gosling, C.J., Boisseleau, L., Solmi, M. et al. Complementary, alternative and integrative medicine for autism: an umbrella review and online platform. Nat Hum Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02256-9

Abstract:

The use of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine (CAIM) is highly prevalent among autistic individuals, with up to 90% reporting having used CAIM at least once in their lifetime. However, the evidence base for the effects of CAIM for autism remains uncertain. Here, to fill this gap, we conducted an umbrella review of meta-analyses exploring the effects of CAIM in autism across the lifespan and developed a web platform to disseminate the generated results. Five databases were searched (up to 31 December 2023) for systematic reviews with meta-analyses exploring the effects of CAIM in autism. Independent pairs of investigators identified eligible papers and extracted relevant data. Included meta-analyses were reestimated using a consistent statistical approach, and their methodological quality was assessed with AMSTAR-2. The certainty of evidence generated by each meta-analysis was appraised using an algorithmic version of the GRADE framework. This process led to the identification of 53 meta-analytic reports, enabling us to conduct 248 meta-analyses exploring the effects of 19 CAIMs in autism. We found no high-quality evidence to support the efficacy of any CAIM for core or associated symptoms of autism. Although several CAIMs showed promising results, they were supported by very low-quality evidence. The safety of CAIMs has rarely been evaluated, making it a crucial area for future research. To support evidence-based consideration of CAIM interventions for autism, we developed an interactive platform that facilitates access to and interpretation of the present results (https://ebiact-database.com).