The RFK Danger

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Ashleigh Fields at The Hill:

Scott Gottlieb, who served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during President-elect Trump’s first term, expressed concerns with the pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) due to his anti-vaccine advocacy.

“I think if RFK follows through on his intentions, and I believe he will, and I believe he can, it will cost lives in this country,” he said during a Friday appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down, and like I said, if we lose another 5 percent [of vaccinations], which could happen in the next year or two, we will see large measles outbreaks,” he continued.

Many are worried Kennedy, who would need to be confirmed by the Senate to become HHS secretary, will amplify vaccine hesitancy for children despite his promise not to take away vaccines.

Gottlieb said he doesn’t think Trump wants to see a “resurgence” in infectious diseases, such as measles, polio and whopping cough. But he noted the nation’s doctors aren’t prepared to provide patients with diagnoses for diseases that have been largely absent for several decades, which could rise if vaccine rates drop.

 

RFK Linked Vaccines to Holocaust, Called for Jailing Dr. Paul Offit

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Brandy Zadrozny at NBC:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.

...

Kennedy made these remarks and others — most previously unreported — over years of appearances at AutismOne. The comments, dating back to 2013, include claims that the CDC is a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to “Nazi death camps.”
...

At the 2013 AutismOne question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC’s motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Kennedy made a comparison to the Holocaust.

“To me this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids,” Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines — which had been debunked over a decade earlier. “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”

He also gave more detail on the people he believed belonged in prison.

“I don’t think this is going to happen because they always manage, the bad guys somehow manage to weasel their way out of it,” he said. “But I would do a lot to see Paul Offit, all these ‘good people,’ behind bars.”

Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. He currently serves on a Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee. Asked for comment, Offit said Kennedy had targeted him and others on government vaccine panels for nearly two decades as main characters in baseless conspiracy theories, attacks that have invited harassment and threats.

The Project 2025 Threat

In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 7.5 million children 3 to 21 years old received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in AY 2022-23.

About 980,000 of them were autistic, up from 498,000 in 2012-13.

The Trumpist Project 2025 would gut that law, wiping out protections for all those students.  See here for details:

It would also scrap the entire Department of Education.

During the campaign, Trump denied any connection with Project 2025 but is now stocking his administration with its architects.

 Deborah Spitalnik at NJ Spotlight News:

Project 2025’s elimination of the federal Department of Education abdicates our responsibility as a society to provide children with equitable opportunities for learning and skill development to become productive, successful adults. For the 18% of school-age children receiving special education services in New Jersey and their counterparts across the country, the right to education came about through the courts and eventually federal law, now IDEA — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The Department of Education has an essential role in protecting rights, ensuring access and quality for children and young adults with disabilities, and requiring individual schools and each state to provide education that enables students with disabilities to learn and pursue life goals as do their typical peers. Project 2025 would allow states to use federal funds without oversight and opt out of educational programs, relegating students with disabilities to at best, second-class citizenship. Moving educational functions to the Department of Health and Human Services threatens students with disabilities, diminishing the power of education as a fundamental right and source of development for all children. As in threatening to change federal grant-making in the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, Project 2025 would eliminate Department of Education competitive grants, reducing educational innovation and improvement. For children with disabilities, federal grants to New Jersey have contributed to access to the general curriculum, creating positive school climates enabling all students to learn, and preparing students for adult life and employment. Project 2025 would eliminate these sources of innovation, stifling progress and foreclosing opportunities hard-won by years of advocacy. Head Start — which provides preschool education and health services in New Jersey for 12,748 poor children with and without disabilities, as well as families and pregnant women — would be eliminated by Project 2025.

More on Weldon

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.

 Trump is nominating former Rep. Dave Weldon to head CDC.  David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine:

During his 14 years in Congress, Weldon funneled his belief in an “autism epidemic.” He also apparently believed in the thimerosal-autism link, to the point of promoting highly dubious studies and attacking decent studies examining whether mercury in childhood vaccines had been responsible for such an “epidemic.” Back in the day, he even spoke at antivax “conferences” falsely billed as scientific conferences:

Understanding autism and searching for a cure is a passion that I will continue to carry with me. In 2004, I delivered an address at the Defeat Autism Now Conference and the keynote address to the Autism One Conference in Chicago regarding the autism epidemic affecting one in 163 children. I challenged public health officials to direct the funding to defeat this epidemic. Today, autism affects one in 88 children. America can’t afford further delay in autism research.

Defeat Autism Now! was the umbrella organization for a lot of antivax quacks abusing children with “autism biomed” treatments to “cure” them of the “vaccine injury” blamed by antivaxxers for their autism, while the Autism One conference was the longstanding fake medical conference held in Chicago annually for many years that showcased all forms of antivax and autism quackery. For those of you not familiar with Autism One, It was at the 2013 Autism One conference that RFK Jr. likened vaccines to the Holocaust, at least to my knowledge, and where Kerri Rivera described feeding bleach to children in 2012 to treat their autism.

Back in 2003-2004, Weldon used his position in Congress to write letters to then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding demanding an “investigation” of supposed links between vaccines and autism. Basically, the letters made the same claims that RFK Jr. made in his 2005 conspiracyfest Deadly Immunity. Recall that the central claim in RFK Jr.’s article, co-published by Rolling Stone and Salon.com (to their eternal shame), was that there was evidence that thimerosal in vaccines was associated with a highly elevated risk of autism in children but that the CDC, at a meeting in 2000, “covered it up.” This is a claim that I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, after the conference center where the meeting was held, an example of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (at least in the US), one I’ve deconstructed in the past. Weldon, even though he’s a physician, fell for the Simpsonwood conference conspiracy theory, promoted a year and a half later by antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hook, line, and sinker. The first letter regurgitates the “concerns” being promoted by the antivaccine movement at the time. The second letter turned up the heat, trying to persuade Gerberding to postpone an important Institute of Medicine conference until the “concern” about the Verstraeten study had been addressed. As we all know, the IOM conference did go on and the IOM report found (and strongly stated) that there was no evidence to support correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism risk. Once again, antivaxxers were deceptively looking at standard epidemiological and statistical techniques to account for confounders as something nefarious, as they misrepresented how the observed “association” between thimerosal and autism risk declined and disappeared as appropriate confounders were accounted for as the CDC intentionally “covering up” an association, and Weldon was the Congressional spearhead for this conspiracy theory.

Truly, the vaccination program and public health efforts by the CDC are in serious jeopardy, even worse than I had imagined. I suppose I should be happy that Trump didn’t appoint Andrew Wakefield as CDC Director.

RFK and CA

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

At a Sacramento event in 2015, Kennedy said: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone, This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

 Ana Ibarra at CalMatters:

Five years ago, hundreds of people crowded the halls of the state Capitol protesting legislation that sought to tighten California’s vaccine rules. Outside, music blasted something about a revolution and people carried signs that read “Vaccine mandates violate bodily autonomy.”

From the sea of red-clad protesters emerged a familiar face idolized by the anti-vaccine activists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He was the guest of honor in one of the biggest public health showdowns the state has seen in recent years. Ultimately, he and his followers lost — the Legislature passed a law to clamp down on fraudulent or inappropriate medical exemptions for required childhood vaccines.

Today, Kennedy finds himself on a bigger stage with potentially far more influence and power. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated the former environmental lawyer turned controversial vaccine critic to oversee the nation’s health policy as secretary of Health and Human Services.

He has been known to make false, and at times dangerous, claims about medicine and public health. Perhaps most infamously he linked vaccines to autism — a claim that has been debunked over and over again.
...
Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who as a state senator authored the 2019 medical exemption law and a separate law that eliminated personal belief exemptions for childhood vaccines, said having a health secretary who casts doubt on vaccines is “a danger” and “disturbing.”

“I imagine we’re going to see a lot more direct attacks on individual scientists, individual people. I’m anticipating that I’m probably gonna be hoisted somewhere by those guys as well. I don’t think RFK Jr. has forgotten about me yet,” he said.

Weldon to CDC

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.

Lena H. Sun at WP:

President-elect Donald Trump on Friday announced that Dave Weldon is his choice to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the federal government’s top public health agency.

Weldon, 71, is a medical doctor and former lawmaker who served in the House, representing Florida. The former congressman has been a strong critic of the CDC, especially its vaccine program. Weldon has championed the long-debunked notion that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, is linked to autism.

...

Weldon was one of the few members of Congress to support the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and pushed the government to study a connection between vaccines and autism. He was a founding member of the Congressional Autism Caucus and pushed for thimerosal to be removed from vaccines.

Thimerosal was largely removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001. Flu shots were an exception; Weldon sponsored legislation to ban preservative levels of thimerosal from them as well. In a 2008 press release, he accused the CDC of prioritizing high immunization rates while “vaccine safety ranks near the bottom both in priorities and funding.”

...

If Kennedy and Weldon are confirmed, they could influence the vaccine recommendation process by naming vaccine skeptics to the agency’s vaccine advisory committee.

Known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, the committee examines safety and effectiveness data once a vaccine has been authorized or approved by the FDA. It recommends who should get the medicine, how many doses and how often. Its recommendations have to be approved by the CDC director to become policy. The recommendations help determine whether the vaccines are covered at no cost for children and adults.

The committee has up to 19 members whose expertise includes virology, immunology, pediatrics and infectious diseases. They are nominated by the CDC and approved by the HHS secretary. No members are federal government employees.

Antivaxxers and the HHS Transition

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Alice Miranda Ollstein and Adam Cancryn at Politico:

In an email obtained by POLITICO, Kennedy ally Kim Haine reached out to a prospective candidate to set up an interview for a top HHS job, identifying herself as part of the “[Make America Healthy Again] transition team.” Haine is the president of the Hawaii chapter of Children’s Health Defense, a leading anti-vaccine group that Kennedy chaired until he resigned in 2023 to run for president. She also led the effort to get Kennedy on the Hawaii ballot earlier this year.

“Our transition team would like to gauge your interest in helping advance our MAHA initiatives,” she wrote to one candidate.

Haine did not respond to questions about her role.

The team that Kennedy is relying on to help vet resumes for incoming HHS staff, conduct interviews and offer advice also includes Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine figure who runs the nonprofit Informed Consent Action Network.

And Aaron Siri, a vaccine injury attorney whose law firm has done millions of dollars of legal work for Bigtree’s ICAN, has been deeply involved in the vetting process as well, according to three people familiar with the matter. Siri specialized in challenging Covid vaccine mandates at schools and workplaces during the pandemic, and has also served as Kennedy’s personal attorney.

ASAN Opposes the RFK Nomination

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network opposes the nomination:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine group. He has claimed that no vaccine has been proven safe and effective, that the recommended vaccine schedule for children is dangerous, and that “autism does come from vaccines.” He has also fought against COVID-19 vaccination, falsely calling an early COVID vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Vaccines are safe and effective. Vaccines do not cause autism. The idea that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is linked to autism comes from one fraudulent 1998 publication claiming that the vaccine had caused autistic traits in 12 children. The man responsible for this publication, Andrew Wakefield, used unethical methods and failed to disclose financial conflicts of interest. The paper did not give enough evidence for its claim that the MMR vaccine could cause autism. It was later retracted by the journal that published it, and Wakefield had his medical license revoked.

In spite of the fraudulent origins of the idea that vaccines cause autism, and in spite of decades of replicable research proving that this is not true, some people, like Kennedy, continue to perpetuate the myth. These lies do very real harm to the autistic community. Kennedy has described autistic people in insulting ways meant to inspire fear, saying that “their brain is gone” and that the purported effects of vaccination are “a Holocaust.” By working to prevent childhood vaccination, he effectively communicates the message that living as an autistic person is a worse fate than dying of measles or pertussis.

The anti-vaccine movement has led to a wave of fake “autism cures,” many of which have very real health risks. Kennedy recently promoted two of these fake cures when he accused the FDA of suppressing “hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds.” Hyperbaric therapy, a treatment for decompression sickness in divers, has been promoted as a fake autism cure in spite of a complete lack of evidence and associated health risks. Chelation, a treatment for heavy metal poisoning, is another fake cure, and its off-label use for autism has been associated with at least one death.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies claim that autistic people did not exist in his youth and that “I have never in my life seen a man my age with full-blown autism.” The idea that autistic people of Kennedy’s age (70) do not exist is not true. Autistic people have always been here, but before widespread autism diagnosis, we either went undiagnosed, or received different diagnoses than would be used today — for example, the outdated diagnosis of “childhood schizophrenia” for autism, or diagnosing people who today would only have an autism diagnosis with intellectual disability. Autistic people in Kennedy’s generation were all too often institutionalized or incarcerated. Even if Kennedy is telling the truth about not seeing us, that does not mean we were not there.

Of course, Kennedy’s lies about vaccines do not just hurt autistic people. Kennedy and his nonprofit played an active role in a recent measles outbreak in American Samoa, spreading vaccine misinformation until the vaccination rate dropped low enough that 5,700 people were infected with measles, and 83 people died. Kennedy has also made false claims about COVID-19 vaccine trials and about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, blaming unrelated deaths on COVID vaccinations. Anti-vaccine misinformation like that promoted by Kennedy’s group has led to a reduced rate of childhood vaccinations in the United States since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

RFK to HHS

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 is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

 Eric Michael Garcia at MSNBC:

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Wednesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is his pick for secretary of Health and Human Services symbolizes a major regression when it comes to the humane treatment of autistic people. By picking Kennedy, he is wrongly elevating someone who sees autism, and therefore autistic people, as problems to be solved. He doesn’t see us as having a disability that deserves to be accepted.

The Kennedy pick also symbolizes a moral loss. Not just because of his opposition to vaccines, but also because of his opinions of autistic people. Of course, he believes that autistic people are largely the result of vaccines, making us evidence that Big Pharma is a danger.

If Kennedy becomes HHS secretary, he would likely cause incalculable harm.

Riley Beggin at USA Today:

Most Republican senators appear ready to support Kennedy Jr. to the influential Cabinet position inside the incoming Trump administration even as they are being hounded about how they'll vote for even more controversial nominees, such as former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be Trump's attorney general and Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of Defense.

"RFK Jr. has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure," said Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who has been openly critical of Trump and who serves on the Senate Finance Committee that will vet Kennedy. “I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda."

Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who will chair the Finance committee next year, said in a statement that Kennedy “prioritized addressing chronic diseases through consumer choice and healthy lifestyle,” adding: “I look forward to considering his nomination.”

Happy Ending to the Slapping Incident

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

A previous post discussed Alfredo Morales, a homeless autistic child who touched the hood ornament of a Mercedes.  The driver slapped him.

Ashley Mackey at KABC-TV:

Earlier this summer, a shocking video of a man slapping a young boy with autism in Arleta sparked outrage. Since then, the community has rallied behind the child and his family, showing them love and support.

Then on Monday, the family received a big surprise after they came across some issues with their truck.

The team at Airport Marina Ford surprised Alfredo Morales and his family with a brand new 2023 Ford Explorer.

"If there's a child involved in a situation like that, and the condition of living in the other vehicle, and trying to survive out of that, and then that vehicle being as bad as it was, it was just the right thing to do," said Dan Theroux, the general manager at Airport Marina Ford.

The video of the incident quickly went viral in June. It shows 10-year-old Alfredo sitting on a bus bench with his older sister when the upset man, identified as Scott Sakajian, slaps him. The boy reportedly damaged the Mercedes emblem on the front of Sakajian's car.
The video player is currently playing an ad.

A man became upset by what a boy with autism allegedly did to his vehicle, but his response, caught on video, is drawing heavy criticism.

Sakajian has since been charged with willful cruelty to a child and battery on a person.

The team at Airport Marina Ford said when the family brought in their 2010 Ford F-150, the initial plan was to try to repair it, but it was in bad shape.

They said it needed a new transmission, engine, and the interior would have had to be completely taken out.

"Dan got the Ford to come into the dealership. We saw it on the flatbed and we were like, 'Uh oh, this needs more than just a repair,'" said NOARUS Auto Group President Jamie Bishton.

The vehicle also comes with a Gold Certified warranty, which means if the truck ever gives the family any troubles, they can take it to any Ford dealer to get it fixed.

Since the incident, a GoFundMe set up to help the family has raised nearly $100,000.

In addition to a brand new SUV, Alfredo now attends a new school that specializes in working with children with autism.

"Amazing. I don't have words to say," said the boy's father, Miguel Morales. "It's crazy. I don't have to say nothing. I don't have words, just say thanks. You know, thank God."

Blue Envelopes in New Jersey

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss interactions between first responders and autistic people.  Some jurisdictions allow autistic drivers to ask for a blue envelope to disclose the driver's diagnosis in case of an accident or traffic stop.  Others have ID cards.

 Mat Fagan and Gene Myers at NorthJersey.com:

[M]ore and more police departments and other law enforcement agencies throughout the state are adopting New Jersey's Blue Envelope Program. The program's goal is to inform officers as fast as possible that the driver they have stopped has a developmental disorder, which may explain their unusual behavior.

Those drivers who participate in the program will get a blue envelope they can place on their vehicle's sun visor or hand over to law enforcement officers during a stop. The envelope holds their essential documents, including license, registration and a contact card. Officers are trained to recognize the blue envelope and its meaning.

Englewood’s Christopher Gagliardi, 43, who has autism, said the bright red and blue lights atop police cars are scary. He's hoping the program helps to ensure that there's "no brutality or any kind of abuse against people with special needs like myself and especially on the autism spectrum disorder that are affected by the terror and fear of police officers."

Once the driver shows or hands over the blue envelope, it alerts the officers to the situation, and they then are able to put training and guidance on best practices into effect. The training will have covered how best to interact and communicate with drivers with autism, said Passaic County Prosecutor Camelia Valdes.

...

A new study found that a third of teens who have autism without intellectual disability earn a driver's license. Nearly 90% of them do so within two years of getting their learner’s permit.

California and the Department of Education

 In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

Trump wants to abolish the Department of Education.

Emma Gallegos at EdSource:

California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond vowed on Friday to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, which he said represented a “clear threat to what our students need to have a good education and a great life.”

“We cannot be caught flatfooted,” Thurmond said, during a news conference.

Thurmond made his pronouncement in Sacramento on Friday while flanked by legislators and education and labor leaders holding up signs saying “Education Is For Everyone” and “Protect All Students.”

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to abolish the department, a long-standing and so far unfulfilled pledge made by Republican leaders dating back to former President Ronald Reagan.

Thurmond said there are concerns that abolishing the department would put at risk some $8 billion that California receives in federal funds for programs serving students with disabilities and those attending low-income schools, both public and private.
“We will not allow that to happen,” he said. “The law will not allow that to happen.”

He observed, for example, that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, guarantees students in special education programs a “free and appropriate education,” and to receive a range of special education services in an individualized education program drawn up for every special education student.

If Congress is reluctant to go that far, Project 2025 has a backup plan: turning IDEA into a no-string block grant.  IDEA is not a civil rights act.  Its requirements are conditions of aid, aka "strings."  If you cut the strings, you gut the protections that students and their families have relied on for decades.

How RFK Jr Could Do Harm

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 recently ran for president as an independent and endorsed Trump.   RFK could get a major job in the administration.  Even if RFK Jr. does not get a cabinet post, he can still do a lot of damage from a staff job in the White House. Dan Diamond et al. at WP:

But health officials and public health experts say giving Kennedy any role in federal vaccine policy could sow doubt and confusion about vaccines. They contend that could lead states to weaken vaccine requirements to enroll in school, resulting in lower vaccination rates among children.

“It gives executive leaders within a state, especially in red states, and lawmakers the license to go ahead and completely dismantle and annihilate those public health guardrails that we’ve had for decades,” said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for the Immunization Partnership, a Texas-based group of doctors and vaccine advocates. “We will see more schools suffering vaccine preventable outbreaks, we’re going to see more children sick, we could potentially see more children being hospitalized, and, God forbid, children dying from things that are preventable.”

Already, the share of kindergartners exempted from vaccine requirements rose to a high of 3.3 percent last school year, compared with 2.5 percent five years prior, a trend experts say is driven in part by vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine sentiment. All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving certain vaccines. And most also permit exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.

Religious exemptions for vaccines have skyrocketed by nearly 22 percent in Mecklenburg County in North Carolina over the last five school years, said Raynard Washington, director of the public health department. Vaccine-preventable diseases have followed suit: Cases of pertussis, known as whooping cough, jumped from four last year to 64 so far this year. Chickenpox cases have tripled to at least 15.

The numbers could rise even more if local, state and federal public health officials start sending conflicting messages about vaccines, Washington said. “We certainly don’t want to do something to exacerbate the issue, fueling more disinformation about what I think is settled science — that these vaccines are effective,” he said.

Target: Medicaid

The Politics of Autism includes an extensive discussion of insurance and Medicaid services for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Stephanie Armour at KFF:

While Trump has vowed to protect Medicare and said he supports funding home care benefits, he’s been less specific about his intentions for Medicaid, which provides coverage to lower-income and disabled people. Some health analysts expect the program will be especially vulnerable to spending cuts, which could help finance the extension of tax breaks that expire at the end of next year.

Possible changes include the imposition of work requirements on beneficiaries in some states. The administration and Republicans in Congress could also try to revamp the way Medicaid is funded. Now, the federal government pays states a variable percentage of program costs. Conservatives have long sought to cap the federal allotments to states, which critics say would lead to draconian cuts.

“Medicaid will be a big target in a Trump administration,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

Ted Kennedy Jr. recently wrote of the first Trump administration:

The administration proposed shifting more Medicaid costs to the states, which would have reduced funding for home and community-based services. Nearly 15 million people with disabilities, who rely on Medicaid for personal caregivers, would have faced a financially forced transfer to institutional care.