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.
The federal government may have partial answers on the purported causes of autism by this fall, but not the full picture, as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised in April.
Kennedy sat down with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday shortly after a White House event to release the Make America Healthy Again Commission’s first report, which argued that ultaprocessed foods, environmental toxins and overmedication are driving a rise in childhood chronic illnesses.
The commission’s next report, spelling out strategies to combat chronic diseases across health, agricultural and environmental agencies, will be released this August, Kennedy said.But his self-declared deadline to distill the drivers of autism by September — as Kennedy announced in an April Cabinet meeting — is slipping.
“We’ll have some of the information [by September]. To get the most solid information, it will probably take us another six months,” Kennedy said Thursday. By the end of those additional six months, or roughly March, “I expect we will know the answers of the etiology of autism,” he said.
Autism researchers and scientists have questioned the likelihood of delivering definitive conclusions on the drivers of autism in such a short timeframe, considering the years of research that is often undertaken in this area.
That research has already identified likely factors leading to autism, including genetics and prenatal exposures.
