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 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.
Andrew Gumbel at The Observer:
Kennedy’s anti-science, slash-and-burn approach is particularly frustrating to autism campaigners, who had hoped he was sincere about answering the question of what causes the condition – answers that might go a long way towards steering many parents and adult sufferers away from conspiracy theories.
But what those advocates have seen is a gutting of research funds. Instead of deepening work into genetic causes of autism, Kennedy has indulged his obsession with one thing scientists are now quite confident does not cause autism: childhood vaccination.
“[Kennedy] acts as if there’s a single environmental toxin that nobody who has been studying autism for the past 25 years has been able to find,” said Alison Singer of the Autism Science Foundation. “We are in fact making really good progress in finding the causes of autism, and yet the administration that says it wants to find the causes is decimating the scientific infrastructure of university-based research.”
Discouraging the vaccination of pregnant women was counterproductive, Singer argued, because research indicates that rubella, flu or Covid during pregnancy could be aggravating factors for autism. Proposing a registry of Americans with autism without explaining its purpose, as Kennedy’s department did in April, risked alarming people and deterring parents from seeking help for their autistic children, she added.
“RFK Jr is a data denier,” Singer argued. “There’s this hypothesis he’s had for 20 years that vaccines cause autism and he disregards anything that contradicts it. You can’t be so entrenched in your own beliefs that you can’t see the data in front of you.”
In going against that data, Kennedy has also politicised the country’s public health – a process Trump himself began during the Covid pandemic by floating untested remedies like injecting disinfectant or “hit[ting] the body with … very powerful light” and conflating medical expertise with the elitism of what he calls the “radical left”.
Now Kennedy is justifying many of his most radical policy shifts as a response to “waste, administrative bloat and duplication” created by the Democrats under President Biden – the implication being that attacking the experts and attacking Democrats amount to the same thing.
