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.
This week's CDC purge is just the lastest installment of RFK Jr's war on public health.
Save for his confirmation hearing and private promises to Cassidy, Kennedy has clearly communicated his intentions to dismantle the CDC. Over decades of activism and lawyering, Kennedy has cast the CDC as the villain in his vaccine conspiracy theories, calling the agency a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with doctors and scientists who seek to profit off of injured children.
In just seven months, Kennedy has: pushed sweeping budget cuts and canceled billions in research and development; overseen mass layoffs and reorganizations that erased whole teams tackling clear health threats; without justification, withdrawn Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant people; gutted the agency’s vaccine advisory panel, firing respected experts and replacing them with ideological loyalists; installed a vocal Covid vaccine critic to chair a safety subcommittee; reopened the long-debunked vaccines-and-autism debate, promising a cause by September; hired a discredited anti-vaccine researcher who experimented on autistic children to trawl government data and relitigate settled science; pressed for access to private data to fuel his project; undermined his own epidemiologists during the Texas measles response; downplayed a shooting that left CDC staff shaken; announced sweeping policy changes on social media with no data to back them and accused the American Academy of Pediatrics of a “pay-to-play scheme” for daring to dissent. He’s done it all mostly from the road, on a national MAHA tour, where between performative push-ups and pull-ups, he’s cheered GOP states as they have restricted food benefits for low-income families.
