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.
He is now Trump's Secretary of HHS.
He connected circumcision to autism on the grounds that parents often give their kids Tylenol after the bris. He was talking nonsense, as Ariana Eunjung Cha explains at WP:
The first, which came out in 2013 in Environmental Health, claimed a strong correlation between autism prevalence in males in eight countries and circumcision rates. The authors said the purpose of their study was to look at newborn exposure to paracetamol (another name for acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol) which they said was widely prescribed since the mid-1990s for male circumcision.
One of the paper’s authors, Ann Bauer, also co-authored a 2025 analysis that linked Tylenol use during pregnancy to an increased risk of autism in children — a paper that officials from the Trump administration cited when issuing a related warning last month. Bauer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor emerita at Boston University, called the 2013 study “quite abysmal.”
She questioned the study’s methodology, saying it did not look at key variables related to autism diagnosis such as the average age of parents having children or increased awareness of autism leading to more diagnoses. She said the study did not have enough data to establish a correlation between autism, much less a causal relationship. And she questioned the basic premise of the research in the first place.
...A second peer-reviewed study based on Danish national health system data was published in 2015 in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, a British publication. It claimed that circumcised boys had a 46 to 62 percentage increase in risk of autism spectrum disorder in the first 10 years of life likely than non-circumcised boys. Their explanation for the possible link focused more on pain.
“While no firm conclusions should be drawn at this point, several lines of evidence are compatible with a possible causal role of circumcision trauma in some cases,” the authors wrote. That study called the previous paper’s assumption that boys undergoing circumcision always get paracetamol as a pain medication “questionable” but said they had no data to address the hypothesis.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hit back at an op-ed written by the most recent six surgeons general, who said they wanted to warn the U.S. about the dangers of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The op-ed, published in The Washington Post on Tuesday, called the health secretary’s policies and positions an "immediate and unprecedented" threat to the nation’s health.
In a statement to ABC News, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the doctors are the same officials "who presided over the decline in America's public health."...In the op-ed, the surgeons general referenced views held by Kennedy, including repeating the false claim that childhood vaccines cause autism and misrepresenting risks of COVID-19 vaccines,
despite studies that found the shots prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths.
...
In the op-ed, the surgeons general referenced views held by Kennedy, including repeating the false claim that childhood vaccines cause autism and misrepresenting risks of COVID-19 vaccines, despite studies that found the shots prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths.
...
The op-ed comes about a month after seven former directors and two former acting directors of the CDC wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, accusing Kennedy of endangering the health of Americans.
