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.

Consider the Source

Many posts have discussed purported links between autism and toxic chemicals.

Emily Willingham tracks the source of one article:

Two clinicians who “utilize detoxification methods in their clinical practices” together with a third author have published an epic review in Translational Psychiatry claiming to evaluate the evidence for the involvement of environmental contaminants in autism. While we obviously want to limit contaminant exposure, autism doesn’t emerge here as the reason for doing so. Something that does emerge, however, looks a lot like bias and not much like systematic evaluation.

...
The review article funding came from the Autism Research Institute, begun by the late Bernard Rimland (vaccines-cause-autism proponent) and the origin of the controversial and now-defunct Defeat Autism Now! conferences and clinician registry.

The first and third authors of this review, Daniel Rossignol and Richard Frye, are scientific advisors to Jenny McCarthy’s Generation Rescue, a group committed to the idea that vaccines and mercury cause autism. Rossignol and second author Stephen Genuis declared the conflict of interest regarding using “detoxification methods” in their practices (those would be applied, presumably, for “metal toxicity” etc.). Each author has other interests in the conclusions from the review (including related to oft-mentioned metabolicdisorders, among others).

Rossignol was a Defeat Autism Now! Doctor who tells parents on his clinic Website that children with an autism diagnosis “in many cases” will need to have a large number of tests ordered. These tests include analyses for lead and “increased heavy metal or pesticide levels in the kidney … markers of the metal burden in the body.” And, of course, at the top of his “Articles” page, you will find a link to this latest open-access review with its conclusions that such toxicants are implicated in autism. In addition to his “detox in clinical practice” disclosure, he’s a big fan of HBOT, which the FDA has warned us about.

DAN and ARI

Left Brain/Right Brain reports:

As late as just a few months ago, The Autism Research Institute (ARI), promoted their upcoming Fall 2010 Defeat Autism Now! conference in a monthly newsletter. Note the name of the conference:

“Fall 2010 ARI/Defeat Autism Now! Conference”
http://www.ariconference.com/enews/enewsletter_201010.html

Now look at ARI’s promotion of their Spring 2011 conference.

“Spring 2011 ARI Conference
(formerly known as Defeat Autism Now!)”
http://www.ariconference.com/enews/enewsletter_201011.html

Do you see the difference? It’s pretty hard to miss. What about all those practitioners (physicians, nurses, chiropractors, nutritionists, naturopaths, and homeopaths, etc.) who want to participate in the “DAN! Physician Training”, you know, become “DAN! Practitioners”? How does one become a DAN! doctor, if Defeat Autism Now! is a former identity?

A quick look at the ARI Conference website answers that right away.

The Autism Research Institute Conference Formerly known as Defeat Autism Now!

The practitioner seminars are still part of the conference. But there’s something potentially newsworthy here too.

As of 12/31/11, ARI will no longer be maintaining a clinician registry (a.k.a “the DAN list”). No new names will be added to the registry in 2011.

Alternative Treatments

An article at MedPage Today puts alternative treatments for autism in the context of a broader movement:

Doctors have always provided treatments that did not have a track record in randomized, controlled trials. Often they've provided such treatments without any serious intent of obtaining scientific validation.

Rather, they were usually convinced that the treatments would work, or at least that their errors would eventually lead them to discover a real therapy.

It has also been the case that these doctors have been treated with disdain, even persecuted by the medical establishment.

Many of them retreated to the shadows, continuing to practice their brand of medicine but with a low profile. Others proudly soldiered on in what they believed to be a noble, though lonely, cause.

Now, however, they organize.

Like the DAN doctors have with autism, physicians have attempted alternative treatments for Lyme Disease and various degenerative conditions.