RFK Jr., Antivaxxers, and Campaign Finance

  In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong. A 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 now running for president as an independent. 

At Puck, Theodore Schleifer reports on RFK Jr.'s fundraising:

On January 1, he held a high-dollar event with folks in Aspen, where “apres ski attire” was recommended; on January 16, donors in Hawaii can wear “aloha attire” for a “private sunset reception” with Kennedy and his wife, Cheryl Hines, or join him two days later to go whale watching at a “very special event on a beautiful catamaran in the heart of Oahu.”

Several of the hosts come from the so-called “health freedom” community—the euphemism for these anti-vaccine activists—as is true of many people in R.F.K.’s fundraising orbit and supportive super PACs. For instance, this past weekend in Oregon, Kennedy spoke and answered questions at a sold-out cocktail reception outside of Portland hosted by J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, an organization that has pushed links between vaccines and autism. It was attended by about 170 people who paid a minimum of $500 to be there, making it, at minimum, an $85,000-grossing event. There’s plenty of money in the vaccine-skeptic world.

Generation Rescue Rebrands

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have helped spread this dangerous myth.

Anna Merlan at Jezebel:

Generation Rescue, the charity whose public face and board president is actor Jenny McCarthy, and which promotes debunked and sometimes dangerous treatments for autistic children, seems to rebranding away from the subject of autism and towards a much more broad set of medical issues. Sometime in May, the Generation Rescue website was taken offline, replaced with a page that reads, simply, “Stay tuned for what’s next.”

Even before the site disappeared, there were signs that McCarthy and Generation Rescue hoped to retool the organization into a “functional medicine” nonprofit, rather than one focused on the controversial and non-scientific autism recovery claims they’ve made for years. The apparent rebrand feels almost Goop-esque, a way for McCarthy and the organization to enter a much broader and less clearly defined “wellness” space, where many more kinds of questionable pseudoscience are possible.

Generation Rescue was founded by a businessman named J.B. Handley, who, like McCarthy, claims that vaccines cause autism. (Both Handley and his wife Lisa, like McCarthy, have claimed that one of their three children developed autism after being vaccinated. Yet another enormous studypublished in March has thoroughly refuted the idea that vaccines cause autism.

Antivax Grifters and Bullies

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have helped spread this dangerous myth.

Anna Merlan at Jezebel:

A deep dive into the world of Generation Rescue has revealed that the organization doesn’t just promote ineffective or medically unproven or downright debunked treatments for autism (all of which has been demonstrated before): The organization and the people associated with it profit from them, too. In two cases, Generation Rescue has heavily promoted products owned by past board members, at the time they served on the board: hyperbaric oxygen chambers and B12 lollipops, both of which have been presented on GR’s website as near-miraculous treatments for symptoms of autism.

In another case, Generation Rescue has lavishly praised and promoted products made by a corporate sponsor—the maker of a ionic footbath that supposedly “cleanses” “toxins” from the body—without directly revealing the company’s business relationship with GR. Families can also apply for “grants” from Generation Rescue, which funnels them into receiving treatment—and buying more products—from handpicked naturopathic doctors and GR partner organizations. (As of March 2019, Generation Rescue says on their site that applications to the grant program are temporarily closed while they update “critical pieces” of the program.)

Elizabeth Cohen and John Bonifield, at CNN

Interviews with mothers who've lost children and with those who spy on anti-vaccination groups, reveal a tactic employed by anti-vaxers: When a child dies, members of the group sometimes encourage each other to go on that parent's Facebook page. The anti-vaxers then post messages telling the parents they're lying and their child never existed, or that the parent murdered them, or that vaccines killed the child, or some combination of all of those.

Nothing is considered too cruel. Just days after their children died, mothers say anti-vaxers on social media called them whores, the c-word and baby killers.

The mother in the Midwest, who wants to remain anonymous, isn't alone.

Jill Promoli, who lives outside Toronto, lost her son to flu. She believes the anti-vaxers are trying to silence the very people who can make the strongest argument for vaccinations: those whose children died of vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Generation Rescue and a Disputed Study

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. 

A recent case involved a retracted study.

Bryson Masse reports at Motherboard:

In late November, a scientific publisher abruptly removed the abstract of a study from its webpage. The as-yet-unpublished research, which would have appeared in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, concluded that unvaccinated children are less likely to suffer from autism (among other ailments). The abstract was taken down after a severe Twitter backlash.

Motherboard has determined that the research in question was funded mostly by actor Jenny McCarthy’s autism awareness nonprofit, Generation Rescue. McCarthy has famously spread the dangerously inaccurate, and scientifically unsound, view that vaccines can cause autism in otherwise healthy children. (She has somewhat softened this view in recent years.)
...
No matter how troubling on its surface, ethicists say that having a nonprofit like Generation Rescue fund of this type of study isn’t a red flag in and of itself: plenty of private companies and nonprofits pay for science. With President-elect Donald Trump threatening to cut back on funding, researchers will likely have to rely even more on private money.

Still, National Institutes of Health bioethicist David Resnik told Motherboard that funding from a particular group with a vested interest might warrant an added degree of skepticism. “You might re-examine the data more closely than you would otherwise because you think that, maybe, there is some potential bias that is affected by the research.”

Trump Foundation Funds Antivax Movement

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.   In this campaign, a number of posts have discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  He also has a bad record on disability issues more generally.

Tim Mak reports at The Daily Beast:

Donald Trump has not only spread dangerous misinformation about the links between vaccines and autism, but he’s also given money to the anti-vaxxer cause.

His monetary support for the conspiracy theory came in the form of a $10,000 check to an anti-vaccine charity run by former Playboy model and television host Jenny McCarthy.

Trump’s monetary and moral support for McCarthy’s discredited ideas have real, harmful effects—they contribute to the mainstreaming of a conspiracy theory at a time when parents are increasingly deciding to opt out of vaccines despite medical advice.


McCarthy has been a vocal opponent of chemicals in vaccines since 2007, citing discredited studies and experiences with her autistic son. “The University of Google is where I got my degree from,” she once said in an interview.

She put her misinformed views into action by leading an anti-vaccine nonprofit called Generation Rescue, which the Republican nominee’s controversial Trump Foundation charity contributed to in 2010, according to nonprofit records.

Two additional points.  One, though the Trump Foundation bears his name, he has not actually given any money to it since 2008.  

Two, Trump's buffonery is often amusing, but his antivax nonsense puts children in jeopardy.  As I wrote a year ago:

Trump is hardly the first politician to spout misinformation – but in this case, it is downright dangerous.  If parents take him seriously and delay vaccinations, their children could catch the diseases that the vaccines prevent.  And some of these diseases can be deadly.

A Dubious Event

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

Seema Yasmin writes at The Dallas Morning News:

An autism summit in Dallas this weekend features medical professionals who have been disciplined for mistreating children, alongside celebrities who shun science and claim vaccines are dangerous. Autism advocates say the event offers false hope to parents by promoting miracle cures and treatments proved to be dangerous and ineffective.

The Autism Education Summit is hosted by Generation Rescue, an organization co-founded by anti-vaccine advocate Jenny McCarthy, who has a son with autism. McCarthy will be joined by Bexar County District Attorney Nico Lahood, who also claims vaccines cause autism.

...

"A number of these speakers are opportunists and predators who prey on the fears and the desperation of parents who have kids with autism," said Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician at Baylor Medical Center in Houston whose daughter has autism. "I understand how desperate and hopeless a parent can feel having a child with autism and it doesn't get better with age because now we're dealing with a young adult with autism."

Studies show one third to 43 percent of families pay for sometimes costly and often unproven alternative treatments for children with autism.

Hotez is concerned that the autism summit is using high-profile speakers to sell false hope to parents like him. "These speakers are offering every type of flim-flam therapy you can imagine, from hyperbaric oxygen therapy to chelation. There's one guy who says autism is caused by parasitic worms," Hotez said.

Finances of Autism Organizations

Left Brain/Right Brain looks at IRS Form 990, finding that Autism Speaks ($45.5m in revenue) and Generation Rescue ($641k in revenue) both have roughly equal ratios of salaries to program service expenses. Also it finds that the National Autism Association ($542k in revenue) does not have the thousands of dues paying members that it had claimed. "The lowest dues level for the NAA is $35/year. The amount of dues collected was $12,465. This suggests a maximum of 356 dues paying members."