RFK Sorta Endorses MMR

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 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 part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

He is now Trump's secretary of HHS.  

Teddy Rosenbluth and Lucinda Holt at NYT:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, attended the funeral on Sunday of an 8-year-old girl who died of measles amid an outbreak that has burned through the region and called into question his ability to handle a public-health crisis.

The child’s death, in a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, early Thursday morning, is the second confirmed fatality from measles in a decade in the United States.

The child died of “measles pulmonary failure,” according to records obtained by The New York Times. The hospital, part of UMC Health System, confirmed the death later on Sunday, adding that the girl was unvaccinated and had no underlying health conditions.

Mr. Kennedy conferred with the girl’s family but did not speak at the funeral ceremony, according to people in attendance.

“My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief,” Mr. Kennedy said in a message posted on X, formerly Twitter.

“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the M.M.R. vaccine,” he added, referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

At the same time, Mr. Kennedy has stopped short of recommending universal vaccination in communities where the virus is not spreading.

And he has ordered a re-examination of whether the vaccine causes autism, a claim long ago debunked by research, to be conducted by a well-known vaccine skeptic.

Some are praising RFK Jr. for accurately noting “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”

That’s not enough.

He needs to state plainly, as below, that the MMR is safe, and that unvaccinated patients should receive it.https://t.co/q5riyuiFs3 https://t.co/WVOfWDUAP6 pic.twitter.com/4wydKXGbEr

— Dr. Michelle Au (@AuforGA) April 6, 2025

RFK and CA

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 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 part of the "Disinformation Dozen."

He is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

At a Sacramento event in 2015, Kennedy said: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone, This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

 Ana Ibarra at CalMatters:

Five years ago, hundreds of people crowded the halls of the state Capitol protesting legislation that sought to tighten California’s vaccine rules. Outside, music blasted something about a revolution and people carried signs that read “Vaccine mandates violate bodily autonomy.”

From the sea of red-clad protesters emerged a familiar face idolized by the anti-vaccine activists: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He was the guest of honor in one of the biggest public health showdowns the state has seen in recent years. Ultimately, he and his followers lost — the Legislature passed a law to clamp down on fraudulent or inappropriate medical exemptions for required childhood vaccines.

Today, Kennedy finds himself on a bigger stage with potentially far more influence and power. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated the former environmental lawyer turned controversial vaccine critic to oversee the nation’s health policy as secretary of Health and Human Services.

He has been known to make false, and at times dangerous, claims about medicine and public health. Perhaps most infamously he linked vaccines to autism — a claim that has been debunked over and over again.
...
Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who as a state senator authored the 2019 medical exemption law and a separate law that eliminated personal belief exemptions for childhood vaccines, said having a health secretary who casts doubt on vaccines is “a danger” and “disturbing.”

“I imagine we’re going to see a lot more direct attacks on individual scientists, individual people. I’m anticipating that I’m probably gonna be hoisted somewhere by those guys as well. I don’t think RFK Jr. has forgotten about me yet,” he said.

Excess Republican Deaths

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 measles and COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

Jacob Wallace,; Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham; Jason L. Schwartz, "Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic" JAMA Internal Medicine

Key Points

Question Was political party affiliation a risk factor associated with excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida and Ohio?

Findings In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Meaning The differences in excess mortality by political party affiliation after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been a factor in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

Abstract

Importance There is evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democratic-leaning counties and similar evidence of an association between political party affiliation and attitudes regarding COVID-19 vaccination; further data on these rates may be useful.

Objective To assess political party affiliation and mortality rates for individuals during the initial 22 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design, Setting, and Participants A cross-sectional comparison of excess mortality between registered Republican and Democratic voters between March 2020 and December 2021 adjusted for age and state of voter registration was conducted. Voter and mortality data from Florida and Ohio in 2017 linked to mortality records for January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2021, were used in data analysis.

Exposures Political party affiliation.

Main Outcomes and Measures Excess weekly deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic adjusted for age, county, party affiliation, and seasonality.

Results Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538 159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample. The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years). Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Conclusions and Relevance In this cross-sectional study, an association was observed between political party affiliation and excess deaths in Ohio and Florida after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults. These findings suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.

It Takes a Neighborhood

 In The Politics of Autism, I write about the everyday experiences of autistic youths and their families -- including safety on the streets.

Michelle Menezes, Jim Soland & Micah O. Mazurek have an article at The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders titled "Association Between Neighborhood Support and Family Resilience in Households with Autistic Children." The abstract:

The capacity of families with autistic children to demonstrate resilience is a notable strength that has received little attention in the literature. A potential predictor of family resilience in households with autistic youth is neighborhood support. This study examined the relationship between neighborhood support and family resilience in households with autistic youth utilizing data from the National Survey of Children’s Health. A structural equation model was constructed as neighborhood support and family resilience were latent variables. Findings demonstrated that neighborhood support significantly predicts family resilience. This study contributes to the literature as the first quantitative investigation of predictors of family resilience with this group. Strengths of autistic youth, their families, and their communities can be and should be leveraged to address challenges.

An Incident in Kansas

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss interactions between police and autistic people.  Police officers need training to respond appropriately.  When they do not, things get out of hand. 

Tim Hrenchir at the Topeka Capital-Journal

A Jackson County sheriff's deputy used his Taser on a 12-year-old autistic boy without warning as the youth sat handcuffed, shackled and hogtied in the deputy's vehicle.

The state's law enforcement oversight body says Matthew Honas on Feb. 23 used excessive force multiple times on the boy, including tying him up in a manner that threatened "his ability to breathe properly."

The Kansas Commission on Peace Officers' Standards and Training on Aug. 22 issued an order of reprimand to Honas. While Honas was discharged March 3 from his deputy's job in Jackson County, the commission chose not to revoke his certification as a law enforcement officer.

The encounter was captured on Honas' in-car camera, KSCPOST said.

Jackson County counselor Lee Hendricks rejected The Topeka Capital-Journal's open records request for the video.

Sources of Autism Research Funding

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the Inter-Agency Autism Coordinating Committee and research priorities.

Portfolio Analysis Report IACC Autism Spectrum Disorder Research 2017-2018

(IACC published the data last year.)

The federal government provides most of the research funding:

Most of the federal money comes from NIH:

The Army is one of these sources:

The Office of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) was created in 1992 from a powerful grassroots effort led by the breast cancer advocacy community that resulted in a Congressional appropriation of funds for breast cancer research. This initiated a unique partnership among the public, Congress, and the military. Since that time, Congress has added additional research programs and topics. Funds for the CDMRP are added to the Department of Defense (DoD) budget, in which support for individual programs such as the Autism Research Program (ARP) is allocated via specific guidance from Congress. Since its inception in fiscal year 2007 (FY07) and on through FY20, appropriations totaling $104.4 Million have been directed to the ARP by the Peer-Reviewed Autism Research Congressional appropriation.

Why the Army?

Strategies to Leverage Research Funding Guiding DOD's Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Alternative Funding Strategies for DOD's Peer Reviewed Medical Research Programs; Editors: Michael McGeary and Kathi E. Hanna

CDMRP was initiated in 1992 in response to several forces. One was the emergence of women's health as an urgent public policy issue. In July 1991, for example, the New England Journal of Medicine published several studies showing that there was sex bias in the management of coronary heart disease. In addition, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had recently launched a women's health initiative and was requiring the inclusion of women in clinical trials.






...

One attractive source of funding at that time was DOD, which had approximately $29 billion in unobligated funds from prior years for the development of weapons systems planned before collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.1 Those funds were put off limits by the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990, which established “firewalls” between the budgets for defense, foreign affairs, and domestic programs and imposed strict caps on funding increases in each of the three categories. A number of attempts were made to breach the firewalls by transferring defense funding to domestic programs, including two attempts in September 1992 that would have increased funding for breast cancer research specifically, but they all failed.2 Ultimately, Senator Tom Harkin put forward an amendment to the FY 1993 defense budget to increase funding for breast cancer research within DOD (rather than at NIH) by $185 million, to bring the total breast cancer research program within DOD to $210 million (Watson, 1992). As a transfer within DOD's research and development (R&D) budget, the amendment did not violate the budget agreement's firewalls. The funds were to be taken from the Strategic Defense Initiative and thus would be above and beyond the battlefield medicine-oriented core program of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC),3 which was funded at $410 million in the Senate bill. The “Harkin Amendment for Breast Cancer” which passed in the Senate by a vote of 89 to 4, also stipulated that all projects funded by the resulting Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) would have to undergo peer review (Mervis, 1993).

.

COVID Keeps Claiming Antivaxxers

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 growing number of them are getting COVID.

David Gilbert at Vice:

A QAnon and anti-vaccine podcaster has died from complications due to COVID-19 after contracting the virus at a conspiracy theory conference that turned into a superspreader event, and where fellow attendees baselessly blamed their illness on an anthrax attack.

Doug Kuzma, 61, from Newport News, Virginia, died on January 3 after being hospitalized 10 days earlier. Kuzma broadcasted on the FROG News podcasting network, which stands for “Fully Rely On God.” Kuzma and his FROG fellow hosts pushed an array of conspiracy theories ranging from QAnon to COVID denial and election fraud lies.

Kuzma attended the ReAwaken America conference in Dallas on the weekend of Dec. 11, posting a picture of his media pass on his Facebook page. Other images Kuzma posted from the conference show large crowds in confined spaces without any social distancing or masks.

Nicholas Goldberg at LAT:

Kelly Ernby was no doubt a good person, a friend to her friends, a companion to her husband, a crime-fighting prosecutor. She presumably had all the decent qualities we usually celebrate after a person dies, when we generally say only the kindest things we can think of.

But she was also a vocal critic of vaccine mandates whose posts on social media risked lives, denied science and confused Americans. She was an activist with a mini-megaphone — an Orange County deputy district attorney, a local Republican Party official and a 2019 GOP candidate for state Assembly — spreading the message of a dangerous populist movement.

So when Ernby died of COVID-19 this week at age 46 (unvaccinated, of course), her death set off an ugly public debate, reflecting all the bitterness, polarization and frustration in American pandemic society. A resident of Huntington Beach, she suddenly became a symbol rather than a person, a blank slate onto which we could all project our harshest gut reactions.

 

Disinformation Superspreader

 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.

Emily Rauhala at WP:

For years now, well-organized and funded U.S. activists have been central to the global spread of dis- and mis- information about vaccine safety, particularly the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

When it comes to false information about vaccines, the United States “is sort of a superspreader,” said Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the author of “Stuck,” a book investigating why vaccine rumors don’t go away.

As the novel coronavirus made its way around the world in the spring, so did questions about an eventual vaccine.

Before the pandemic, the average adult did not think about vaccines until they had children, said Kolina Koltai, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.

Now, information about vaccine development and testing is everywhere from Facebook groups to the nightly news. “At a global level, you have people talking about vaccines: Who is producing them? What are their political ties?” she said. “The anti-vaccine movement was already asking those questions.”

Anti-vaccine campaigners stepped in with answers, flooding existing networks with false and misleading content.

A major turning point was the May 4 release of a conspiracy video, “Plandemic,” featuring a discredited American scientist with ties to the anti-vaccine movement.

The video cast the coronavirus crisis as a shadowy plot orchestrated by the “scientific and political elite.” (There is no evidence to support this.) It falsely claimed that a coronavirus vaccine would “kill millions.” (Immunization prevents between 2 million and 3 million deaths per year, according to the WHO.)

“Plandemic” ricocheted across the Internet, bouncing from anti-vaccine groups to anti-lockdown groups, spreading among “Make America Great Again” enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists, as well as seemingly apolitical neighborhood bulletin boards.

"Child with Autism" Street Signs

 In The Politics of Autism, I write about the everyday struggles facing autistic people and their families -- including safety on the streets.

Kayla Green at WROC-TV:

Irondequoit families can now request to put up a sign in their neighborhood indicating an autistic child lives in the area. The state started allowing towns to put up these signs back in May and the town of Irondequoit just got the go-ahead.

Lawana Jones, president of the Rochester Autism Council, said she’s been looking into installing these signs for at least 10 years. She said she’s excited Irondequoit is leading the charge on putting them up locally.

“I think its important because not only are you making the drivers aware that there’s a child in the neighborhood that may wander out into the road, but it also makes your neighbors aware that you’ve got a child in the neighborhood that there are some safety concerns about,” Jones said.

Irondequoit town supervisor Dave Seeley said there are a few boxes to check to get a sign approved. The autistic child is under age 18, the average daily traffic volume in the neighborhood is less than 2,000 cars, the speed limit is 35 miles per hour or lower, and the street is residential.