RFK and Stem Cell "Therapy"

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

A lot of people in RFK Jr's MAHA orbit are making a lot of money from dubious "treatments."

Ed Pilkington at The Guardian:

Autistic children as young as 18 months old are being injected with human stem cells derived from umbilical cords in unapproved, unproven and potentially harmful “treatments” that scientists warn are proliferating across the US under the active encouragement of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Clinics in Florida, Texas and other states are selling what they bill as “regenerative medicine” to families with autistic children who have intensive care needs. Parents who have taken their children through the process talked about their hopes and fears for a therapy that appears to be gaining ground in the US.

The procedure, which can involve the child being sedated with ketamine before receiving intravenous doses of millions of stem cells, costs up to $20,000 for each treatment. Families are often advised to return for regular top-ups.

Profoundly stressed parents are being wooed to the clinics with promises that a high-dose infusion of umbilical cord stem cells can lead to dramatic improvements in their children’s ability to speak, socialise, or avoid aggressive or self-harming behaviour. Yet there is no scientific evidence that the procedure works – the most comprehensive clinical trial staged so far, a placebo experiment conducted by Duke University, found insignificant benefits for most of the 180 children tested.

...

In his 16 months as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services within the Trump administration, Kennedy has undercut established scientific endeavors. He has fired thousands of federal health officials, dismissed longstanding scientific advisers, defunded $31m in autism-related research and attempted to shrink the recommended list of childhood vaccinations.

At the same time, largely unnoticed, he has given his backing to alternative health providers moving to fill the gap. Kennedy appeared by video link at the first two annual summits held in San Diego by Autism Health, a leading advocate of stem cell infusions for autistic kids.


At the summit last year, he told the audience that “your issue is no longer on the fringe”. At this year’s gathering in April, he promised to “create opportunities that extend across a lifetime” and to work with the stem cell providers “to drive solutions together”.

Assisted Spelling

  Autism parents are highly vulnerable to quacks.

Arthur Allen at WP:

Assisted spelling is used to help nonverbal people communicate by pointing to letters on boards or using keyboards with physical help from another person.

...

But leading professional groups for autism science, as well as those representing psychologists and speech pathologists, point to research showing that these methods — premised on the idea that people with autism have the normal range of cognitive powers but are imprisoned in malfunctioning bodies — are flawed or fraudulent.

Other, validated methods enable nonspeakers to communicate through digital and analog pictures and letter boards. But assisted spelling isn’t autonomous communication, critics say: Consciously or not, the board holder may be influencing or responsible for the typed or pointed-at words — as with a Ouija board.

For many parents in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again community, the spelling controversy is angrily ringing the bells as the notion that vaccines cause autism — which they refuse to consider debunked. As some people see it: Established medicine damaged them with vaccines and now refuses to accept a helpful treatment.

...

“In this underfunded disability environment, I don’t want a single penny diverted to debunked interventions like spelling,” said Amy Lutz, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Pennsylvania and an autism support advocate who described her 27-year-old son as “profoundly autistic.”

It’s not only a waste of time, she said later in an interview, but “people subjected to spelling are not given access to evidence-based education. Every interaction turns someone like my son into a puppet, and I find that very objectionable.”

See a review of the literature from the Association for Science in Autism Treatment. 

Removing Protections

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

A lot of people in RFK Jr's MAHA orbit are making a lot of money from supplements. 

Bottema-Beutel, K. (2026). When Ableism Supplants Evidence: Federal Autism Guidance in the United States. Autism, 0(0).  https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613261439928

The US government has also removed protections that were previously in place to prevent harm to autistic people. In February of 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed a warning about disproven autism “remedies”, including chelation therapies, chlorine dioxide (i.e. bleach) treatments, raw camel milk, and hyperbaric oxygen therapies (O’Matz, 2026). In the 1990s, by Bernard Rimland, a US-based psychologist and parent of an autistic son, promoted therapies involving adjustment of the biological environment (including vitamin regimens and other, more invasive approaches such as chelation therapy and gluten/casein-free diets). Although these therapies had no or minimal research evidence, he convinced parents they were worth trying because any possibility for reducing autism “symptoms” meant the intervention was worth any potential harms, which he considered unlikely (Shattock, 2006). This of course was not true— primary harms to autistic children could and did happen with biogenic therapies, including death (Sinha et al., 2006). On a now defunct US FDA consumer updates webpage available via the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, the agency (under a previous administration) shared the potential harms of many of these therapies. For example, regarding bleach cures marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) they stated, “FDA has received reports of consumers who say they experienced nausea, severe vomiting and life-threatening low blood pressure after drinking the MMS and citrus juice mixture” (United States Federal Drug Administration [USFDA], 2014). Secondary harms, such as wasted caregiver time and resources, and reduced motivation to access more efficacious interventions, are also likely when therapies without research support are promoted by people in positions of power. No reliable evidence of their effectiveness has ever been produced, and other international sources of guidance continue to warn families against these therapies (e.g. Raising Children Network, 2026).

RFK Jr. and Leucovorin

 A number of posts discussed Trump's support for discredited notions about autism A September news conference was a firehose of lies.

Dr. Paul Offit:

Supporters of leucovorin point to a study that showed that the drug was effective and safe. On January 28, 2026, the journal that published that study retracted it because of “errors in results and concerns with the statistical analyses.” On March 10, 2026, the FDA backed away from its broad claims of efficacy of leucovorin stating that it would only work in that rare child who had a defect in the FOLR1 gene. For that reason, groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Psychiatric Association, the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, the Autism Science Foundation, and several major pediatric healthcare centers don’t recommend leucovorin as a treatment for autism. “The reason the AAP is not broadly recommending leucovorin is because we know that autistic children deserve the same level of evidence to support interventions as anyone else,” said Dr. Kristin Sohl. Once again, RFK Jr. was wrong. And, once again, he failed to apologize for misleading parents.

For many parents, autism can be financially burdensome and emotionally draining. Nonetheless, physicians who are still willing to prescribe leucovorin charge as much as $1,500 for an initial visit. There is nothing more sinister than people who offer false hope to those desperate to do something, anything to help their children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to use children with autism as a prop to further his anti-vaccine agenda. For that, this opportunist and interloper should be roundly condemned.

FDA Pulls Warning About Quack Autism "Cures"

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

A lot of people in RFK Jr's MAHA orbit are making a lot of money from supplements. 

Megan O’Matz at Pro Publica:

The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk.

Now that advisory is gone.

The Food and Drug Administration pulled the page down late last year. The federal Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it retired the webpage “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025,” noting the page had not been updated since 2019. (An archived version of the page is still available online.)

Some advocates for people with autism don’t understand that decision. “It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit policy organization run by and for autistic people. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelation and chlorine dioxide. Those can both kill people.”

Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has been used as an industrial disinfectant, a bleaching agent and an ingredient in mouthwash, though with the warning it shouldn’t be swallowed. A ProPublica story examined Sen. Ron Johnson’s endorsement of a new book by Dr. Pierre Kory, which describes the chemical as a “remarkable molecule” that, when diluted and ingested, “works to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.”

...

At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy praised Trump for his wide search for a COVID-19 remedy in his first term, which Kennedy said included vaccines, various drugs and “even chlorine dioxide.”

The FDA, dating back to at least 2010, has urged consumers not to purchase or drink chlorine dioxide, frequently marketed as a Miracle Mineral Solution, because “the solution, when mixed, develops into a dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.”

The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) has previously reported on the removal of the FDA warnings page. The lack of a warning has also received attention in the Telegram channel Chlorine Dioxide Testimonies.

Curb Your Enthusiasm About Leucovorin

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for dubious notions about autism.

The history of autism "cures" is a history of dashed hopes and frequent danger.

Trump and RFK, Jr. recently touted leucovorin.

 Jon Hamilton at NPR:

All of this is part of a familiar cycle for Dr. Paul Offit, who directs the vaccine education center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit says he realized years ago that leucovorin's popularity was far ahead of the science.

"I saw it for what it was, which was yet the next magic medicine to treat autism, in a long line of magic medicines to treat autism that haven't worked," Offit says.

Offit has chronicled the rise and fall of many of those products in his books and blog posts.

"First it was secretin, an intestinal hormone," he says. "Then it was Lupron, chemical castration, antibiotics, megavitamins, nicotine patches, and my personal favorite, which is raw camel's milk."

Leucovorin is likely to find a place on that cautionary list, Offit says, adding that the FDA has failed to protect the public from an autism remedy that "clearly hasn't been well tested to be effective."

...

Decades ago, the drug became a popular treatment for children with Fragile X syndrome, an inherited condition that affects a region of the X chromosome and is a leading cause of autism.

Until genetic tests for Fragile X arrived in the 1990s, scientists used a microscope to look for "fragile" or "broken" regions on the X chromosome. And they found that those abnormalities were easier to see in brain cells grown in a medium low in folic acid (a synthetic form of folate).

"So the very first, and most obvious theory was that Fragile X must have something to do with folic acid metabolism," says Dr. Michael Tranfaglia, medical director of the FRAXA Research Foundation and parent of an adult child who has the disorder and severe autism.

Parents started giving folic acid to their children with Fragile X. When that didn't work, they moved on to folinic acid — leucovorin.

"There was a lot of excitement about that, until people started doing actual clinical trials," Tranfaglia says. Then it became clear the drug was no better than a placebo.

Now, Tranfaglia says, leucovorin is back.

"It's not terribly surprising," he says, "because for every supplement and every vitamin you can possibly imagine, someone has proposed some kind of link to autism."

Usually, though, that someone is not running the FDA — the agency that determines whether a drug is safe and effective.

Focus on Helping Autistic People, Not Spreading Pseudoscience

 A number of posts have discussed Trump's support for discredited notions about autism 

Challenging Claims of an Autism Epidemic — Misconceptions and a Path Forward

Authors: Tara Eicher, Ph.D., John Quackenbush, Ph.D., and Ari Ne’eman, Ph.D.Published January 17, 2026DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2514250

The history of autism offers many reasons for fraught relationships between clinicians and autistic persons and their families. For decades, the psychiatric and especially psychoanalytic communities relied on psychodynamic theories of the causation of autism that blamed “refrigerator mothers.” It is thus unsurprising that a culture of distrust exists between parents of autistic children and physicians — a distrust that the president only exacerbates when he suggests that physicians are withholding information from families about environmental causes. This rhetoric, specifically the blaming of mothers who use acetaminophen during pregnancy for their children’s impairments, harkens back to past decades. Such rhetoric can cause concrete harms, encouraging expectant mothers to forgo essential treatment for fever and leading parents to turn to an exploitative alternative medicine industry peddling costly pseudoscience that frequently harms autistic people.

Autistic people and their families do deserve answers — not answers involving ill-conceived “causes” and pseudoscientific “cures,” but answers to their aspirations for improved services, medical care, and inclusion in society. Much needs to be done to shift the focus of existing autism-research investments toward issues of immediate relevance to autistic people and their families. Researchers who make this shift can help address the root causes of mistrust that make some parents of autistic people so receptive to pseudoscientific treatments and theories of causation. Unfortunately, the direction the federal government is taking on autism seems calculated to exacerbate the divide.

Research programs can be designed to maximize the benefits for autistic people and their families by studying both causes and the most effective and meaningful services and supports in an appropriate balance. Such a constructive shift will not be accomplished, however, by means of alarmist claims about autism as an epidemic, chasing of ill-supported and debunked theories of causation, and further stigmatizing autism. Instead, it will require building strong, collaborative research programs in which researchers from diverse fields join forces with autistic people and their families to generate lasting change.

FDA Deletes Warning About Bogus Autism Treatments

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

A lot of people in RFK Jr's MAHA orbit are making a lot of money from supplements. 

Beth Mole at ArsTechnica:

For years, the Food and Drug Administration provided an informational webpage for parents warning them of the dangers of bogus autism treatments, some promoted by anti-vaccine activists and “wellness” companies. The page cited specifics scams and the “significant health risks” they pose.

But, under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has numerous ties to the wellness industry—that FDA information webpage is now gone. It was quietly deleted at the end of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to Ars Technica.

The defunct webpage, titled “Be Aware of Potentially Dangerous Products and Therapies that Claim to Treat Autism,” provided parents and other consumers with an overview of the problem. It began with a short description of autism and some evidence-based, FDA-approved medications that can help manage autism symptoms. Then, the regulatory agency provided a list of some false claims and unproven, potentially dangerous treatments it had been working to combat. “Some of these so-called therapies carry significant health risks,” the FDA wrote.

The list included chelation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, treatments that those in the anti-vaccine and wellness spheres have championed

Parents Are Vulnerable to Autism Quacks

 Autism parents are highly vulnerable to pitches for quack "cures."

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

Trisha Thadani at WP:

Wrangling three children with autism consumed Dana Paduchowski’s days in a chaotic swirl, her weeks dissolving into a blur of routines and meltdowns. When the house finally quieted at night, the mother would stay awake for hours scouring the internet for a magic treatment that didn’t exist.

Instead of finding answers, Paduchowski said, she constantly stumbled into expensive “rabbit holes of broken promises.”

Over the past few years, Paduchowski estimates, she and her husband have spent at least $30,000 on unproven alternative treatments for her children: An intravenous therapy to remove heavy metals from her son’s body. A clinic with hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Supplements, new diets and naturopathic doctors. While some helped in small ways, others made no difference. In a few cases, she said, her children became “sick and pale” or regressed.

“I just thought, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get this test, and then we’re gonna get results, and then we’re going to fix this one thing and then he’s going to talk and break out of his autism shell,’” she said on a recent afternoon standing in her kitchen, as 15-year-old Caleb, her oldest, jumped and flapped his arms to an episode of “Sesame Street” blaring on the TV.

“But none of that has ever happened,” she said.

... 

.Fringe treatments for autism have long tempted some individuals and families struggling with the disorder, which is a neurodevelopmental condition that presents itself differently in each person. There’s little evidence of effectiveness for common alternatives to behavioral therapy that are widely cited on the internet, according to a study this year in the Nature Human Behavior journal. Still, the study found, up to 90 percent of autistic individuals reported having tried some type of alternative treatment at least once in their lifetime.

Kennedy v. People Who Know What They Are Talking About

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.

Mary Kekatos at ABC:

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.

 

Bleachers

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery.  There have been lots of bogus "cures" over the years: chelation, camel milk, "magic dirt," and products containing bleach. They do not work and some are dangerous. 

Josie Ensor at The Times:

Ignoring health authority warnings around the ingesting of chlorine dioxide, alternative health influencers are recommending people drink it with water, spray it on skin and even use it in enemas as a “cure” for everything from measles to cancer, HIV and autism.
...
Kennedy, who has built a huge following promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, has not explicitly promoted chlorine dioxide as a treatment. But during his Senate confirmation hearing in January, he referred to the chemical substance and praised Trump for “looking at all of the different remedies” for Covid, “including even chlorine dioxide”.

...

In recent months, interest has exploded among social media groups such as those called “Chlorine Dioxide” and “Secret Mineral”, some of which have added thousands of new followers on Facebook from the US, UK and across the world.

...

In May, the movement was given its first mainstream boost when [Andreas] Kalcker was invited to a “Truth Seekers” conference at the Trump National Doral hotel in Miami, a two-day event featuring anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.

Though the conference was a closed event, The Times found video and photographs posted on the social media accounts of attendees. A number of products appeared to be on sale to ticket-holders, including chlorine dioxide-based nasal sprays sold by Michelle Herman.

...

The American Association of Poison Control Centers recorded more than 16,000 cases of chlorine dioxide poisoning, including 2,500 cases of children under 12, in 2020, the last year it published figures on the trend. Many of those individuals suffered serious side-effects, the group noted, including a six-year-old autistic girl who required hospital treatment for liver failure.

...

Emma Dalmayne, an autism campaigner who has several autistic children and was diagnosed herself, said giving any legitimacy to bleach cures was dangerous. “It’s one thing if a consenting adult decides to take this, but we are seeing children held down and given enemas,” she told The Times. “Sometimes drops are put into their babies’ bottles.”

Dalmayne said her advocacy has attracted hate mail, threats and even bullets through the post, believed to be sent by members of the bleacher community trying to “silence” her.

Bleach 2025

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery.  There have been lots of bogus "cures" over the years: chelation, camel milk, "magic dirt," and products containing bleach. They do not work and some are dangerous. 

Jabed Ahmed at The Independent:

A social media influencer is promoting industrial bleach as a false “autism cure”, despite health warnings and reports from parents that their children have become seriously ill after following her advice.

Kerri Rivera, who has more than 17,000 followers on Instagram, encourages parents to give their autistic children chlorine dioxide (CD) — a potentially lethal chemical used to bleach textiles and disinfect industrial surfaces.

Experts have called her fake cures “sickening”, adding it is “wrong, dangerous and harmful to autistic people and their families”.

Messages seen by The Independent from Ms Rivera’s private support group reveal parents reporting vomiting, rashes, seizures and chemical-smelling urine in their children after following her advice.

One parent wrote: “I have noticed a high ammonia-smelling urine in my daughter's pull-ups... I imagine these are the parasites dying and leaving behind their toxins. Is this a good sign to be smelling this?”

Ms Rivera, who falsely claims that autism is caused by “parasites” and “worms”, routinely reassures parents that these are signs the treatment is working. She refers to symptoms like vomiting and hives as evidence that the body is “detoxifying”.

Her Instagram account states “autism is treatable” – a categorically false claim.

Ms Rivera’s Instagram account has more than 17,000 followers, while her TikTok has attracted over 3,000.

After The Independent contacted TikTok for comment, a spokesperson confirmed the account had been deactivated. Meta has been approached for comment.

...

A petition to remove Ms Rivera’s account has been signed by more than 30,000 people.

RFK, Vaccines, and Measles -- Continued

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.  Trump has directed him to investigate autism.  In turn, RFK gave that task to David Geier -- a notorious antivaxxer who does not have a medical or graduate degree.

 Christina JewettEmily Baumgaertner Nunn and Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYT:

David Geier’s new government role has stunned public health experts, who had already expressed concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s decisions to cancel a long-held vaccine meeting and to cut grants focused on understanding vaccine hesitancy.

In addition, David Geier’s involvement in government research heightens their fears that vaccine confidence could be further eroded, especially after Mr. Kennedy’s recent embrace of questionable alternative treatments for measles during the sprawling outbreak in Texas.

“If we increase vaccine hesitancy and immunization rates go down further, we will see more vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks,” said Dr. Christopher Beyrer, director of the Duke Global Health Institute. “That’s how it works.”

Several experts said that appointing David Geier to work on a study of vaccine safety preordains the outcome — like having a basketball referee show up in one team’s jersey.

...

The Senate confirmed Mr. Kennedy largely because he won over the chairman of the Senate health committee, Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who is a medical doctor and strong proponent of childhood vaccines.

Mr. Cassidy has said that further research into any supposed link between vaccines and autism would be a waste of money and a distraction from studies that might shed light on the “true reason” for the rise in autism rates.

On Thursday, Mr. Cassidy said he wanted confirmation of David Geier’s role, aside from news reports. He mentioned that he had breakfast with Mr. Kennedy on Thursday but said the topic did not come up.

The story appeared in The Washington Post on Tuesday night.  If Cassidy did not see it, surely his staff did.  So either his denial is disingenuous or he was too cowardly to raise the topic. 

Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.

Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.

One of those supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.

RFK Touts Quackery as Another Measles Victim Dies

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.  Trump has directed him to investigate autism.

Maria Godoy at NPR:

Two people have now died in the growing measles outbreak in west Texas and New Mexico.

New Mexico Health officials on Thursday confirmed the death of an unvaccinated adult who tested positive for measles. The first death was a school-age child in Gaines County, Texas last week.

News of a second death comes as infectious disease doctors worry that the federal government's messaging about the outbreak is putting more emphasis on treatments like vitamin A than on vaccination, even as misinformation about some of these treatments is spreading online.

Those concerns come in the wake of recent comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy addressed the growing measles outbreak in an editorial for FOX News published on Sunday, also posted on the HHS website.

While mentioning the value of vaccination for community immunity, Kennedy said "the decision to vaccinate is a personal one." He emphasized treatment for measles, saying that vitamin A can "dramatically" reduce deaths from the disease. In an interview with FOX News Tuesday, he said Texas doctors are giving steroids and cod liver oil to their measles patients and "getting very, very, good results."

In his editorial, he said good nutrition is "a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses."

That emphasis on nutrition and vitamin A to treat measles is concerning some infectious disease doctors.

"Mentions of cod liver oil and vitamins [are] just distracting people away from what the single message should be, which is to increase the vaccination rate, " said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Detox Treatments for Autism Are Bogus

 Autism parents are highly vulnerable to pitches for quack "cures."

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

The conventional wisdom is that any kind of treatment is likely to be less effective as the child gets older, so parents of autistic children usually believe that they are working against the clock. They will not be satisfied with the ambiguities surrounding ABA, nor will they want to wait for some future research finding that might slightly increase its effectiveness. They want results now. Because there are no scientifically-validated drugs for the core symptoms of autism, they look outside the boundaries of mainstream medicine and FDA approval. Studies have found that anywhere from 28 to 54 percent of autistic children receive “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and these numbers probably understate CAM usage.

From CBS:

Misinformation about "autism detox treatments," which claim to remove toxins and heavy metals from the bloodstream, is circulating online. These products, often made from zeolite, are unapproved by the FDA and can pose serious health risks. Dr. Alycia Halladay of the Autism Science Foundation discusses the dangers and myths surrounding these treatments.

 

RFK Jr. and Chelation

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery.  There have been lots of bogus "cures" over the years:, including chelation. 

Trump says he would give RFK Jr. a role in a future administration and let him do whatever he wants on health.  His agenda -- which includes chelation -- would put Americans at risk.

FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 25, 2024

From the Autism Science Foundation:

Chelation: Chelation therapy involves administering chemicals designed to bind to heavy metals and eliminate them from the body. Chelating agents have a legitimate use in the treatment of poisoning from lead, mercury and other metals. There is no evidence that supports chelation as a safe treatment alternative because autism is not caused by metal poisoning. In 2005, a child with autism died from chelation therapy, when the chelating agent bonded with calcium in his body and caused his heart to stop. No paper published in the peer-reviewed literature has reported abnormal levels of mercury in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Moreover, symptoms of mercury poisoning are unlike symptoms of autism, making chelation an impractical way to improve symptoms.

From the Association for Science in Autism Treatment:

Chelation is not a benign intervention; it is associated with many adverse and potentially harmful side effects. Some of the side effects noted in the research include rash, gastrointestinal upset, generalized toxicity, fatigue, hypocalcemia (low calcium levels), thrombophlebitis (increased blood clots), nausea, dysgeusia (distorted metallic taste), nephrotoxicity (toxicity of the kidneys), and even death (James et al., 2015).