Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spread many detestable theories in his life, but none is more detestable than his scaremongering over autism and vaccines.
It’s not merely that the new Health and Human Services secretary has convinced thousands of Americans that they’re partially responsible for their children’s autism — a trend he once compared to the “holocaust” — it’s that he’s ensuring thousands more will put their children in needless danger for absolutely no scientific or rational reason.
One of Kennedy’s new justifications for “asking questions” is predicated on the lie that Americans have seen a huge spike in autism cases over the past 40 years. Autism rates, Kennedy said during his congressional hearings, “have gone from 1 in 10,000 [in 1980] … and today in our children, it’s one in 34.” Kennedy repeated this statistic during his swearing ceremony. “Who can believe that?” he added. “There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong, and I think it’s something that can be found out.”
President Donald Trump repeated this statistic on Truth Social and in his executive order instituting the Make America Healthy Again Commission. It’s a contention constantly being spread by MAHA enthusiasts.
Where the 1-10,000 number came from, however, is a mystery. Kennedy probably dug it up in some dark conspiratorial corner of the web, his favored place for data collection. Even in 1966, when autism was still largely diagnosed as a child being socially isolated and showing withdrawn behavior, researchers estimated that around 1 in 2,500 children were autistic. Why doesn’t Kennedy just go back to 1943, the year autism was first designated a condition, when only 1 in 100 million Americans had it?
The idea that anyone had any useful handle on the number of autistic children in the past, much less used the same criterion as we do today, is preposterous. Autism wasn’t even a separate diagnosis from schizophrenia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, the year Kennedy said the affliction began rising.
Before 1991, the federal government lumped children with autism in with other “intellectual disabilities.” In 1994, the definition of autism included Asperger syndrome and children on the milder end of the spectrum.
Researchers didn’t start trying to track autism until 2000. It wasn’t until 2006 that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended screening all children for autism during routine pediatrician visits in the first two years, and many still did not. It wasn’t until 2013 that present guidelines were instituted.
Even now, there’s no objective test for autism — no blood test — for diagnosis. So, for instance, the prevalence of autism has varied greatly between states, which points to different levels of awareness and testing. In 2010, 1-767 children in Iowa were diagnosed with autism, while in Maine, the number was 1-67. Even now, there are significant disparities in states such as Rhode Island, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
However, the Make America Healthy Again Commission actually contends, “Autism spectrum disorders had the highest prevalence in high-income countries,” which seems to strongly indicate that wealthier counties have better awareness, better diagnostic tools, and more testing. For Kennedy, though, it’s another opportunity to peddle conspiracy theories to demonize pharmaceutical companies.
(Another possible reason for a rise in autism is that more Americans are having children later. In one meta-analysis researchers found that advanced maternal age posed a small risk of autism, which is one more study than has ever found any link between vaccine shots and autism.)
When Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician who broke the Hippocratic oath moving the Kennedy nomination forward, implored the HHS nominee to “reassure mothers unequivocally and without qualification” that vaccines do not cause autism, he would not.
“If the data is there, I will absolutely do that,” Kennedy responded. “Not only will I do that, but I will apologize for any statements that misled people otherwise.”
No, he won’t. Because tons of data are already there, which Kennedy keeps ignoring, repeating debunked claims and creating fear so we can keep normalizing vaccine skepticism.
Let’s momentarily set aside the fact that studies have shown autism likely begins in the womb, long before any vaccines are even given to children.
Kennedy, who in 2023 said no vaccine was “safe and effective,” doesn’t have a single legitimate study to rely on. He never has. Like most conspiracy theorists, every answered question merely leads him to more “questions.”
Kennedy made his name in the anti-vaccine movement by contending that there was a link between thimerosal, a preservative, and the “epidemic of childhood neurological disorders” in Rolling Stone and other publications. Indeed, he wrote that the government “colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public.”
There was never a shred of evidence this was true, and publications all retracted Kennedy’s pieces. Kennedy ignored numerous CDC studies that found no connection between the two. In 2004, researchers in Denmark — a nation with highly accurate centralized health records — conducted a study of every child vaccinated in that country between 1971 and 2000 and found that there “was no trend toward an increase in the incidence of autism during that period when thimerosal was used.”
Once thimerosal was removed from most vaccines over these fears, Kennedy moved on to spreading unfalsifiable paranoia about alleged unknown factors causing a giant spike in autism.
The autism scare began in earnest after a 1998 article in the Lancet said families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital blamed MMR vaccines for autism. Kennedy was a champion of Andrew Wakefield, the author who was a fraud and manipulated patient data, so the Lancet withdrew the piece in 2010. Later, more unethical behavior emerged, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine.
At least 27 major studies have found no connection between MMR vaccines and autism. How many studies will draw an apology from Kennedy? 28? 128?
Moreover, in 2013, a CDC study found no connection between the number of vaccine antibodies used and the risk of an autism diagnosis. In 2015, JAMA published the largest randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial on vaccines ever done, analyzing the health records of over 95,000 children and found that MMR vaccine did not increase the risk autism.
Beyond all this, it’s reprehensible that Kennedy talks about autism as if it were polio or cancer. Like Kennedy, I’m not a doctor, but it seems to me that we’re overdiagnosing cases of mild autism, telling children there’s something wrong with them. Dr. Allen Frances, who spearheaded the effort to expand the definition of autism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, believes he helped create a “false epidemic.”
Of course, it’s good to “question science.” Serious people are out there doing it every day. However, Kennedy has promised that under his rule, “Nothing is going to be off limits.” Nothing? Are we going to relitigate the usefulness of antibiotics? Or get back into bloodletting? Maggot therapy? Trepanning? With Kennedy, you never know.
ANTI-VAX PHILANTHROPY AND LEGAL FEES: HOW RFK JR. MAKES HIS MILLIONS
Kennedy is championed as a truth-telling maverick because he questioned the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. Guess what? If you spend a lifetime warning that every medicine is bad, you may be right 1 in 1,000 times, which is Kennedy’s batting average.
As Kevin Williamson pointed out, Kennedy is not a “skeptic” since he embraces “every imbecilic new-age health fad and conspiracy theory to come in over the transom.” If you spend your life ignoring the preponderance of the scientific evidence, you’re not “questioning science,” you’re just a quack. In this case, a dangerous one.