About RFK Jr’s autism “study”
Where "Parental Rights" and "alternative facts" meet
Update 05/06/24 - read this post on my Substack
RFK Jr, secretary of the HHS, is planning a federal “study” on whether or not vaccines cause autism. He claims that autism is an “epidemic” that has “reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young” and that “autism is a preventable disease… genes don’t cause epidemics, you need an environmental toxin.”
Autism is not a disease, it’s a distinct neurotype, and we have strong genomic evidence for a genetic basis of autism. I’ll do a whole post on this in the near future, but here are two recent studies with great discussion and robust methods:
Inherited and de novo genetic risk for autism impacts shared networks, Ruzzo et al., 2020, Cell
Referring to autism as an epidemic is profoundly dehumanizing and is factually incorrect. There isn’t strong evidence that the actual rate of autism has increased over time, and we have data across generations showing there isn’t a difference in the rate of autism between older and younger generations. There is however a large body of evidence demonstrating that rates of autism diagnoses track extremely closely with changes to diagnostic criteria, changes in screening practices, and changes in social acceptance of autism. Collectively, the data shows that autism has distinct developmental features that pre-date receipt of any vaccine. We are literally getting to a point that we could be able to identify autism in utero.
So this “study” that the federal government is planning, using your tax dollars, is something researchers across the globe from a multitude of fields have done tens of thousands of times over many decades and generally arrived at the same conclusion: that vaccines do not cause autism. Meanwhile, DOGE is claiming to reduce the federal deficit by cutting funding for cancer & HIV research, just to name a few things lost to this regime. The study will be directed by David Geier, who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, who the state of Maryland found guilty of practicing medicine without a license (including injecting autistic children with experimental hormones), and who with his father Mark Geier published a now-retracted study including fabricated data to support their claim.
An important new development: the National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to track people with autism for this “study”, including medication records for pharmacy chains, lab testing and genomics data from patients treated by the VA and Indian Health Service, claims from private insurers and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers. AFAIK, enrollment in this database is involuntary.
Here’s what you need to know:
Centralized databases of health information from willing participants can be invaluable for honest research. This is undeniably not that. We don’t even need to go into the life history of RFK Jr here (but you should), he’s been extremely consistent in his beliefs. RFK Jr wants complete centralized knowledge of every American’s health in order to exact control on what medications are allowed and in order to fabricate “evidence” for his nonsense “theories”. His plan isn’t the T4 (Nazi eugenics) program, but it is sick and dangerous and deadly. He wants to end autism, which he sees as a disease and that is absolutely genocidal.
When it comes to people with autism, particularly children, RFK Jr wants to make it easier for parents and quack doctors to “experiment” and force dangerous and unproven treatments on them. And, he wants to make it harder or outright illegal to counter disinformation that harms this industry. This is a different movement than the Nazis in the 1930’s and its adherents aren’t focused on sterilization or execution. Their obsession is on the rights of parents to abuse and medically torture children and to use the arm of the state to punish legitimate medical practitioners. You have to see the danger RFK Jr represents and the harm he wants to cause in the context of the Parental Rights Movement and other Christian Nationalist projects.
This is a key arm of the project: in the last week, the DOJ has sent threatening letters to several medical journals, focused around whether these journals are spreading misinformation that harms the American people and suppressing alternative viewpoints.
Paraphrasing Carl Bergstrom (Professor of Biology at UW) as he put it on Bluesky: A scientific journal is a collection of articles judged to be worthy of publication by peers, trained professionals in a community of scientists. These articles are OFTEN mutually contradictory. “Scientific debates in medicine and elsewhere can rage on for decades until adequate evidence is amassed, can be extremely contentious, and often both sides are published predominantly in a single journal.” The subtext in the DOJ’s letters is “an inability to understand that the scientific literature is NOT a collection of certified, unquestionable facts, but rather a running record of a massively parallel, collective investigation into the nature of reality.” It’s a failure to grasp that “science is a highly decentralized form of knowledge production, with strong incentives for individuals to refute common understanding and disprove dominant theories or explanations.”
This is why you should NOT take ANY stock in ANYTHING someone like RFK Jr, or Joe Rogan, or other “anti-establishment” health influencers have to say about science. Because it wasn’t until the regime took control over federal health agencies and science funding that they’re doing “studies” to support their “alternative viewpoints”. At any point in time they could have written grants to compete for funding from federal or private institutions, conducted controlled experiments to test hypotheses with appropriate methods, subjected their findings to review by scientific peers, and shared those findings with the broader scientific community and the public at large for further scrutiny. But the point for these ghouls is NOT to do science: it’s to leverage the resources of institutions for financial gain, censoring scientists from using words or studying topics the regime disproves of, all while enacting control over infrastructure to enforce a very specific, utterly batshit worldview.
We have to stop the regime. People are dying. And many more will.