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One thing I’ve learned not to do over the years is to work out vendettas in my writing, and not to write about things and people that I am too “bitch eating crackers” about. It’s something I think everyone ought to be aware of, whether they’re a writer or not. We get so mad about or irritated by one particular thing, person, group of people, idea, belief, take, etc. that we see it or them as exemplifying everything that is wrong in the world. Perhaps even the cause of it.
It seems like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take this lesson, about everyone who has made him feel stupid over his very stupid beliefs about vaccines, autism and vaccines causing autism.
On Wednesday, during a press briefing about new CDC data showing that 1 in 31 eight-year-olds were found to be on the autism spectrum, Kennedy Jr. unloaded.
“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this,” he said. “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has really upsetting ideas about people with autism.
But he’s also, as he has always done, using children with autism to attack science, medicine, and basically the modern world, and he’s doing it from atop the health agency of the world’s last (for now) superpower.
He aggressively refuted the health agency’s assertion that the high number of children on the autism spectrum is primarily the result of increased screening and expanded diagnostic criteria, instead insisting that it absolutely had to be caused by “environmental toxins.”
Insisting that autism is a “preventable disease” (it is neither), Kennedy Jr. argued, “We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability. You need an environmental toxin.” (He means vaccines. But he won’t say it out loud anymore, as much, because even the normie Republicans are freaked out by him telling people not to vaccinate their children while other children are dying of measles.)
Well, there are a few things wrong with this syllogism.
First, there is not an autism epidemic. Second, there is no rule in existence requiring that epidemics have “environmental toxins.” Also, autism is not a disease, and one cannot “catch” autism from someone who has it. It’s a neurological difference. That is why people with autism, ADHD, and OCD are described as neurodiverse.
One of Kennedy Jr.’s big claims was that the diagnostic explanation (which he repeatedly refers to as a myth and a “canard”) has to be wrong because there has been no increase in people being diagnosed with autism as adults, which is categorically incorrect. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that there has been a 450 percent increase in adult diagnoses from 2011 to 2022. And those are just the people who went out and got the diagnosis.
He also claimed that this was refuted by the fact that we don’t see autistic people his age walking around the mall.
“Have you ever seen anybody our age, I’m 71 years old, with full-blown autism —headbanging, uh non-verbal, non-toilet trained, stimming, toe walking, these other stereotypical features?” he asked. “Where are these people walking around the mall? You can’t find them. They’re not in homes, there are no homes for them, there are no institutions for them, why are we not seeing them on the street? Anybody can look around and see that this is a canard and then you have to ask yourself why is it so pervasive?”
Well, there are a few reasons for that. First of all, how often do any of us walk down the street, see someone of any age and go “Well, they definitely have autism!?” I am going to say “practically never.”
Second, studies have found that people on the spectrum have a far lower life expectancy than neurotypical individuals. According to one 2018 study, the average life expectancy for people with autism is 39. According to another published that same year, it’s 54. This is not due to anything related to an autism diagnosis so much as other, related factors. People with autism have an increased risk of genetic disorders, including Down Syndrome, muscular dystrophy, and fragile X syndrome, all of which are related to lower life expectancy.
Worth noting here is that there has also been a large increase in Fragile X syndrome — a genetic disorder frequently comorbid with autism and with many similar features — over the last several decades as well. American geneticist Stephanie Sherman observed in the 1980s that the incidents of the disorder increased with each generation, a phenomenon now known as Sherman’s Paradox.
People with autism are also at increased risk of neurological conditions, such as “epilepsy, hydrocephalus, sleep disorders, and gastrointestinal disorders,” all of which could also contribute to a lower life expectancy.
So that explains part of it. Another part of it is that when Kennedy Jr. was a young man, people with autism, people with developmental disorders, people with physical disabilities absolutely were institutionalized — often with parents being told to cut all ties and never see the child again. This, actually, is exactly what happened to his aunt Rosemary Kennedy after her botched lobotomy. She went away to an institution and her siblings weren’t told what happened or where she really went for 20 years.
This, combined with the phenomenon of people who may have been on the spectrum but who were thought to be “just a little touched in the head” or “eccentric,” or to be suffering from “childhood-onset schizophrenia” (which children who actually had autism were frequently diagnosed with instead), would do a lot to explain why people RFK Jr.’s age feel so strongly that this was not a thing when they were younger.
Another one of his reasonings was that autism is more commonly diagnosed in boys than in girls. This is not surprising. Much as with ADHD, there has been an increase, lately, in girls and women being diagnosed with autism. Why? Not because of “environmental toxins,” but because there is now a greater understanding of how it affects and presents in women and girls. Early on, as with many physical and mental health conditions, practically all research on autism was done on men and boys and little consideration was given to the fact that, because of gender socialization and expectations, women and girls are often better at masking.
Also speaking at the press conference was Walter M. Zahorodny, an autism researcher who has been the director of the New Jersey Autism Study for over 20 years.
“Other childhood disabilities, neurological disorders, do not change over time,” Zahorodny said. “But somehow, for some reason, with autism everything was different. Autism went from being a very unusual, rare disability which affected one child in maybe 10,000 to being known in every community, every school district, every center that cares for children with disabilities.”
Not exactly.
A CDC survey actually found that “[t]he prevalence of developmental disabilities increased from 7.4 percent in 2019 to 8.6 percent in 2021 for children ages 3-17” and that, ironically, there were “no notable changes in the prevalence of diagnosed autism spectrum disorder or intellectual disability over the same period.”
Autism isn’t just one thing, which is part of why no one can point to a gene and or look at something in the brain and say “Oh, yeah, that’s what causes it!!” Rather, it exists on a spectrum and a number of conditions that were previously considered separate diagnoses are now considered part of that spectrum.
RFK Jr. has been thirsting to flip the script on those who have derided him. You can feel the smug in his voice when he talks about “reading the scientific literature,” when he calls the well-established theory that the expansion and better understanding of the diagnostic criteria for autism is the primary cause of the number of cases increasing a “myth” or a “canard.”
On a human level, perhaps it’s understandable, but in order to make his point he not only ends up denigrating people who have actually “read the scientific literature” but stigmatizing people with autism themselves. In order to make it sound as horrific as possible, he describes them as diseased, as people who will never go on a date or write a poem or go to the bathroom by themselves — and he presents these things specifically as things that will hurt and burden and disappoint their parents and caretakers. He doesn’t see their humanity, he sees them as a way to prove that he’s right about something.
There’s a cruelty there. He’s got a mean streak, and I don’t know if that’s natural or because people think he’s an idiot and he’s mad about it. Maybe that’s just what happens when you care more about nurturing your vendetta than you do about the people you are supposedly trying to help.
Open thread.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
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