This weekend, on “Meet The Press,” President-elect Donald Trump shared that one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s duties as the head of Health and Human Services will be to “investigate” whether or not vaccines cause autism. He was apparently not only under the impression that in all the time people have been screeching about vaccines causing autism no one has bothered to do this, but also that autism might be caused by “chlorine in the water” — which is certainly a new one.
Via the New York Times:
“I think somebody has to find out,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” after his interviewer, Kristen Welker, brought up autism in the context of a conversation about Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines.
Mr. Trump noted that autism cases in the United States have risen in recent decades, and said he was “open to anything” when asked if Mr. Kennedy would look into it.
“I mean, something is going on,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s vaccines. Maybe it’s chlorine in the water, right? You know, people are looking at a lot of different things.”
Are they? What people? Where? People who just make things up? Is that who is looking into this?
I think I know where he got the chlorine bit, though (unless he’s confusing it with fluoride). The same Magical Mystery Miracle Bleach Solution (MMS) — otherwise known as chlorine dioxide — that many of his followers were gulping down during the early days of COVID is also used by similarly inclined people to “cure autism.”
Of course, magic bleach does not “cure” autism. As we all know, the only thing it cures is Morgellons. (That is a joke — if you think you have Morgellons, please go see an actual medical doctor and also stop diagnosing yourself with things you read about on the internet. Do not drink bleach, magic or otherwise!)
I have to say — I would actually love for Kennedy Jr. to focus on “investigating” the non-existent link between vaccines and autism. For one, it would be great to keep him occupied with something other than defluoridating our water or doing anything else with potentially disastrous consequences.
For another, this is clearly something that, in all RFK Jr.’s years as an anti-vaxxer, he hasn’t ever actually done. Perhaps this “investigation” could lead him to discover that the Wakefield studies — which supposedly proved that vaccines caused autism — were deeply, deeply flawed.
He might learn some of the real reasons why diagnoses of autism have increased.
It’s true! Autism diagnoses have increased since the MMR vaccine first started to be widely used in the 1970s — but it’s not because of vaccines or because of chlorine. It’s not because of anything especially fascinating. It’s because there’s simply more awareness of it, because the diagnostic criteria has changed to include a wider spectrum of behaviors. This awareness has led to parents being more likely to see signs and bring their kids in for testing.
There’s also the fact that an autism diagnosis becomes possible in many children around the same time as the MMR vaccine is administered — although the “intestinal inflammation” that Wakefield believed was the cause of autism in all eight babies he studied was not observed until after the symptoms of autism appeared. (Also, autism isn’t fucking caused by “intestinal inflammation.”)
This is what happens when we simply learn more things about a condition or illness. For instance, for years, Caucasian men were used as the default in clinical trials and medical studies — so there were a lot of conditions specific to or more common in women that were ignored, and a lot of conditions that simply manifested differently in women or needed a different kind of treatment. Vaccines did not cause heart disease or ADHD in women. They did not cause endometriosis, either. These things are, however, being diagnosed a lot more often now because awareness has increased or the diagnostic criteria has changed.
On the other side of things, “hysteria” was removed as a diagnosis from the DSM in 1980 (yes, that late). Does that mean that vaccines cured hysteria, or does it mean that we started looking at things a different way?
It’s also worth noting that, for a very long time, kids who had severe forms of autism, cognitive disabilities, epilepsy, brain injuries, cerebral palsy, physical disabilities, birth defects, etc. were frequently just put away in institutions for the rest of their lives, so no, you did not see a lot of them walking around and families certainly didn’t talk about it. That was something they kept quiet, often even keeping it from their own children (that is, in fact, exactly what happened with his aunt Rosemary Kennedy after they gave her a lobotomy to make her more “docile” — she was institutionalized and none of her siblings found out for twenty years). Actress Daryl Hannah, for example, was diagnosed with autism as a child and the doctors told her parents that she needed to be institutionalized. Her mother refused, and that was, actually, really unusual for the time.
There is no longer such a stigma around neurodiversity or any of the other many, many reasons for which people were institutionalized in the past. Parents do TikToks about their experiences raising autistic children instead of sending them to places with names like the “Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded” (which, incredibly, was a real place that existed).
It’s just less hidden and more understood than it once was. That’s literally it.
Now, as much as this all makes logical sense to you and me, we cannot be sure about RFK Jr. He’s not that swift. That being said, if it will put this to rest once and for all, if we can ensure that people will start vaccinating their kids again so we don’t have any measles or whooping cough outbreaks? I say let the government fund whatever fucking studies he needs to convince himself. Let Kennedy supervise them if he likes! Let him do whatever he needs to do, see whatever he needs to see, scratch whatever itch he needs to scratch to be fully convinced, and then let him spread the word to the rest of his fellow conspiracy theorists, who will surely trust him more than they’d trust any scientist.
Sure, it’s possible that even if he were convinced or able to prove the link to his own satisfaction, the other anti-vaxxers would decide he was actually “controlled opposition” the whole time anyway. But as a bonus, that would make them less likely to trust anything he says, which might just be the best case “Health and Human Services” scenario for any of us at this point.
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