The scientific community has spent decades trying to refute the widely disproved hypothesis that vaccines cause autism before turning its attention to other plausible explanations.
However, proponents of autism now express concern that if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as secretary of health and human services, it could undo years of progress in distancing autism from vaccines and possibly redirect valuable research funds to a theory that has already been refuted by hundreds of studies conducted worldwide. They caution that he would have significant control over who serves on committees and sets policy.
Kennedy’s previous remarks regarding the impairment were also denounced by others as offensive and stigmatizing.
The founder of the Autism Science Foundation, Alison Singer, stated that while she supports research into possible causes of autism, concentrating just on vaccines may be harmful to kids.
According to Singer, a new generation of parents will be terrified and may refuse to give their kids life-saving vaccinations because they think the shots could damage them or even cause autism.
According to her, the worry is that money is being diverted from investigating novel potential causes of autism to reexamine what is known not to cause it. We have a lot of research on autism that needs to be funded.
Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearings are set to start on Wednesday. He is anticipated to be subjected to challenging questions over the false information he has spread over the years regarding public health, especially his assertions regarding vaccines.
Kennedy has widely promoted the bogus claim that vaccines cause autism. Kennedy started a nonprofit organization dedicated to opposing vaccines and became one of the most well-known anti-vaccine activists worldwide. He and related organizations have earned millions of dollars from this campaign.
“I do think that vaccines cause autism,” Kennedy said Fox News in 2023.
He continued by saying that his stance was misinterpreted and that his goal is to test the underlying science. However, detractors claim that Kennedy is the one who dismisses the science that is presented to him.
Is the subject of whether the world is flat being revisited as well? Rep. Kim Schrier, a Democrat from Washington who was also a pediatrician, stated that this is established science. We have already studied vaccinations. Let’s explore elsewhere, but they don’t cause autism. Genetics may be present elsewhere. It could be because we are now classifying many more children who previously would not have been classified as having autism. There are many possible explanations, but bringing up established research will only erode public trust in vaccinations, lower vaccination rates, and endanger the general public.
Kennedy would have enormous influence over the course of American health policy as the head of HHS. He would serve as the head of several organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration. Fears are being heightened by President Donald Trump’s appointment of former Florida Representative David Weldon to the CDC, who has expressed doubts about the safety of vaccines in the past.
Colliding with history
Kennedy frequently starts his case that vaccines cause autism by claiming that he didn’t know any children with severe autism while he was growing up and that he doesn’t know any today. He comes to the conclusion that the higher incidence and the prevalence of childhood vaccines are related.
Kennedy began a script he frequently used in public appearances by telling podcaster Joe Roganin in 2023, “I bet you’ve never met anybody with full-blown autism your age.” You know, head-banging, wearing a football helmet, not using the restroom, and not speaking. Although I’ve never encountered anyone like that at my age, one in every 34 children in my current generation has autism. Of those, half are full-blown.
In contrast to the integrated schools that many public institutions strive for today, individuals with developmental impairments were institutionalized and, in Nazi Germany, kept out of the public view for decades.
In post-war America, the practice of institutionalizing children with disabilities was very common, and it frequently took place in subpar institutions.
Kennedy was around 11 years old in 1965, and this incident serves as an illustration of the disparity in societal perception of children with disabilities. The dangerous circumstances at Willowbrook State School were condemned by his father, who was a U.S. senator from New York at the time. Disabled children were discovered to be living in squalor, cruelty, and generally appalling conditions in one of the most humiliating exposés in American history, which infuriated the country.
At the time of Willowbrook, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. stated, “I believe that we are all to blame and that it is just past time that something be done about it.”
In the 1960s, the diagnosis of autism was still developing, according to Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. She cited Willowbrook as an illustration of how people with developmental and other problems were traditionally kept out of the public eye.
The individuals that RFK Jr. claims were absent during his early years may be seen if you watch the video of the living conditions in Willowbrook. According to Gross, you’ll see where they went and where they had no choice.
Ignoring science
Diagnoses of autism have increased from approximately 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 36 now. The definition of autism expanded significantly over that time, encompassing a wide range of abilities. These days, it includes people who lead independent lives as well as those who are nonspeaking or who deal with severe medical conditions like seizures.
The complicated condition has a strong genetic component, according to researchers, but much more study is required to identify any environmental elements that may be involved. One organization that has advocated for further research into the possible roles of variables like parental age and chemical exposure is Autism Speaks, one of the biggest autism research groups in the country.
Research on the interaction between genes and the environment is especially essential because autism is known to be highly heritable. According to Singer of the Autism Science Foundation, genetic variances may result in alterations in the underlying biology, making those people more resilient or vulnerable to various stressors. According to Singer, these exposures might be pharmacological (such as drugs), toxicant (such as pesticides or plasticizers), or perhaps social (such as a low socioeconomic level or inadequate access to healthcare).
“We don’t have good ways of measuring what we are exposed to in the environment,” she said, adding that genetics research is well ahead of environmental study. That has to get better. Additionally, we must comprehend how environmental influences impact DNA expression and structure.
Kennedy claimed in his 2023 interview with Rogan that it was other people who disregarded scientific research in the area.
And everyone will respond, “Oh, there is no research linking vaccines to autism.” That is simply insane. Kennedy remarked, “That’s people who are not looking at science.”
Some claim that shifting the focus back to vaccines as the cause of autism could take funds away from more important research topics. Some aspects of autism research have lagged since the last vaccine scare, such as how to support autistic people who experience seizures, gastrointestinal problems, sleep difficulties, or delays in using the restroom, or whether there is a connection between autism diagnoses and the onset of Parkinson’s disease later in life, according to Gross.
Our worry is that allocating funds to these understudied subjects is already quite challenging, she stated. The last thing we want is for vaccines to become a financial burden, snuffing out the meager financing that these extremely important issues already receive.
After Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study found a link between the MMR injection and autism, parental suspicions about a vaccine-autism relationship increased. Years later, it was retracted after being discovered to be fake. Wakefield’s failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest in the study was one of the problems.
In the years that followed, anxieties spread through the field of intellectual disability, leading to vaccination hesitation and directing research funds toward possible vaccine-autism connections. That put the community behind on research-based treatments for autism and interventions, advocates say.
Hundreds of studiesdone across decades and around the world have found vaccines to be safe.
These studies followed fluctuating theories about what in the vaccines may be potentially unsafe. The predominant hypotheses shifted from blaming the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine to homing in on the preservative thimerosal that is used in some vaccines to looking at the volume of vaccines children are given at one time. Each of thetheorieswastested and dismissed in scientific studies, which included research comparing the incidence of autism among vaccinated children tothose who had not receivedcertain vaccines.
Despite those findings, Kennedy supports the theory that ingredients in vaccines or the battery of vaccination schedules have triggered the rise.
In a 2023podcast interview, Kennedy was asked if he thought any vaccine was effective. His response: I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they re causing. He then added: There s no vaccine that is safe and effective.
A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.
Stigmatizing language
Trumphimself suggested late last yearon NBC News Meet the Press that in choosing Kennedy to lead HHS, he wanted him to look at the discredited link between vaccines and autism. Trump previously toldFox Newsmore than once that he personally knew a family who had a beautiful child before receiving a monster shot of vaccinations then got very, very sick, now is autistic.
Among the concerns in the autism community is that the kind of language both Trump and Kennedy use to describe the complex neurological condition is disparaging.
He uses this belief that vaccines cause autism to spread a very stigmatizing and negative image of autism, where he says, for example, someone has a vaccine and their brain is gone, Gross said of Kennedy. And by saying their brain is gone, he means they re autistic.
Gross, who is autistic, was referencinga 2015 remark by Kennedyin which he compared vaccinating children to the Holocaust. He later apologized for his remarks.
They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone, Kennedy said then. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.
Gross called it fearmongering,, stating: The idea behind making this link is that it s better to die of pertussis as a baby than to live as an autistic person.