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Reportedly, Mark Blaxill is a CDC “Senior Advisor”. Remember, this is not The Onion.

28 Sep

How does one recapture trust in the public health system? I can tell you one way to make it worse. Put Mark Baxill to work at the CDC. Mr. Blaxill is a long time anti-vaccine activist who has done a lot of harm promoting the “vaccines cause autism” lie. We on this blog have been countering Mr. Blaxill’s misinformation for about two decades now.

According to Alt CDC, Mr. Blaxill now is in the Office of the Director. Once again: this is not The Onion. This is not April Fool’s day. This is life under Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy. Meritocracy is not a thing anymore. Fealty to the “vaccines are bad” campaign is. I’m open to counter arguments by those who feel Mr. Blaxill earned a spot at CDC. Go ahead. Point to his books and his papers, his writing on the Age of Autism blog and convince me he has the chops and, mostly, the integrity to serve as a public health “consultant” in what was once the premier public health agency in the world. I’m listening.

I don’t see Mr. Blaxill when I do a search on the HHS employee directory. But I am told he is a “senior advisor/consultant” reporting to Matt Buzzeli. Mr. Buzzelli is a political appointee, apparently assigned to CDC after the recent purge of qualified public health officials at CDC. So we have Mark Blaxill who, ignoring his anti-vaccine activism, is a businessman, and an apparently failed politician (he created his own political party which appears to have gone nowhere, and had a failed bid for a congressional seat). And he works for an attorney who “worked with the Family Office of Norm Miller to support the development of Interstate Batteries’ emerging retail and commercial operation.”

We’ve replaced people who were nonpolitical experts in their fields with these gentlemen. Feeling more confident about the CDC? Neither am I.

By Matt Carey

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Want the Nobel Prize for Warp Speed, Mr. Trump? Fire Kennedy.

6 Sep

The same people who might value your efforts with Operation Warp Speed will also be able to do the simple math in their heads that says Mr. Kennedy’s approach is going to kill people.

Mr. Trump, there is a lot of chatter about you wanting the Nobel Peace Prize. OK, I know you’ve publicly stated you don’t want it, but just in case that’s just you being modest, let’s assume you actually do.

Even Robert Kennedy, a man with few to no good words to offer on vaccines, stated publicly that he believes you should get the Prize. Which may make you think, “good guy, Bobby. He’s going to help me get that Prize!”

Well…not so much. You may be thinking that I’ll point out the fact that Mr. Kennedy, as Senator Cassidy pointed out, says things like, “the vaccine killed more people than COVID”. You may be thinking that I’ll point out that he is likely getting people to generate “gold-standard science” that will claim the vaccine doesn’t work and kills people. Which he probably is doing.

Nope. Here’s an even bigger point I want to make: Mr. Kennedy’s policies are taking America back to a time when children die of vaccine preventable diseases. For example, we just had a large outbreak of measles, and Mr. Kennedy’s response was so lackluster that it certainly was a factor in how long it lasted. Two American children died. Needlessly. I called that outbreak “large”. It is nothing compared to what is in store for America under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership. Florida is moving to removing vaccine mandates for schoolchildren. That will lead to larger outbreaks. And not just among children. Florida is a state with a large retiree population.

The same people who might value your efforts with Operation Warp Speed will also be able to do the simple math in their heads that says Mr. Kennedy’s approach is going to kill people.

My guess is that if Mr. Kennedy is already telling you in private: “Solving the ‘autism epidemic’ will be even bigger than Operation Warp Speed. They will have to give you the Nobel then.” He even has ‘studies’ by some really bad and unethical people he can use to support his idea that vaccines are the cause. And, no doubt, more are on the way from David Geier and others. This is one of those times you need advisors who are both competent and free to speak their mind. People who actually understand science which, frankly, Mr. Kennedy does not. Because he is playing with people’s lives. Children’s lives. And that’s a lot more important than the Nobel Prize.

I am the parent of a young autistic adult. My kid grew up during the time Mr. Kennedy has been running his campaign against vaccines. I am a scientist. A researcher. Not in medicine, but I understand the studies. Focus on that last–not in medicine. I have no conflicts of interest other than this topic is very important to me. I don’t want children to die because Mr. Kennedy used my kid as a weapon against vaccines. I just don’t want children to die needlessly. I have been speaking out to counter Mr. Kennedy for 20 years because I saw the danger he posed.

Mr. Trump, I think you don’t want children to die and that is probably a bigger motivation than the Prize. But, do the simple math. Anyone on the Peace Prize Committee who values public health to the point of considering you for your efforts with the COVID vaccine program will see the dangers your administration–with Robert Kennedy running HHS–poses.

Do it for the children. Do it for yourself. Fire Robert Kennedy.

By Matt Carey

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For Robert Kennedy “Restoring Trust” is not a goal. It’s a weapon.

3 Sep

We pay for the CDC. It isn’t there to support Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. It’s there to generate good information that Mr. Kennedy can use or, sadly, not use. He can’t ask them to sign off on dangerous vaccine policy and then cry “restore trust” to excuse firing the trusted experts who are, in his own words, world-leading experts who drive the science that serves us all.

Robert Kennedy (aka RFK Jr.) is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services*. He came to this job after his failed run for the office of President, but if you follow his social media you know: he still sounds like someone campaigning.

He loves slogans. Of course he has his “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) which not only brands his movement, but allows him to flatter Mr. Trump at the same time. Two more slogans are very important to him and are what I will focus on today: “Restoring Public Trust” and “Gold-Standard Science”. On first glance, they sound like good aspirational goals. But “restoring” public trust is a slam, where Mr. Kennedy makes people accept his premise that people don’t trust the CDC. Likewise, “Gold-Standard” science is a way of saying that results produced before his tenure are low quality.

Allow me to discuss Mr. Kennedy’s failure this last week with the CDC to highlight his use of “Public Trust” as a weapon.

What failure am I thinking of? Losing much of CDC’s leadership through mismanagement. That failure. Last week, Mr. Kennedy tried to pressure the head of the CDC into rubber-stamping his agenda on vaccines. The CDC Director, Dr. Susan Monarez, not only refused to approve Mr. Kennedy’s anything-but-gold-standard vaccine policy, she also refused to recognize Mr. Kennedy’s authority to fire her (Kennedy Sought to Fire C.D.C. Director Over Vaccine Policy) Eventually she was fired by the President.

At least four other senior CDC officials resigned over Mr. Kennedy’s actions with Dr. Monarez (CDC director is out after less than a month; other agency leaders resign). The list includes Dr. Debra Houry, the agency’s deputy director; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, head of the agency’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, head of its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.

Losing so much expertise in one week in a huge blow to America. We all rely upon the CDC. We rely on expertise, experience and a nonpolitical agency. Make no mistake, all this is a huge blow to Mr. Kennedy. He not only lost experienced leaders who could provide him with quality information (which, he appears to be too arrogant to ask for), but also the reputation of the CDC and these staff. Mr. Kennedy wouldn’t have wouldn’t have pressured Dr. Monarez to rubber-stamp his policy if he didn’t want the credibility of the CDC behind his action.

If this wasn’t bad enough for Mr Kennedy’s claim to be restoring trust, nine (nine!) former CDC directors wrote a scathing (to use the New York Post’s word) editorial spelling out how dangerous Mr. Kennedy’s actions are: We Ran the CDC: RFK Jr. Is Endangering Every American’s Health. If it had been one, or only democrats, perhaps Mr. Kennedy could shrug this off. But it was nine former heads of the CDC. People who know how CDC works and know how important it is.

Clearly it was time for damage control. Mr. Kennedy took to the Wall Street Journal to defend himself. Instead of acknowledging that he severely damaged trust in the CDC, he spun his actions as “restoring public trust” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC). Of course, to “restore trust”. Mr. Kennedy states “First, the CDC must restore public trust—and that restoration has begun.” No, really, it hasn’t. When nine former CDC directors come out and not just disagree with you, but state that you are “endangering every American’s health”, you can’t claim to be restoring public trust.

Focus on how Mr. Kennedy uses “restoring trust”. “Restoring trust” isn’t a goal. It’s a weapon. Stand up for the health of Americans? You are out, because we need to “restore trust”. It’s an excuse. “Did I try to ram through a vaccine policy so dangerous that over a dozen leaders, past and present, of CDC protested? No! I was ‘restoring trust'”.

The final sentence of Mr. Kennedy’s opinion piece is a slam to the good people who stood up and resigned. Mr. Kennedy doesn’t have the guts to directly call them out, instead he simply states:

It won’t stop until America’s public-health institutions again serve the people with transparency, honesty and integrity.

Yep. Those good people were part of a system that doesn’t serve with “transparency, honesty and integrity”. As opposed to Mr. Kennedy, who fired most of the FOIA staff (so much for transparency) and, frankly has rarely shown integrity and honesty in the 20 years I’ve known of him.

Consider that just a few weeks ago, Mr. Kennedy responded to the shooting at the CDC campus by praising the very people he now accuses of lacking integrity and honesty and the “public’s trust”. How did he characterize the people who work at CDC then**?

Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are curable or preventable, chronic or acute, or from human activity or deliberate attack, CDC’s world-leading experts protect lives and livelihoods, national security and the U.S. economy by providing timely, commonsense information, and rapidly identifying and responding to diseases, including outbreaks and illnesses. CDC drives science, public health research, and data innovation in communities across the country by investing in local initiatives to protect everyone’s health.

Yes. In a couple of weeks, they went from “world-leading experts” who “drive science” to people who lack “transparency, honesty and integrity”.

Mr. Kennedy is a politician. He’s not a doctor or a health expert. As a researcher who has followed Mr. Kennedy for 20 years, I can say he is not in any way the expert on reading science that he claims to be. He’s a politician. One week it serves him to praise CDC and the people there. The next he needs to slam them to excuse his own inexcusable behavior.

We pay for the CDC. It isn’t there to support Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. It’s there to generate good information that Mr. Kennedy can use or, sadly, not use. He can’t ask them to sign off on dangerous vaccine policy and then cry “restore trust” to excuse firing the trusted experts who are, in his own words, world-leading experts who drive the science that serves us all.

By Matt Carey

*It’s been six months, but it is still mind boggling to read, much less type, that sentence. After 20 years of following Mr. Kennedy’s action, much of that chronicled on this blog, it would be hard to imagine someone worse for the job that Mr. Kennedy.

** One might argue that since Mr. Kennedy didn’t sign that statement, these aren’t his words. He’s the Secretary of HHS. The quote is from a “Statement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services“. If one wants to argue whether these are his words or just words he approved of, go ahead with the semantics. The end result is the same.

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In light of the CDC attack, RFK Jr. should apologize for his language against vaccine researchers.

21 Aug

I will state this straight out–I believe the anti vaccine movement has put good people at risk for decades with their rhetoric. And I also believe Mr. Kennedy has contributed a great deal to this climate of hate. How much or how directly he may have influenced the gunman who opened fire at the CDC recently, I cannot say. But I can say that I believe Mr. Kennedy, who has used terms like “corrupt”, “criminal” and “poison children” when discussing a CDC researcher, should apologize for his language. It isn’t a matter of whether the language directly contributed to the shooting. He never should have made many of the comments that were a mainstay of his speeches over the years.

Let’s consider one specific event. Ten years ago Robert Kennedy attended an anti vaccine event called the CDCTruth rally. The rally was held in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the CDC. Mr. Kennedy singled out a researcher at CDC, calling them them “corrupt”, a “criminal”, “guilty of research fraud”, who injured people and suggested they “poison[ed] children”. Read his statement for yourself:

I’m going to say one last thing to you.  [CDC-Researcher], who runs the division, the vaccine division, and who orchestrated this corruption; [they are] a criminal and he committed scientific research fraud and [they are] guilty of injuring all of these people.  Now I’m saying that and I’m using [their] name*; and what I’m saying, if it’s untrue is an act of slander, and I want [them] to sue me.  And if [they] didn’t do it, [they] ought to sue me.  [They] ought to file a suit this afternoon and enjoin me from ever saying that again.  If somebody said that about me, I would sue them immediately and I’m saying to you, [CDC-Researcher], if you didn’t poison the children, you need to sue me right now and shut me up because what I’m saying to you is damaging to your career.  So let’s see what [they do] on Monday.  Thank you all very much.” 

That was ten years ago, why bring this up now? Because, as I noted above, a gunman killed a police officer in what was an apparent attempt to commit mass murder at the CDC recently (1 week after deadly shooting at CDC, some employees feel Trump and RFK Jr. have moved on). The attack appears to have been a motivated by the CDC’s actions with vaccines (Shooter attacked CDC headquarters to protest COVID-19 vaccines, authorities say).

When Mr. Kennedy spoke, it wasn’t about the COVID-19 vaccines. The pandemic hadn’t occurred yet. It was about the MMR vaccine. But, I will argue, it contributed to the climate of hatred towards vaccine researchers that persists to this day among his supporters. While I can’t say Mr. Kennedy’s words directly influenced the murderer, he never should have said them. They were irresponsible then and they should be retracted now.

We should address a few points as long as this topic has come up. First, as Medpage Today reports:

“There is no evidence that vaccination causes depression and suicidality,” Roy Perlis, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told MedPage Today.

So, for those who have framed this as, “look at what vaccines did”: stop. You are setting the stage for the next attack.

Also, from the same article, “One study found that those with depression were more likely to endorse COVID vaccine falsehoods”.

Mr. Kennedy’s supporters can try to excuse his comments as, “reasonable people wouldn’t use words like these to justify violence.” Not everyone is reasonable. And you can’t just send out hateful words to reasonable people.

By Matt Carey

I suspect Mr. Kennedy will make moves that will dramatically reduce access to the MMR vaccine. Sooner rather than later. It will be a big mistake. That’s one of the big understatements ever made on this blog.

That said, here’s something to consider as an appendix to the article above. Mr. Kennedy made statements that, in his own words, are slander if not true. He was talking about the MMR vaccine which in his statements “poison[s] children”. Begs the question: why is it still approved? It is safe and effective and doesn’t cause autism. But why hasn’t Mr. Kennedy stopped its use?

Mr. Kennedy has been in charge of HHS–which ultimately has control over whether the MMR vaccine is approved for use–for six months. While he has done a lot to dismantle America’s vaccine program, and has moved very quickly, the MMR vaccine is still approved for use with American infants. Given Mr. Kennedy’s 2015 statements, one must ask why he didn’t immediately pull approval. Did Mr. Kennedy actually believe his rhetoric back in 2015 or was it indeed slander? Or, did he believe it then but doesn’t now? Is he moving slowly to keep his position of power? Wouldn’t that action, if the MMR vaccine were indeed poison (again, it is not), amount to sacrificing the kids getting the vaccine today for some “greater good”?

I have a hard time aligning Mr. Kennedy’s actions with his views.

* I redacted the researcher’s name and gender. Should be obvious that I think Mr. Kennedy put that researcher in danger and that I want don’t want to contribute to that effort.

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Who will take over for Gavi, Mr. Kennedy?

27 Jun

No one.

And that tells us this isn’t about “gold standard science” or anything else. Mr. Kennedy just wanted to remove a major source of vaccination in the world. He had the power, so he used it.

What’s this all about, Matt? Here’s the background: Gavi is an international vaccine alliance. The United States is part of the alliance and contributed $400m last year. And Mr. Kennedy just pulled America out (U.S. is pulling funding from Gavi, global group that has paid for more than a billion kids to get vaccinated)

Mr. Kennedy would like us all to spend time debating his reasoning. He says Gavi has “ignored the science” and “lost the public trust.” I’m sure many people will discuss how that’s nonsense. Perhaps by noting that Mr. Kennedy starts by saying that Gavi and WHO were mean to him by asking social media companies to de emphasize his misinformation. Simply put, Mr. Kennedy is saying, “this is payback”.

But let me bring this back to the simple question of: who will the U.S. choose to perform the job Gavi has been doing?

No one. Mr. Kennedy doesn’t mention who the US will fund to provide the life saving vaccines Gavi did. Or even that there is an interest in continuing the program.

And that’s critical. He saw the chance to stop people from getting vaccinated and he took it.

by Matt Carey

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WSJ: Vaccine Opponent Hired by RFK Jr. Scours Official Records for Link to Autism

9 Jun

For years, I’ve hoped major news outlets would shine a light on figures like David and Mark Geier—key players in the anti-vaccine movement that has harmed autism communities for decades. Now that attention has come, but since it’s due to Robert Kennedy being the Secretary of HHS, I wish it hadn’t.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that David Geier has been hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. The article, by Liz Essley Whyte and Dominique Mosbergen, titled “Vaccine Opponent Hired by RFK Jr. Scours Official Records for Link to Autism”, highlights what appears to be Mr. Kennedy’s plan to reanalyze CDC vaccine data—seeking to link vaccines to autism and allege CDC corruption.

Geier is aiming to reanalyze the data used in the CDC thimerosal study to see if it supports a link between vaccines and autism, people familiar with the matter said. But he is also interested in proving the CDC is corrupt, the people added.

The article is relatively short and it’s better for you to read it for yourself than for me to summarize it. Instead let me discuss my opinions of Mr. Kennedy and his decision to hire Mr. Geier.

People like to point out David Geier’s lack of credentials. While true (he has a B.A. and left graduate school without completing a degree), I would argue it’s very much secondary to the fact that he has a track record. And his track record in vaccine-related research is poor at best. There’s no reason for Mr. Kennedy to involve him again—unless, that is, the goal is to confirm a preexisting belief that vaccines cause autism. Ironically, that’s the very kind of bias and “corruption” Mr. Kennedy has accused public health institutions of engaging in.

Mr. Kennedy has access to skilled epidemiologists. If he truly wanted transparency and scientific rigor, he could commission a well-documented, peer-reviewed study. Instead, he brought on David Geier. The WSJ reports:

NIH researchers have been asked to help Geier, people familiar with the matter said. NIH employees recently requested that the CDC send over the entirety of the VSD—an ask that set off alarm bells at the CDC and among researchers at the healthcare networks, who worried whether their patients’ private health information would be adequately protected, according to other people familiar with the matter.

Which is backwards. Don’t have the experienced, qualified researchers help the unqualified guy with a bias. If he wants a quality study done and wants someone to ensure transparency, have Mr. Geier observe the actual researchers.

Sadly, this assumes an ideal world where researchers at NIH aren’t under threat of losing their jobs, their pensions and all, if they tell a clearly vindictive administration what it doesn’t want to hear. We don’t live in that ideal world.

As the saying goes, judge a person by their actions, not their words. Mr. Kennedy’s decision suggests he’s more interested in validating long-held beliefs than uncovering scientific truth. For years, he’s built influence and wealth off the backs of families like mine—families with autistic children. For years, he’s ignored good scientific results and instead promoted junk. Like that generated by David Geier.

Before I go on and on and completely lose the point of this article (the new WSJ article: Vaccine Opponent Hired by RFK Jr. Scours Official Records for Link to Autism), let me make three points:

  1. I have been following Mr. Geier, Mr. Kennedy and the anti-vaccine movement for 19 years now.
  2. I am the parent of an autistic adult. I have skin in this game. If there were evidence that vaccines caused an autism epidemic, I’d be shouting it out.
  3. I am a Ph.D. researcher with decades of experience. I’d say my publication record is better than Mr. Geier’s but that is a terribly low bar. I am well respected in my field. Mr. Geier’s publications are an affront to good scientists everywhere.

If there were real evidence linking vaccines to an autism epidemic, I would be the first to speak up. But what we’re seeing now is not a search for truth. It’s a continuation of a harmful agenda, now backed by the highest levels of government.

By Matt Carey

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Report: The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist

29 May

If you haven’t read this yet, surf over to this article on NOTUS: The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist. The subtitle is very clear, but it’s worth the full read.

The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.

I have to agree with Tara Smith over on Facebook that this looks like they used some LLM AI which created fake citations:

So looks like Kennedy used chatGPT or similar AI to write his MAHA report, as multiple citations are hallucinated. Others are cherry- picked or don’t support his claims (exactly as he did in “The Real Anthony Fauci”). One example:

“Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.””

Mr. Kennedy has been trying to brand his work as “Gold-Standard Science”, which is basically a way to slam research he doesn’t agree with. The above report would be laughable if this weren’t so serious. The Secretary of Health and Human Services released a report with fictitious citations and misinterpretations. This sort of behavior could get a professor fired. This sort of behavior can lead to people dying. Think about it–a person we all rely upon to make important health decisions for the entire country believes that he can create what amounts to scientific propaganda, label it “Gold Standard”, and use that to defend his decisions.

By Matt Carey

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So, Mr. Kennedy, why do you cite corrupt journals?

29 May

Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has two conflicting statements out in the past couple of days. Earlier this week he stated that he might bar people at HHS from publishing in certain journals. They are “corrupt”, you see. And they have to change their ways. Here’s how Politico described Mr. Kennedy’s comments:


Speaking on the “Ultimate Human” podcast, Kennedy said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, three of the most influential medical journals in the world, were “corrupt” and publish studies funded and approved by pharmaceutical companies.

“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” he said, referring to the National Institutes of Health, an HHS agency that is the world’s largest funder of health research.

We can discuss why Mr. Kennedy did that. For example, he needs to discredit the journals that have (and likely will continue to) show that his “Gold Standard Science” is nonsense (see the citations at the bottom of this article). But, for the moment, let’s just jump to Mr. Kennedy’s hypocrisy.

You see, he just released “The MAHA Report“. Aside from the fact that it includes made-up citations and, in my opinion, is AI generated slop, it cites the very journals Mr. Kennedy says are corrupt.

Lancet journals are cited 4 times. New England Journal of Medicine is cited 4 times. JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) journals about 44 times.

So, these journals are corrupt. We can’t trust them. But, we should trust Mr. Kennedy to carefully vet those articles that are not corrupt. Because, you know, Gold-Standard Science. Or something like that.

—

By Matt Carey

Association between thimerosal-containing vaccine and autism (Journal of the American Medical Association)

Conclusion: The results do not support a causal relationship between childhood vaccination with thimerosal-containing vaccines and development of autistic-spectrum disorders.

also

Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With Older Siblings With and Without Autism

Conclusions and Relevance  In this large sample of privately insured children with older siblings, receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with increased risk of ASD, regardless of whether older siblings had ASD. These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Didn’t See Autistic People—But They Were There

14 Apr

Kennedy wants us to believe that autism was vanishingly rare when he was young. Instead, he’s revealed something much simpler: he didn’t know what autism looked like.

Robert Kennedy Jr. often tells a story meant to bolster the idea that autism is a modern epidemic. When he was a teenager, he volunteered at the Wassaic State School in New York. His takeaway? He never saw anyone with autism. The implication is clear: autism must be new. An epidemic, and one caused by vaccines. But there’s a problem with his story: there were a lot of autistic people at Wassaic.

At best, Kennedy’s story reveals more about his own lack of awareness than it does about autism. Based on data from the California Department of Developmental Disabilities (CDDS)—data Kennedy himself has cited in various arguments—to support the idea that autistic people were indeed present in institutions like Wassaic in significant numbers during the time he volunteered there.

His revisionist anecdote is standard in the “autism epidemic” playbook. First, you take old prevalence studies at face value—as though diagnostic practices and awareness haven’t changed dramatically over the decades. In the 1970s, autism was estimated at around 3 in 10,000. Wassaic housed somewhere between 2,400 and 5,000 residents at the time. If you apply that (outdated) prevalence rate, you might expect only one or two autistic individuals in the entire institution.

You can be forgiven if you don’t see the logical flaw in that argument. Apparently, Mr. Kennedy cannot. The autism prevalence in a place like Wassaic would have been much higher than that in the general population. 3 in 10,000, even if it were an accurate autism prevalence, is not the number to use. Pretty obvious once it’s spelled out.

So let’s do what Kennedy doesn’t: look at the numbers. Let’s ask how many autistic people were at Wassaic.

I examined a historical dataset from the CDDS* and asked a simple question: for individuals born around the same time as Kennedy (and, thus, would be representative of the age of students at the “school”), how many are recognized as autistic compared to those with intellectual disability (ID)? The answer: about 1 in 20. Implicit in Mr. Kennedy’s logic is that many or most of these autistic people would have been at places like Wassaic.

So, if you are looking at a population of people with developmental disabilities in 1972, you’d expect one diagnosed autistic** for every 20 people with intellectual disability. That one person probably is both autistic and intellectually disabled. So, on average, every classroom group Mr. Kennedy would have seen would have a recognized autistic person. Or, to put it another way, ff Wassaic had 5000 residents, there’d be about 250 autistic people.

Kennedy states he didn’t see recognize anyone who was autistic at Wassaic. And why would he have understood the people he saw were autistic? He was about 18 years old. Even now, he’s not a doctor. He’s not trained in neurodevelopmental disorders. The idea that he could identify autism in a mid-century institutional setting, from his memories as a teenager, is implausible at best.

So Kennedy wasn’t seeing too few autistic people. They were there. He was simply unable to recognize them.

This isn’t a complicated scientific issue. It’s about context, data, and critical thinking—qualities Kennedy claims to value but rarely applies. And that matters, because his ignorance has consequences.

Kennedy uses the “autism epidemic” narrative to stoke vaccine fear. He’s spent two decades promoting misinformation that undermines public health. Today, people are dying of preventable diseases in places like Texas because of narratives like his.

But my reasons for writing this go beyond public health.

This matters because it hurts autistic people. When Kennedy claims that autistic individuals didn’t exist before, he erases generations of people who went undiagnosed and unsupported. It’s not just bad science—it’s dehumanizing.

If Kennedy wants to lead, he needs to start by recognizing the people he claims to care about.

By Matt Carey***

*Here’s a screenshot of the spreadsheet I got from CDDS. It is from 2015. I added a column with the ratio of consumers in the autism category to the ID category. For people born around the same time as Mr. Kennedy, the age group likely represented at Wassaic when he was there, it’s about 1:20. I.e. for every 20 people at Wassaic with ID, there was at least one autistic individual. All this without saying “they weren’t diagnosed”.

Once, again, I’ll stress autism was vastly undercounted then. I have literally hundreds of articles on this blog discussing this.

**and a lot more undiagnosed autistics, but that’s the logic Mr. Kennedy and his community denies.

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“if you’ve been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about” Why did you lie, Mr. Kennedy?

7 Apr

We have recently seen a huge layoff at HHS. It’s amazing to think that just 2 months ago, Robert Kennedy was saying this wouldn’t happen.

On February 14, Robert Kennedy promised that people involved in good science would have nothing to worry about in terms of losing their jobs. He had a “generic list” of people who should be let go, but people working on good science were safe.

“I have a list in my head … we have a generic list of the kind of people that — if you’ve been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about,” Kennedy said during an appearance on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle” Thursday night.

“If you care about public health, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you’re in there working for the pharmaceutical industry, then I’d say you should move out and work for the pharmaceutical industry,” he added.

Shortly after that, he started indiscriminately firing people. It’s so bad he’s admitting he made a mistake and has to bring people back. That’s not “you’ve got nothing to worry about”.

One area that affects the autism community directly is the Administration for Community Living.

The Administration for Community Living, which coordinates federal policy on aging and disability, was gutted – 40% of staff there lost their jobs, according to Alison Barkoff, the former head of the agency who says she learned this by talking to multiple members of her former staff. The ACL funds programs that run senior centers and distributes 216 million meals a year to older and disabled people.

These are not people doing science, but they are definitely people who care about public health who are not working for the pharmaceutical industry. It’s hard to see gutting this organization as being within Mr. Kennedy’s comments on FoxNews. At all.

Which is why I ask: did you know you were lying at the time, Mr. Kennedy? Or did you just not have the guts to stand up and defend good people doing good work when you were told to cut them?

Having watched Mr. Kennedy for decades, I never expected him to have a backbone when he got into power. Sacrificing the jobs of people who directly help disabled people in order to keep his job, yes, that’s in line with what I expected. Mr. Kennedy hired a staunch anti-vaccine pseudo-scientist, so we know where his priorities lay.

By Matt Carey

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