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.
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.
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.
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.
I have been following Mr. Geier, Mr. Kennedy and the anti-vaccine movement for 19 years now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Conclusion: The results do not support a causal relationship between childhood vaccination with thimerosal-containing vaccines and development of autistic-spectrum disorders.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Prof. Fisher mentions “Autism families of a certain vintage”. I am of that vintage. I’ve watched his son grow up through blog posts over the years. I too saw Robert Kennedy over decades and David Geier promote bad science and bad medicine. The harm they have caused is real and it can only get worse with them in positions of power. Prof. Fisher gives another perspective on the history, from an autism father’s point of view.
This would be funny if Mr. Kennedy weren’t playing games with one of America’s greatest assets: our public health system. What specifically this time, you may ask?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Mr. Kennedy plans to reinstate many fired employees (RFK Jr. Plans to Reinstate Some Federal Workers, Programs). Which is a very good thing. Except they (and the rest) should never have been let go in the first place. Per the WSJ:
“Some programs that were cut, they’re being reinstated,” Kennedy said Thursday. “Personnel that should not have been cut were cut. We’re reinstating them.”
But here’s where it becomes a Pee Wee Herman moment: he meant to do that. No, seriously, he’s saying he always meant to make mistakes and bring people back:
“That was always the plan,” he said, referring to fixing mistakes and the Department of Government Efficiency’s approach to making federal cuts. “Part of the DOGE—we talked about this from the beginning—is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.”
Because that’s what a good manager does. Fire a whole lot of people and then ask the good ones to come back and not be pissed off and spend their time looking for a new job. Right?
Seriously, these are people’s lives you are dealing with, Mr. Kennedy. You don’t just tell someone, “pack your desk. We didn’t even give you the respect you deserve” and then, “please come back. We meant to do that to you. But don’t be disgruntled or anything.”
I didn’t go to management school, or business school, but even I can tell this is a bad management and bad business move. We don’t need amateurs running billions of dollars of America’s assets. Especially ones who can’t even admit mistakes.
This is a Pee Wee Herman “I meant to do that moment”. Don’t do it again.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), Deaf Equality, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and Massachusetts Senior Action Council, along with individual plaintiffs, filed a federal lawsuit today against the Social Security Administration (SSA), Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, DOGE Acting Administrator Amy Gleason, and Elon Musk in his de facto role as head of DOGE. The lawsuit alleges that recent mass staffing reductions, policies requiring individuals to seek services in person at field offices, and the elimination of critical offices within the SSA unlawfully harm Americans with disabilities and older adults who rely on Social Security services. Justice in Aging and Brown Goldstein & Levy, LLP join the lawsuit as co-counsel.
Axios has an article (White House fed up with RFK Jr.’s sluggish press shop) about how Robert Kennedy’s mismanagement of press events is frustrating White House staff. The story is worth a read and I don’t want to just copy it here. But here’s one anecdote:
On March 11, HHS held its first “MAHA Moms” event behind closed doors with Kennedy, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. No press was notified. No professional photographer was there. Fumed one attendee: “Stefanie was in charge and created a perfect press opportunity with no press, a perfect photo op with no photos.”
A perfect press opportunity with no press. For a president who lives on the press cycle, this has to be infuriating.
I will quote one more bit from the Axios article as it’s amusing in the irony. They got an official White House statement:
“The White House has a great relationship with Stefanie and HHS. We work closely day in and day out to Make America Healthy Again. It’s disappointing that bitter, anonymous sources are attempting to create conflict where none exists.”
Read the article and count how many times those “bitter, anonymous sources” are inside the White House.
Publicly they are backing Kennedy up, but those leaks don’t sound like “bitter anonymous” sources. Or, if they are, they are bitter at Mr. Kennedy’s lack of skill at handling the job he has been given.
By Matt Carey
If you read the Axios article you will see where I got the title for this piece.
Yesterday, Donald Trump, Robert Kennedy and others met in the Oval Office to announce an executive order on vaccines and autism. I have a simple message for them: Don’t pretend that you are helping my kid, me or my family. Don’t act like you are speaking for us or our wants or desires. There is […]
Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact. States have a financial incentive to underserve disabled students. Special education is expensive, and every support costs money. The Department of Education exists, in part, as a federal watchdog to ensure that states live up to their obligations under the law. And these are kids who will never pay […]
When I was young, people like my kid were institutionalized. Access to community, either in their residence or their daily activities, was limited. Which is a nice way of saying, a lot of people never saw the outside of an institution. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to think that after I […]
NIH autism research funding has collapsed since Mr. Kennedy became HHS Secretary. I wrote about this in my open letter to the IACC. Then I got curious: are the cuts limited to autism, or is this happening across NIH? The answer: it’s everywhere, and it’s worse than I expected. Below is a graph I made […]
Secretary Kennedy has cut back on autism research, and you can act. You should act. You must act. Here are data from NIH Reporter on new NIH autism grants by fiscal year. I pro-rated the results from 2026, since the fiscal year ends in September. This graph shows only those grants which are new in each fiscal […]
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