RFK and Science
The relationship appears to be an inverse one.
Well, to take a brief break from the horrors of extraordinary renditions of innocent people and the insanity of the Trump approach to tariff policy, I want to briefly return to the topic of utterly foolish cabinet appointments. In this case, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The following BBC headline caught my eye, RFK Jr pledges to find the cause of autism by September.
Several reactions crashed in my head simultaneously, to include “that’s not the job of the Secretary of HHS,” “so maybe we shouldn’t be cancelling university grants,” and “that’s not how science works.”
From the BBC piece:
US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has pledged “a massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism in five months.
Experts cautioned that finding the causes of autism spectrum disorder – a complex syndrome that has been studied for decades – will not be straightforward, and called the effort misguided and unrealistic.
Kennedy, who has promoted debunked theories suggesting autism is linked to vaccines, said during a cabinet meeting on Thursday that a US research effort will “involve hundreds of scientists from around the world.”
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said.
You can’t put a deadline on scientific results. It doesn’t work that way. And if it did, why not focus on something like, “We’ll have a cure for cancer by Christmas!”
And this sentence is just outstanding.
Kennedy did not give details on the research project or how much funding will be devoted to autism research.
But, he knows when the results will be in, so there’s that.
“We’re going to look at vaccines, but we’re going to look at everything,” Kennedy later said during an interview with Fox News about the scope of the undertaking. “Everything is on the table, our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”
Well, if it all on the table, I am sure they will spot the problem forthwith.
Autism diagnoses have increased sharply since 2000, according to government figures, and by 2020 the rate among 8-year-olds reached 2.77%, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Scientists attribute at least part of the rise to increased awareness of autism and an expanding definition of the disorder. Researchers have also been investigating environmental factors.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), a government agency, spends more than $300m (£230m) per year researching autism.
The NIH lists some possible risk factors including prenatal exposure to pesticides or air pollution, premature birth or low birth weight, maternal health problems and parents conceiving at older ages.
I wonder how much of that of that $300 million in NIH money is in grants to universities? I wonder if any of the DOGE-inspired NIH firings have hit the autism team?
In a statement the Autism Society of America called Kennedy’s plan “harmful, misleading, and unrealistic”.
“It is neither a chronic illness nor a contagion,” the society said.
Christopher Banks, the society’s president, questioned whether the research efforts would be transparent and said claims that autism is solely caused by environmental factors were “misleading theories (which) perpetuate harmful stigma, jeopardize public health, and distract from the critical needs of the autism community.”
Kennedy has also alarmed some over his hiring of David Geier, who has been described by some as a conspiracy theorist, to research vaccines and autism, and on Thursday Democrats in the US House of Representatives wrote to HHS “to express our urgent concern” over the selection of “a biased and discredited individual”.
Yes, I am sure this will end in a productive bit of scientific inquiry.
It seems to me that Kennedy has an unhealthy concern with autism, which seems to be linked to his anti-vaccine positions. But speaking as someone with a family member on the spectrum, I would be far more interested in both destigmatizing the condition and funding ways to help families navigate these waters than to have a conspiracy theorist claims to have solved a long-standing set of scientific questions in a few months on a deadline.
I will conclude with a reminder of the following.
The discredited idea that childhood vaccines are linked to autism first gained mainstream attention after a paper published in 1998 in the medical journal The Lancet by British doctor Andrew Wakefield.
Wakefield was later found to have financial conflicts of interest and the UK’s General Medical Council found that he falsified his results. The research paper was retracted.
The September deadline is a ‘tell’ that he already knows what he is going to say is the cause – and my money is on “vaccines” – broadly defined.
There won’t be any reviewable or published scientific justification for it, just the United States Government’s official stance.
Circular logic will prevail.
As Tony correctly notes, it’s easy to make the deadline when you’ve already decided what the conclusion is.
We have 600+ measles cases, and whooping cough is at its highest level in years. I think we’re also on track for an increase in deaths from flu (the regular kind). If RFK even hints at vaccination being a cause, we’re in trouble.
And yes to everything in the original post about how science works.
The autism-vaccines BS* is, sadly, one of those canards that will not die, simply because a large enough group of people don’t want to, are immune to scientific evidence, and cannot admit when they’re wrong.
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/2/7965885/vaccine-autism-link-false-evidence-wakefield
* I originaly wrote “conspiracy theory” instead of “BS,” but I thought gracing this willful stupidity with “theory,” even in the context conspiracy theory, was a bit too much.
Well, at least he isn’t selling A-One steak sauce.
Tangentially related; currently there are more cases of measles than there are transgender athletes, but which one gets all the attention tells you all you need to know about the MAGA cult.
Orac has been blogging about RFK Jr’s idiocy for years at https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/?s=Rfk
The least deranged among the anti-vaxxers because of autism, proposed a commonly used preservative thiomersal was the problem. It was used in vaccines, and it does contain mercury. mercury can cause neurological issues.
But then it was phased out from use in vaccines, and no differences were detected in rates of autism. So, the least deranged anti vaxxers moved the goalposts.
I’ve found myself wondering how much of the expansion in diagnosed autism is connected to increases in rate of testing for the condition and expansion of the definition of what things constitute autism. But the people I asked in the education community asked me why I thought those would be factors, so I shrugged and walked away.
A whole lot of software engineers exhibit a lot of the symptoms of autism, although relatively few have sought a diagnosis.
What I’m saying is that if you want your kids to get those high paying, relatively cushy software jobs, you better make sure they get all their vaccines.
@Kingdaddy: It’s absolutely a theory, because it’s a testable hypothesis.
Testing has shown that it is not consistent with the data, and incredibly unlikely to be true.
@just nutha: We were missing a lot of diagnoses in the past, but now I’m wondering if the rate of impossible-to-miss autism has increased. No one would miss my nearly non-verbal nephew, for instance, although he might have been diagnosed as retarded.
It would be a difficult study, as you would probably need to start with statewide records of children kept out of regular classes — possibly kept at home — and there’s a high risk of missing some kids N years ago which could create a false increase. And factor in leaded gasoline, or determine it’s not a factor.
That and autism research has been polluted with so much made up shit, that I don’t know if the layperson can ever trust anything.
Also, it’s worth noting that autism diagnoses increased as the more conservative wing of the Republican Party has gained more power.
(And as we removed lead. And as California condor populations declined. And as union membership declined.)
@Gustopher: I don’t know how many job candidates I interviewed in my 8+ years as dean, but is was a large number. While I fully recognize that I am no expert, I am certain I saw a lot of people on the spectrum.
Me too, Steven. Me too.
Some studies suggest that the increase in overall diagnosis is because of increase in diagnosis in girls and women, who were previously missed or misdiagnosed, particularly with borderline personality disorder.
If anything, this understates just how bad RFK is turning out. He’s also killing research into mRNA vaccines, some of which are showing good promise in curing cancer. That research will probably come to fruition too late for my family, but thousands will suffer needlessly because he killed the research. He’s trying to destroy vaccine schedules. And he wants to just let bird flu run wild so we can breed strains of resistant chickens, which is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. There are lots of lawsuits pending against vaccine makers. Kennedy has a financial stakes in some of these. The purpose of the study is not to figure out what causes autism; it’s to the financial floodgates to Kennedy and his buddies.
(Also, as an aside. As a parent of an autistic kid and possible someone on the spectrum himself, I am tired of RFK acting as though autistic kids are damaged goods.)
I was working in a lab studying autism just after the Wakefield paper hit. We dove in trying to identify an animal model of vaccine injury we could use to study further. After a careful perusing of the available literature, we found that no model with less than ~10000x the exposure from any vaccine could cause noticeable deficits (in mice and rats). It left us flummoxed as to what he described but we just dropped the topic and moved on.
This is one of the things that cracks me up about the anti-vaxxers. “Scientists are just in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies/afraid of the truth/whatever”. If I could prove vaccines caused autism, I would be rich.
As for the vast increase in diagnosis? It was a very limited diagnosis prior to ~1990 – if you were functional, you weren’t considered autistic – if you were non-verbal, you were diagnosed as “mentally impaired”. The “autism umbrella” of diagnosis has grown 100 fold and so have the number of diagnosed.
@Hal_10000: The attacks on mRNA vaccines is one of the most disturbing/disheartening thing about all of the covid-antivax nonsense. It shows such promise in addressing some of our most intractable diseases, and, not for nothing, it can be used to QUICKLY deploy when needed to mitigate the effects of future pandemics.
I desperately hope that other countries will fill in the massive hole we’ve blown in scientific research.
@Gustopher: I have seen an expert state that back in the day, people like your nephew would have been diagnosed as mentally retarded.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this “administration” is acting pretty much exactly the way they would act if their goal were to end science in the US. Stupid or evil? You decide. (Et pourquoi pas tous les deux…?)