Autism and the American Inquisition
Sadly, people with ASD have become RFKJr’s political football.
Summary
The prevalence of Autism has increased many fold since it was first defined 80 years ago
This is largely due to improved understanding, widened diagnostic criteria, better detection and early diagnosis.
The cause is mainly genetic with interesting environmental leads to research.
Autism has been conclusively shown not to be caused by vaccination.
RFKJr wishes to deny this.
To do this, he has appointed a dishonest antivaccine crank to lead autism research and will announce his results in September.
Why is Autism in the news?
During my years as a junior doctor on a 1980’s paediatric ward, Autism was only diagnosed in those with marked disabilities. Since then it, and Aspergers Syndrome, have merged into the Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and the diagnosis expanded to include many struggling at school who were in the past undiagnosed, uncounted and unhelped.
Defining and helping more neurodiverse children is a big improvement. For many undiagnosed adults who had problems school, with work, with relationships and who have been previously labelled as ESN, difficult, eccentric, awkward or odd, even late (often self) diagnosis can help with understanding and perspective. I know quite a few neurodiverse adults; none of them have been formally diagnosed and none were helped at school.
So while I’m glad we have got way better at recognising, learning about and understanding ASD, I feel anger that neurodiverse people have become a political tool of the antivaccine industry. How has this happened?
Diagnosing people with ASD.
Interestingly this US study showed the increase in diagnosis over 2000-2016 occurred in poor, female and non white people, suggesting previous under-diagnosis in these groups rather than a genuine increase.
The image below also describes the huge variation in prevalence across US groups and states which must be due to differences in what might be called diagnostic effort.
Are there really two and a half times more people in New Jersey with ASD than in Colorado? This variability is mirrored in the UK with rates of diagnosis varying from 85% in some Autism centres to 35% in others.
Dr Peter Carpenter, the chair of the Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry Special Interest Group, agreed that it was “very much in the eye of the clinician-beholder as to whether someone is diagnosed as autistic or not”. This needs to change.
Despite this, its fair to say there are now less children with features of neurodiversity experiencing problems who remain undiagnosed, and this increased recognition of people who are struggling is a positive thing.
After the diagnosis
The proportion of those children with learning difficulties diagnosed with ASD has also increased from a quarter to three quarters, and it now affects 1 in 34 children.
Again, this also hints that current population prevalence of 1% is a likely to be a considerable underestimate given that many older adults, particularly women with ASD remain undiagnosed.
Yet the challenges of increased recognition are profound. Local authorities in the UK are facing financial meltdown due to many reasons, one of the most potent being the number of kids with Special Educational Needs. In 2013, 74,000 English children out of a school population of 10 million were identified as having moderate, severe or profound learning difficulty. Thats not including mild difficulties which if not addressed can cause educational problems.
In my county, Devon, the SEN deficit is forecast to be £160million (about £300 per household) which somehow needs to be found as many needs are not being met even as things stand.
So it’s clear we need more research into how we can improve the speed and accuracy of the diagnosis, as well as defining and putting into place the help they need.
I’m reminded of Asperger himself trying to convince his Nazi colleagues that his ‘special boys’ had amazing talents and abilities. He failed. Unfortunately, in the US right now they are being demonised and seen as a problem to be solved.
The use and abuse of people with ASD.
Given that ASD is diagnosed and vaccines given in those early years, the scientific community rightly spent much time and effort to exploring any link between them. The solid consensus is that there isn’t. The evidence is comprehensive and summaries can be read and seen here.
Given the importance of all this, it is infuriating that children with ASD have long been and are increasingly used as a tool in the antivaccine toolbox. This started with Wakefield’s bogus and immoral study which began a veritable avalanche of vaccine misinformation. This has in part at least, led to the bizarre outcome of a leading vaccine cynic running Americas health sector.
RFKJr has led the leading anti-vax organisation for decades. He also produced, with his colleagues, Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree a film called Vaxxed2, blatantly manipulating families with ASD to scare people away from vaccines. His recent book, “The Real Antony Fauci” details his HIV/AIDS denialism, and his medieval belief in miasma or terrain rather than germ theory as a cause of infections disease amongst much other frank idiocy.
Not only is his approach harmful to children with ASD, categorising them as helpless, severely disabled victims, but is harmful to all children. It was predicted at the time that if decreasing levels of vaccination caused by such publicity led to measles outbreaks, then we will see children dying of measles again. This is exactly what has happened, not to speak of the other preventable diseases making a comeback.
ASD as a political football
Despite knowing what an idiot Kennedy is, I was still taken aback by a recent cabinet meeting where he laid out his plan to his Glorious Leader:
Trump asked Kennedy, "There's got to be something artificial out there that's doing this, so you think you're gonna have a pretty good idea?"
Kennedy reaffirmed: "we will know by September."
Adding to vaccine scepticism, Trump cluelessly stated the findings will inform people to "stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it's a shot. Something's causing it."
So he has predetermined the cause of ASD is due to “exposures” which he will announce in September, inverting science by putting conclusions before a hypothesis. As Paul Offit said, “You don’t have to be a psychic to see where this is going”
Corrupting science
Kennedy is ensuring the outcomes he wants by appointing fellow antivaccine campaigners to lead his ‘massive testing and research’; David Grier, his pick for the job, has an irrelevant Bachelor of Arts degree and a history of bad science.
Worse, while running an Autism clinic with his father, Grier was sanctioned for pretending to be a doctor treating (in my opinion abusing) children with ASD. They were ‘diagnosing’ kids with ASD as having too much testosterone and treating them with hormones which cause chemical castration and whose only real use is in advanced cancer of the prostate.
This adds to the other useless, dangerous and sometimes fatal treatments of Autism used by doctors who in my opinion are nothing short of criminals.
Grier has written bogus papers to ‘prove’ the link between ASD and Thiomersal a preservative which used to be used in vaccines, which, to put it kindly:
Along with his father Mark, (a doctor who has been struck off for misrepresenting himself and for harmful Autism treatments) he set up the bogus Institute of Chronic Illness to front his personal studies which due to their dishonesty feature heavily in retraction watch as "uninterpretable"
To add to the fraud, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) required in the US as a safeguard for patients was, in the case of the Mark Grier’s experiments on children with Autism, a “sham”. The IRB they used was located at Mark Grier’s home address and the board included himself, his son David and his wife, a business partner and a lawyer specialising in vaccine litigation.
This is the man Kennedy has appointed to lead the research into ASD!
Kennedy has Captured the HHS
That this crank is being paid public money to do Kennedy’s bidding is staggering corruption - capturing an agency which for so long he has argued to have been captured by Big Pharma.
That he has allowed himself just 6 months to get an answer guarantees he already knows what the result will be. How could he be able to find out if air pollution, or food is the cause of ASD? Real complex epidemiology takes way longer than that and twenty years of research costing billions has failed to get “The Answer”, because it is complex - I will look at that in my next post.
The American Inquisition
Kennedys corrupting influence is even more clear after another NIH scientist has been forced to quit. This time its Dr Kevin Hall, who is researching into the link between processed food and brain health. Right up Kennedys street, you might think!
However, when he produced a paper highlighting the unexpected findings that that ultra processed food did not increase dopamine activity in brain scans, it was effectively censored as not fitting into the new HHS agenda. Stepping out of line will not be tolerated.
A recent post on Bluesky said this:
“Just spoke with my CDC sources. They were in tears. Budgets cut. RFJK has ordered them not to publicize bird flu symptoms in exposed workers. Not to test them. Not to speak. They know people are getting sick. And they’re being forced to stay silent. This is not just a cover-up. It's cruelty”
That is enough to take in. I can hardly believe I’m writing this. It’s like a descent into a dystopian nightmare, and it’s only just begun. Anyone interested in health, honesty, and scientific principles now have a fight on their hands.
I will next post on the myths Kennedy creates to advance his own political agenda at the expense of the kids with ASD and everyone at risk of preventable infections disease.
Good Medicine has always had enemies, but none as powerful as this!