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December 13, 2024 - 6:30pm
In an interview with Time magazine published this week, Donald Trump mooted a review of childhood vaccination programmes when he returns to office in January. By way of explanation, he invoked the notable increase in autism diagnoses in recent years. “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible,” he said. “If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.”
Although he demurred when asked if he believed that childhood autism was definitely linked to vaccines, Trump said that he would be “listening to Bobby”. That’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr, his likely head of Health and Human Services, who has spent years talking up the link between vaccines and autism.
There is no doubt that autism rates are increasing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 6.7 in every thousand American children were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2000, but that had risen to 27.6 per thousand by 2020. In the UK, meanwhile, a 2021 study found that diagnoses had risen by 787% between 1998 and 2018, with one in 36 children now believed to have ASD.
There are three possible explanations for the rise in autism diagnoses, all of which may be true. First, there may have been an increase in accurate diagnoses due to greater awareness, an increase in the number of clinicians specialising in the condition, and an increase in previously under-diagnosed groups being able to receive a diagnosis, including the middle-aged, women, working-class patients, and non-white people.
Second, the rise may be due to “over-diagnosis”, with the definition of “autistic” loosened to encompass everyone from the severely disabled to those whose symptoms might more properly be understood as aspects of their personality, rather than a pathology.
Third, it may be the case that there actually has been an increase in incidences of autism due to environmental factors such as pollution, viral infections in childhood, vitamin deficiencies, increasing parental age — or even, potentially, vaccines.
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SubscribeI am 62 and there are no autistic people in my cohort. We grew up with mentally handicapped peers but nobody with autism and it wasn’t under or miss-diagnosed. The mentally handicapped kids, even if not diagnosed are not present in anywhere near the numbers seen today. We should study autism with non-politized funds through the lens of science not under the influence of big pharma and settle it.
There have been extensive studies of the causes of autism, but those causes remain obscure. Big pharma has had nothing to do with it. The problem is that we have no way of conducting scientific experiments on human beings and the statistical studies we can do have limited value.
We do know some things, however. Statistical studies can show correlations between causes and effects. While the presence of a correlation does not imply causation, the lack of a correlation does imply lack of causation. There is no statistical correlation between vaccination and autism. As a result, we have proof that vaccination does not cause autism.
There should be nothing political about this. Science doesn’t differ between Republicans and Democrats. Politicians have no ability to interpret scientific data. Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy should no more be listened to regarding the causes of autism than Greta Thunberg should be listened to regarding climate change.
If you really want to touch off an inferno of controversy, point out the most likely cause, which does in fact correlate – advanced maternal age.
Very wealthy areas in the US, that tend to have two high earning spouses – the tech heavy hubs of northern California and Massachusetts, the suburbs of NYC, the research triangle of the Carolinas – have sky high autism rates.
Having your first child when you’re several years out of law school or B-school not only puts your fertility at risk, but also raises rates of birth defects substantially, from autism to Down’s syndrome to certain types of anadactylism.
Eggs don’t keep forever, in other words, though it may be unpopular to say so.
First definition of autism is not clear.
Second birth control and ultrasound machine etc may be more culpable than natural aging eggs. What rail trail did to the spine may be similar take here.
And thirdly, it could be evolutionary process and we are too conscious recognizing and not willing to accommodate.
The last one is defended because of ideas found in disable literature such society created disability vs deficit and ideas of being ablieist but AI coming in the pipeline maybe worth looking into it.
Well said.
Big Pharma has everything to do with it. What are you talking about. The extent of corruption within the academic medical community, especially in the US, and its links to big Pharma is indisputable. As for autism there is no decent RCT study that shows that autism and excessive vaccination are not linked. i.e. right now we have no idea and the honest thing to do is to admit this, and then do the correct unbiased, properly conducted RCT studies to look at the issue properly.
Doing a random controlled trial to see if there is a link between vaccines and autism would be highly unethical and impractical. Extensive statistical analyses of vaccines and autism have shown no association or correlation between them. Nor has any causal mechanism been shown. Applying the rules of causal inference, a link can thus be ruled out.
Andrew Wakefield was the doctor who first raised the possibility of a link between vaccines and autism. His work was found to be both false and fraudulent. But he is the main support Bobby Kennedy claims for the theory that vaccines cause autism.
Big Pharma certainly has its problems, but at least on the issue of vaccines and autism they aren’t conmen and fraudsters like Andrew Wakefield and Bobby Kennedy.
Whilst autism spectrum disorders may well be more accurately diagnosed these days, leading to greater numbers, that still doesn’t explain the lack of older people with autism, who we are supposed to believe were never diagnosed.
Past tolerance towards different personality types and general human variety, plus the social knowledge, folk wisdom and poetic culture of archetypes to negotiate this variety, have been absorbed into this scientistic diagnostic culture, which literally only deals in a small handful of approved terms, and then tries to crowbar any deviation from constructed norms inside this framework. No wonder rates of diagnoses are increasing – that would just be a circular aspect of the prevailing diagnostic culture.
“important points are ignored because of the types of people making them”.
Right. So let’s stop prejudging people by their “type”. In the past, people with valid arguments have been besmirched, ignored and much, much worse because they are too catholic, too atheist, too feminist, too non-conformist, too Protestant, too Jewish, too black, too Irish, too socialist, too conservative, too radical, too just simply different and not accepting the complacent narrative that the “moral majority” seems passively to accept, until they suddenly don’t and everything turns on a dime.
Today that applies to all of the above, to some extent, but also to the “anti-vax” label. I wouldn’t trust Trump and his acolytes further than I could throw them. Ditto Biden and his corrupt mates and family. Power, and money, corrupts. It’s time for decent, humble, courageous men and women with a sincere commitment to objective truth and their fellow man and woman to step up and take some calculated risks; and for the lookers on to listen without prejudice, and to face their fears that they might have been misled by false narratives.
I would not worry about the arguments not getting a fair hearing; if the MAGA lot can produce some reliable evidence in favour of their theories they will eventually concvince people. The worst-case scenario is rather that the MAGA NIH will produce so much fake science to support their opinions that they mess up the scientific record. A bit less bad – but rather more likely – is that MAGA will not get any evidence, fake or real, but will continue to push their views without it, That could convince lots of people to stop getting vaccinated, with the resultant increase in disease and death.
If Bobby Kennedy is confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary, he will be in an executive position where he will have little influence on what the agencies do. He will, I confidently predict, fail at doing anything harmful or good. He’s a trial lawyer, and like all trial lawyers, he talks and talks and accomplishes nothing.
If confirmed, Jay Bhattacharya will become head of the National Institutes of Health. He will have more influence on the scientific work that will be carried out at the NIH. But he’s more solid on science than Bobby Kennedy. He is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, and he has himself been funded by the NIH and been on peer review panels for the NIH. He knows the difference between politics and science.
MAGA will have no influence on science. We are not the Soviet Union where someone like Trofim Lysenko can turn science political. People like Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy may meddle in medical matters, but they will get nowhere. Facts will speak louder than fiction.
In other words, it’s all bs like the rest of the maga movement, a huge scam that some aligned billionaires will profit from before it all comes tumbling down
No, the idea that vaccines cause autism is not part of MAGA. Bobby Kennedy believes it. No one else in the administration does. There is no evidence, scientific or statistical, to support that view. It’s not going to be government policy.
Really. Remember Fauci and Collins, and the politicization of Covid, the mitigation procedures which were not only draconian but ineffective, and the vaccines which didn’t prevent transmission or infection. Recall also the politicization of nutritional science that led to the food pyramid in the US based on garbage data and resulted in the current epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes. It has taken 50 years for the various medical societies and US National Academies to even admit that they all screwed up badly, while destroying any researcher who object to the so-called consensus.
I think you are confusing science and public health policy. And that’s understandable, as the FDA and the CDC often do confuse the two. The NIH does better at keeping them separate.
You mention Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, but they had almost nothing to do with the public health policy during the pandemic. The NIH, including Tony Fauci’s NIAID, stuck to science. The vaccines passed the same Phase III tests of safety and efficacy that any new drug has to pass.
As to the FDA’s food pyramid and things like recommended daily allowances, they are not based on science but are public health policy that are based more on politics than any scientific grounds. I don’t think they have done much good, but I don’t think they have done much harm either.
The point I am making is that Bobby Kennedy’s rejection of proven science and promotion of pseudoscience disqualifies him, in my eyes, for the important role of health secretary. He knows nothing about science. He knows nothing about how to lead a large organization. He is a trial lawyer who lies for a living.
If Bobby Kennedy is confirmed for this post, I think he will quickly fail and be removed. I just hope the Senate is smart enough to reject him. I have to agree with Kimberly Strassel over at the Wall Street Journal, who in her article yesterday titled “The Great RFK Jr. Charade”, asked the question “Why won’t the Senate take an opportunity to save Trump from a bad political deal?”
Sorry Rasmus but you are full of B…S. The important thing to remember is that the Pharma companies are not saints and they have been successfully sued for billions of dollars including providing false information to the FDA, kickbacks, falsification of data and everything in between. This is why honest post-market surveillance is so imortant to pick up rare adverse reactions. When it comes to vaccines this is especially important because (a) they are administered to so many people (i.e. close to 90% of the population), (b) it is difficult to pick up safety signals from relatively smll clinical trials; (c) you cannot have a situation where the trials are conducted by the Pharma companies or doctors linked in any way to the Pharma companies.