I hadn’t intended to write about the longtime antivax activist who is, tragically, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the US, namely Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Truth be told, I’d love to forget about RFK Jr. for a while, as I’m getting a bit of RFK Jr. fatigue (and, I suspect, so are you). I’d love nothing more than to be able to do a post or two about standard-issue quackery of the variety that I used to write about routinely back in the day. On the other hand, I can’t ignore what’s happening every day around me. The extinction-level threat to US federal biomedical and public health policy that I predicted is here, and each week seems to bring new evidence that, if anything, my first prediction five months ago when RFK Jr. first suspended his independent Presidential campaign and bent the knee to Donald Trump in return for a prominent role in his administration on health was insufficiently pessimistic.
This time around, I want to revisit something that I wrote two weeks ago in light of two developments that occurred last week. The first was RFK Jr.’s horrendous press conference about the new autism prevalence statistics held last Wednesday, in which longtime offensive antivax tropes about autistic people that portray them as “damaged,” “diseased,” and hopeless, portraying autism as a fate worse than death that must be prevented or cured took center stage as official US government policy and research plans. The second development was that the man whom I have long called “America’s quack,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, was finally confirmed and sworn in as Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the massive agency that oversees not just the Medicare and Medicaid programs, but all health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The two are related, but RFK Jr. got lots of press and outrage, while, oddly enough, little was said about Dr. Oz’s remarks after his swearing in ceremony. Yet both are related through what I referred to as the “soft eugenics” of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement. (Hat tip again, to the Conspirituality podcast for having coined that term. I hope that Derek Beres doesn’t mind that I’ve appropriated it, with credit.)
Let’s start with RFK Jr.’s disastrous press conference last Wednesday.
The autism “tsunami”: RFK Jr. parties like it’s 2005
Last Wednesday, RFK Jr. held a press conference to announce the results of a new CDC report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on April 17, Prevalence and Early Identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 16 Sites, United States, 2022. Before I discuss the report and the press conference, here’s a link to the video, for those who can stomach it:
As I listened, it didn’t take long for me to notice that I had heard all of this before many, many times dating back to 2005. It was all there, calling autism an “epidemic” (a term that I searched for in the transcript and found 20 times in a 30-minute presser. At one point, the term “tsunami” came up. Amazingly, it was not RFK Jr. who used it, but rather Dr. Walter Zahorodny, an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School who directed the New Jersey portion of the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) study. Depressingly, for someone who has been researching autism as long as he has, Dr. Zahorodny seemed to be pretty much all-in with the narrative that the increase in observed autism prevalence must be real and due to “something.” (No doubt that’s why RFK Jr. included him; either that, or he pressured him.) Indeed, at one point in the press conference, he even used the same language that RFK Jr. and antivaxxers have long used:
So I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors. We need to address this question seriously because, in my opinion, for the last 20 years we’ve collected data but not made real progress in understanding what causes autism or how to effectively prevent it or treat it effectively.
At the very least, Dr. Zahorodny should never have used the term “tsunami,” as it’s a term long used mainly by the antivax movement that many autistic people—with justification, in my opinion—consider deeply offensive, as it portrays them as something that engulfs, overwhelms, and destroys everything in its path, much as another term that antivaxxers often use, an “avalanche” of autism. Indeed, it’s usually used to portray autistic people as a huge drain on society, as RFK Jr. did elsewhere in the press conference, under the guise of sympathy:
These are kids that, this is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics. It can provide a vulnerability. You need an environmental toxin, and Irva Hertz-Picciotto pointed out that because of this mythology, that the amount of money and resources put into studying genetic causes, which is a dead end, has been historically 10 to 20 times the amount spent by NIH and other agencies to study environmental factors, to study exposures, to study external factors, and that’s where we’re going to find the answer.
This is an individual tragedy as well. Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old, and these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted, and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it, and I think I’m going to have Walter Zahorodny, who is the most senior researcher for this project, for ADDM, and who’s been doing this for many years, to come up and say a little.
First off, autism is not a “disease.” Antivaxxers and “autism biomed” quacks who abuse autistic children with chelation therapy and all sorts of other treatments designed to “cleanse” them of “toxins” from vaccines, from “parasites,” or whatever evil humors to which they attribute autism frequently refer to autism as a “disease,” but it is a developmental disorder covering a wide spectrum that can range from severe neurodevelopmental delay and abnormalities to the relatively mild. In severe cases, the child can be nonverbal and display a well-characterized set of behaviors, including repetitive behaviors such as “stimming” (for example, hand flapping, making sounds, head rolling, and body rocking.), restricted behavior and focus, ritualistic behavior, and compulsive behaviors. In milder cases, less severe compulsion, restriction of behavior and focus, and ritualistic behaviors do not preclude functioning independently in society, but such children and adults may have significant difficulties with social interactions and communication. Because the autism spectrum represents a wide spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders whose symptoms typically first manifest themselves to parents between the ages of two and three, the idea that vaccines cause autism and ASDs has been depressingly difficult to dislodge, even with copious evidence, and has been a large part of the fuel for the antivaccine movement 20-30 years ago and continues to fuel it today. Add to that the rising apparent prevalence of ASDs, and, confusing correlation with causation, the anti-vaccine movement concludes that vaccines must be the reason for the “autism epidemic.”
In the same manner that antivaxxers frequently do, RFK Jr. ignores the vast majority of autistic people who are functioning members of society to emphasize the minority who don’t, all in order to portray autism as a fate seemingly worse than death. Also, notice what’s hidden under the faux sympathy. What’s the first thing that RFK Jr. mentions? What he leads with is telling: “…these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job…” (Emphasis mine.) Let me say right here, this is some real, top grade, “useless eaters” rhetoric. If RFK Jr. had said simply that many severely autistic children require lifelong care and never be able to live independently, that would be one thing. It would simply be factual and relatively neutral statement of their situation. But no. He had to say first that they’d never be productive taxpaying members of society who can hold down jobs! Of course, none of this is unique to antivaxxers or anything new. There has long been a eugenicist strain in psychiatry and medicine. Moreover, the rhetoric about how those with “severe autism” “destroy families” and how autism “destroys children” is very reminiscent of the sorts of rhetoric used to justify the Aktion T4, the “euthanasia” program instituted by the Nazis around the start of World War II to eliminate those with serious conditions that necessitated lifelong care in institutions.
Indeed, elsewhere RFK Jr. doubles down on the very same rhetoric:
There’s a recent study by Blacksell et al. and a team of other researchers that said that the cost of treating autism in this country by 2035, so within 10 years, will be a trillion dollars a year. This is added to already astronomical healthcare costs, and then there is an individual injury.
I was reminded of images like those below, from here and elsewhere:
It’s the same rhetoric being used to justify looking for the “environmental causes” of autism. I wonder, though: What happens if observed autism prevalence keeps increasing during RFK Jr.’s tenure, despite his best efforts to “find” a bunch of “environmental causes”?
This was so dark, that I have to insert a little levity right here. RFK Jr.’s mention of autistic children never playing baseball let to some hilarious responses on X, the social media hellsite formerly known as Twitter. If you need to, hit the link just listed and peruse them for a palate cleanser before I move on.
Besides the “useless eaters”-adjacent rhetoric, RFK Jr. is also promoting an old and false narrative about autism. Its key components include the following.
#1. We know almost nothing about what causes autism.
Although no one would claim we have a definitive answer yet, it’s deceptive to portray autism as a totally mysterious black box about which we know practically nothing. In fact, we do know quite a bit about what causes autism. It’s just that antivaxxers and quacks like RFK Jr. don’t like the answers. One reason that they don’t like the answers because not only has science generated huge amounts of data that have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism. Another reason is, as I have been writing about for at least 15 years, science has produced a lot of data and studies strongly implicating a largely, but not entirely, genetic cause. As Daniel H. Geschwind, MD, PhD, Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor of Precision Health in the UCLA Health System and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (DGSOM), director of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), and the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry (who also won a National Academy of Medicine prize for investigating autism’s genetic underpinnings), puts it:
Autism is hereditary and therefore does run in families. A majority (around 80%) of autism cases can be linked to inherited genetic mutations. The remaining cases likely stem from non-inherited mutations.
There’s no evidence that children can develop autism after early fetal development as a result of exposure to vaccines or postnatal toxins.
“Everything known to cause autism occurs during early brain development,” says Dr. Geschwind.
Of course, if you accept the narrative that the cause of autism is totally a black box, not genetic, almost totally unknown, then anything can be a cause and must be worth studying, particularly in light of the next false narrative, that autism is an “epidemic.”
#2. Autism is an “epidemic” (or “avalanche” or “tsunami”)
There is no doubt that observed autism prevalence has been increasing markedly over the last quarter century. Indeed, every few years, when the CDC reports its latest autism prevalence statistics, I’ve been writing about how the antivaccine movement tries to spin the statistics to blame vaccines. Here’s just a sampling, with the year that I wrote the post:
- Autism prevalence: Now estimated to be one in 88, and the antivaccine movement goes wild (2012)
- Autism prevalence: Now estimated to be one in 68, and the antivaccine movement goes wild (2014)
- Autism prevalence increases to 1 in 59, and antivaxers lose it…yet again (2018)
- Autism prevalence increases to 1 in 38, and antivaxxers blame vaccines without using the word “vaccine” (2023)
The most recent ADDM survey that RFK Jr. announced concluded that, among children aged 8 years in 2022, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence is 32.2 per 1,000 children (one in 31) across the 16 ADDM sites, ranging from 9.7 in Laredo, TX (one in 103) to 53.1 in California (one out of 19). Reasonable readers not knowledgeable about autism or how medical conditions are diagnosed might look at this and think: What’s going on there? After all, autism prevalence was reported to be one in 88 just 13 years ago. This is why I emphasize the term “observed autism prevalence,” which I will distinguish between true autism prevalence. One must also remember that there is a difference between incidence, which is the frequency of new cases diagnosed per a given time period (usually one year, normalized to population) and prevalence, which is the frequency of cases in the population overall (normalized to population), diagnosed and undiagnosed, encompassing everyone diagnosed earlier with the condition.
What one has to remember whenever looking at prevalence numbers like this about a condition or disease is that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the true prevalence, but rather the number of diagnoses of that condition or disease divided by the total relevant population. If a condition is underdiagnosed, for example, its observed prevalence could easily increase with increased awareness, better screening, and decreased stigma in the case of conditions for which there was formerly a stigma. In other words
Number of DIAGNOSES ≠ number of CASES
At least not necessarily. The number of diagnoses will only equal the number of actual cases if case ascertainment is 100%; that is, every patient with autism or ASD is being detected and appropriately diagnosed with autism/ASD. Moreover, the number of diagnoses can be affected by the diagnostic criteria, which for a condition like autism and ASDs, have been periodically tweaked since at least the early 1990s. Remember this when RFK Jr. expresses alarm and amazement like this:
The ASD prevalence rate in eight-year-olds is now one in 31. Shocking. There is an extreme risk for boys. Overall the risk for boys of getting an autism diagnosis in this country is now one in 20. And it’s high in California, which has the best data collection. It probably also reflects the national trend, one in 12.5 boys.
This is part of an unrelenting upward trend. The prevalence two years ago was one in 36. Since the first ADDM report in 1990, which was 1992 births, autism has increased by a factor of 4.8, that’s 480% I believe. The first ADDM survey was 22 years ago when prevalence was one in 150 children. In all the core states, the trend is consistently upward.
Before I move on, let me just briefly revisit a couple of examples that I always use whenever discussing autism prevalence. It’s an example of how screening alone can increase the observed incidence/prevalence of a “hard diagnosis” that is based on pathology or a reliable measurement First, let’s look at ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a precursor to breast cancer that is often (and probably erroneously) referred to as “stage 0 breast cancer.” Before 1975, DCIS was a very uncommon diagnosis. Now it is very common. Indeed, back in the early 1900s, DCIS was rare because, by the time it grew large enough to be a palpable mass, it almost always had evolved into invasive cancer. Now, nearly fifty years after mass mammographic screening programs were implemented and forty years after they became standard of care, DCIS is a common diagnosis. Indeed, approximately 40% of breast cancer diagnoses are DCIS, and a recent study found that DCIS incidence rose from 1.87 per 100,000 in the mid-1970s to 32.5 in 2004. That’s a more than 16-fold increase over a 30 year period, and it’s pretty much all due to the introduction of mammographic screening. That’s a similar time period to that which RFK Jr. references with respect to autism, whose observed prevalence only increased 4.8-fold during a roughly similar time period.
Moreover, unlike the case for autism and ASDs, the diagnostic criteria for DCIS remained pretty stable over that 30 year period. Pathologists in the 1970s and pathologists in the 2000s would likely largely agree on what constitutes DCIS looking at a slide of a breast biopsy. The same is true for other conditions. Indeed, thyroid cancer comes to mind, a disease for which increased screening with ultrasound has led to a massive increase in the number of diagnoses of thyroid cancer, the vast majority of which are almost certainly overdiagnosis. Actually, there are issues with changing criteria for the diagnosis of thyroid cancer too. Indeed, diseases for which the prevalence is increasing often involve both increased screening and changes in the diagnostic criteria.
Another example is hypertension. Before the 1920s doctors didn’t routinely measure systolic/diastolic blood pressure ratios; so there were few, if any, cases of hypertension because doctors weren’t looking for it and didn’t know how to easily measure it. (If you don’t measure or look for something, you won’t find it.) Even over the last decade, prevalence of hypertension has increased (for instance, in Canada). Perhaps a better marker for hypertension diagnoses is the percentage of adults who have been prescribed antihypertensive medications, which has skyrocketed since 1950. Of course, over that time, the definition of what constituted “hypertension” has changed markedly, to lower and lower diastolic and systolic pressures, as evidence showed that treating lower blood pressures could prevent premature death, although that trend appears to have leveled off. Amusingly, various denialists lambaste such broadening of diagnostic criteria to claim that hypertension is an “engineered” epidemic. And don’t even get me started on hypercholesterolemia and hyperlipidemia.
Pointing out these basic facts to people like RFK Jr. leads to another common antivax trope from two decades ago, the claim that anyone who tries to explain the increase in observed diagnoses of autism and ASD is an “epidemic denier”:
One of the things that I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that the autism diagnosis, that the autism prevalence increases, the relentless increases, are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria. If you look at Table 3 of the ADDM report, it’s clear that the rates are real, that they are increasing in the last 10 years, beginning with the first one. Year by year there is a steady, relentless increase.
I looked at Table 3 and, quite frankly, was confused. You can visit the link, scroll down, and at it for yourself. (The table is too large to easily just post here.) Nothing in the Table demonstrates that these numbers can’t possibly be due to more intense screening. Indeed, the Table doesn’t show increasing rates of autism; it merely shows a snapshot of observed prevalence at 15 ADDM sites, along with ages of diagnosis and IQ ranges, in 2022. Again, none of this rules out a phenomenon for autism with respect to observed prevalence of the diagnosis like that seen with DCIS, hypertension, thyroid cancer, or any of a number of other diagnoses that have increased as a result of screening and other factors, such as changes in diagnostic criteria.
RFK Jr. then references two very old studies to bolster his point:
The baseline for autism in this country was established with the biggest, largest epidemiological study in history, a study of all 900,000 children in the state of Wisconsin, children under the age of 12. They found 0.7 percent, 0.7 children had autism in every 10,000. That’s less than 1 in 10,000, today we’re at 1 in 31. That study also confirmed the 4 to 1 male to female ratio. There were at that time just over 60 children in Wisconsin with autism, and today it’s around 20,000.
This study was published in 1970. 1970! That was 55 years ago. One notes that this was an exhaustive review of records from “nonduplicated cases coming to attention or under treatment for a five-year period (1962 to 1967) in Wisconsin’s community mental health clinics, state and county mental hospitals, colonies, and training schools.” Again, diagnostic criteria were much different then, and who knows what the case ascertainment rate was? Most likely it was very low. None of that stops RFK Jr from jumping ahead 17 years:
In 1987, there was another exhaustive study, a peer-reviewed study in North Dakota set out to count every child in the state with a pervasive developmental disorder, including autism. That study meticulously combed through every record, every diagnosis, and it even conducted the in-person assessments of the entire population of 180,000 children under 18. The autism rate they found was 3.3 per 10,000. So that’s in line with the 1 in 10,000 that was found in Wisconsin 17 years earlier.
For context, today the last number, 1 in 36, is 83 times higher. In 1987, out of every 1 million kids, 330 were diagnosed with autism. Today, there are 27,777 for every million.
If you accept the epidemic denier’s narrative, you have to believe that researchers in North Dakota missed 98.8% of the children with autism, and thousands of profoundly disabled children were somehow invisible to doctors, teachers, parents, and even their own study. The same researchers who followed the original cohort for 12 years to double-check their number, they went back in 2000 and found that they had missed exactly one child.
Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid. They weren’t missing all these cases. The epidemic is real.
This is the study, and that last bit is a pure straw man argument. No one is saying that doctors and therapists in 1970 or 1987 were “stupid,” any more than doctors who were recommending what were science-based treatments for breast cancer 100 years ago were “stupid.” They were using the understanding of the condition that they had at the time, which, yes, could lead to them “missing all those cases,” at least using today’s diagnostic criteria. Seriously, the incidence of DCIS was very low in the 1970s too!
Moreover, there have been a number of sets of major changes since 1970 in how autism and ASDs are defined and diagnosed. For example, the the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-II (DSM-II), published in 1968, the term autism was used to describe the symptoms of three different conditions: childhood schizophrenia (295.8), withdrawing reaction of childhood (308.1), and schizoid personality (301.2). Interestingly (and not coincidentally for purposes of this discussion), the DSM-IV expanded the definition of autism to include autism spectrum disorders. I said “not coincidentally” because it was during the 1990s that autism prevalence started increasing and also during the 1990s that the vaccination schedule was expanded. As I’ve been describing for many years, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but the science that has shown that vaccines do not increase the risk of autism or ASD has struggled to overcome the antivax narrative that it “must be” the vaccines.
Stephanie Pappas provides a bit more detail about this process in Scientific American:
This period saw a number of changes in how autism was diagnosed, however. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which has lays out criteria for psychiatric diagnoses in the U.S., called autism “schizophrenic reaction, childhood type” in its first edition and subsequently referred to it as “schizophrenia, childhood type” until 1980, when the diagnosis changed to “infantile autism.” The criteria then focused on external symptoms such as delays in language development, resistance to change and attachments to objects. In 1987 the criteria widened and encompassed three categories related to social interaction, communication and restrictions in activities. In 1994 the diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder appeared, only to be subsumed into a broadened “autism spectrum disorder” in the DSM’s fifth edition (DSM-5) in 2013. That year was also the first in which autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder could be diagnosed in the same child at the same time, Estes says. Prior to that time, an ADHD diagnosis would preclude a child from getting an autism diagnosis, even though researchers currently estimate that half or more of autistic people also have ADHD.
She also correctly points out that there might be a genuine increase in the prevalence of autism based on a number of factors, such as the delay in childbirth, as children born to older parents have a higher risk of autism. The point to be emphasized that there is no good evidence to support the massive increase in the true prevalence of autism that justifies calling it an “epidemic” or “tsunami.”
Sadly, RFK Jr.’s expert, Dr. Walter Zahorodny, parrots the same line of argument:
Autism prevalence has increased very dramatically. It’s increased in New Jersey, where we have excellent resources and access to services, and it’s increased in all the states in the network. It’s increased not only by the CDC, but by the Centers for Disease Control and CDC, Adam Network, active surveillance activities, but it’s increased according to federal IDEA statistics and information from a multitude of surveys.
It is a true increase. There is better awareness of autism, but better awareness of autism cannot be driving a disability like autism to increase by 300% in 20 years. That’s what we saw in New Jersey. That’s what the CDC report of yesterday indicates, and that’s what, in my opinion, future reports from epidemiologists will show.
Dr. Zahorodny really should know better. He’s attacking a straw man, just as RFK Jr. did. No one is saying that just “better awareness” is driving the increase in observed autism prevalence. Moreover, one red flag that we are not (yet) measuring the true prevalence of autism is the variability in prevalence reported at the various ADDM sites, ranging from one in 103 at the Laredo site to roughly one in 19 in California. Of course, antivaxxers like to point to such variability as evidence that it must be an “environmental factor,” even though there is no good evidence to suspect such a strong effect. Naturally, RFK Jr. almost certainly believes that it’s vaccines, even though he didn’t mention vaccines once in the press conference, likely a tactical decision. In any event, if you don’t want to believe that the cause of autism is mostly genetic, then it’s easy to make the deceptive argument that you “can’t have a genetic epidemic,” as RFK Jr. does repeatedly during the press conference.
#3. “Environmental causes”
It’s worthwhile at this point to mention that nowhere am I arguing that there can’t be environmental exposures that might increase autism risk. We already have some potential culprits, such as infections that are accompanied by fever in the second trimester raise the risk of autism for their eventual baby. So does exposure to fine particulate matter pollution in the third trimester of development and the first year of life. The problem with pointing to these studies is that the increased risk is modest. For instance, the odds ratio for the first study was around 2-fold; for the second study it was 1.2 to 1.3, not many-fold. Even combined, these would not explain the increase in diagnoses observed. As far as environmental exposures and risk of disease or condition, I like to point out that a long-term smoking history “only” increases the risk of lung cancer around 10-fold, and that’s one of the strongest environment-disease relationships known.
My point is that, given that it’s not even clear that the true prevalence of autism, as it is diagnosed now, using 2025 diagnostic criteria, has even increased all that much and that the observed increase in prevalence isn’t due to a combination of factors, including case ascertainment, diagnostic substitution, more services, and less stigma. We’ve pointed to a number of studies in the past that suggest that, using consistent diagnostic criteria, the prevalence of autism hasn’t changed much, if at all, over the last few decades, and how many factors could impact reported autism prevalence. As Stephanie Pappas also added:
Kennedy downplayed diagnostic shift as a minor explanation for the increase in autism cases, but researchers have found that changes in diagnosis probably explain a majority of the increase. A 2015 study on children diagnosed as autistic in Denmark, for example, found that 60 percent of the rise of autism among children born between 1980 and 1991 was caused by changes in diagnostic criteria and reporting practices. Another 2015 study examined students in U.S. special education programs between 2000 and 2010. The number of autistic children who enrolled in special education tripled from 93,624 to 419,647. In the same time frame, however, the number of children labeled as having an “intellectual disability” declined from 637,270 to 457,478. The shift of children from one diagnostic category to another explained two thirds of the increase in autism in this population, researchers say.
I must admit that I laughed out loud when RFK Jr. cited an EPA scientist who dated the start of the “autism epidemic” to 1989, as well, leading him to implicate (potentially) mold, food additives, air and water, medicines (of course he means vaccines), and maternal ultrasounds, never mind that ultrasounds have been looked at repeatedly as a contributor to autism risk, with a large study finding as recently as 2023 no correlation. Unfortunately, instead of following the science, RFK Jr. will fund studies to reinvent the wheel:
We’re going to issue grants the way that it’s always done to university researchers and others. We’re going to remove the taboo. People will know they can research and they can follow the science no matter what it says without any kind of fear that they’re going to be censored, that they’re going to be gaslighted, that they’re going to be silenced, that they’re going to be defunded, delicensed, and we’re going to give them permission to do this research, and then we’re going to open it up to the research community, and we’re going to task them with certain outcomes, and we’re going to have them come and bid on how to do the research.
This is all being run by Jay Bhattacharya, and I think Martin Kulldorff may be also working on this, on designing the grant proposals. So it’s going to be done by credible scientists, by the most credible scientists from all over the world, and we’re going to do it very, very quickly.
Imagine my relief. Two out of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a “let ‘er rip” approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in the hopes of reaching herd immunity in 3-6 months, while only offering a perfunctory and ill-defined nod to “focused protection” for the elderly and those at high risk of severe disease and death from COVID, will be in charge of this effort. I do note that RFK Jr. did back off a little from his promise to find the cause of autism by September. Heck, the grants won’t even be funded by September; that is, unless the recipients have already been chosen outside of the usual NIH competitive process, something that I don’t discount as being depressingly possible under RFK Jr., with Dr. Bhattacharya as his willing accomplice.
Before I move on, I will note that antivaxxers have noticed how RFK Jr. didn’t mention vaccines at his press conference and are not pleased.
RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, as I have discussed, is a form of medical Lysenkoism that equates health with virtue and purity with respect to diet, exercise, and health habits and lack of health with either lack of virtue or some external “contamination.” It preaches a message that you can make yourself healthy through sheer force of will and virtue that leads to “good behavior,” but does allow for external contamination by pharmaceuticals, the better to push a message that big pharma is a temptation from the straight and narrow path of health virtue. It’s disturbing how much of this is “soft eugenics” in that its emphasis on the “natural” and demonization of vaccines and pharmaceutical drugs also carries the implication that nature—e.g., vaccine-preventable diseases—should just be allowed to cull the “unfit” and that, if you aren’t healthy, it is your own fault.
Which brings me to America’s quack, Dr. Oz, taking over as CMS Administrator.
Do your patriotic duty!
Speaking of MAHA and soft eugenics, let’s take a look at Dr. Oz’s remarks after being sworn in as CMS Administrator:
Just as RFK Jr. echoes “useless eaters” rhetoric of the past as justification for his programs, so, too, does Dr. Oz do the same:
As we entered the the main building, the Humphrey Building, where Health and Human Services is located, there’s a placard of Hubert Humphrey, and it says that it’s a moral opportunity and moral obligation of government to take care of people in the dawn of their life (the kids), in the twilight of their life (the elderly), the mature (seniors), and those in the shadows of life those struggling with disabilities. We want to provide America with access to great care. We want to save the public health insurance programs of this country.
I immediately got the feeling that we’re looking at a “we must destroy the village to save it” argument coming and that the real causes of our problems won’t be addressed. I was not far off:
Now if we’re going to do that you’ve got to be honest with each other. And a physician, President Trump, has to always do that, right? We’ve got to share news—so do Presidents—that folks don’t want to hear, but it’s important for our well-being. So I’m going to give you four bullet points to remember. Bullet point number one—and they’re all numbered in order for a reason—Medicaid is the number one budget item for many states, and it is crowding out education other important social programs. The states are having a big problem and that’s with the federal government paying most of the bill. Item number two healthcare expenditures are increasing at 2% higher, higher than the economy is growing. And because of that we spend more than two times per person on health care than any other country on the planet.
It never occurs to anyone there that much of this could be alleviated with universal health insurance, rather than relying on for-profit insurance provided through employers. That’s just an aside, though. After trotting out the myth, turbocharged by the new FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary in 2016, that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in America (they’re not), here comes the soft eugenics:
What are we going to do? First we’re going to reduce chronic disease. How do you do that? 70% of the health care expenditures of this country are driven by chronic disease. But, and it is your patriotic duty—I’ll say it again—the patriotic duty of all Americans to take care of themselves, because it’s important for serving in the military but it’s also important because healthy people don’t consume healthcare resources. The best way to reduce drug spending is to use less drugs because you don’t need them because you’re healthy. And it feels a lot better as well.
Here we go again. Yes, healthy habits can help you stay healthier, but in the end biology and genetics always win. Healthy habits can help you maximize your health as much as your genetics allow, and that’s a good thing, but one can’t help but hear echoes of “useless eaters” rhetoric in what RFK Jr. is saying, particularly the part about health being important for serving in the military and for not consuming healthcare resources.
Truth be told, I’m rather surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion of the concept of being “healthy” as one’s patriotic duty. Why? There are direct echoes to a society that was more than “soft eugenicist” in nature:
According to Nazi ideology, every member of the so-called Volksgemeinschaft (German racial community) was like a single cell in the larger national body. Each individual had a duty to stay healthy and strong so that the German nation could conquer other peoples and colonize their lands. These theories about individual health and national strength were influential throughout Europe and the United States in the early 20th century.
And:
The Nazi regime urged Germans to adopt healthy lifestyles and personal habits. Like Weimar-era public health campaigns, Nazi health programs pushed the idea of a wholesome and “natural” lifestyle as a remedy for many of the health concerns in modern society. Nazi public health campaigns often promoted the importance of fresh air and nutritious foods, as shown in the 1941 Nazi propaganda film, “The English Disease.” A 1939 newspaper article titled “Nazis Hit Alcohol, Tobacco” records Nazi health leaders’ declarations that rejecting tobacco and alcohol in favor of a “wholesome life” was the “national duty” of all German youth.4
There was one difference, though:
Nazi public health propaganda promoted a return to “natural” living, but Nazi health officials also embraced modern medical innovations to prevent and treat diseases in the so-called “Aryan” population. For example, the Nazi regime organized mass X-ray screenings for cancer, tuberculosis, and other illnesses. Nazi propaganda urged Germans to trust the advice of medical doctors over the “hocus pocus” given by unqualified quacks offering miracle cures, as seen in the 1941 propaganda film on cancer treatment, “One in Eight.”5
Dr. Oz, RFK, and MAHA seem to discourage trusting the advice of qualified medical doctors in favor of the “hocus hocus” given by unqualified quacks offering miracle cures. Indeed, Dr. Oz has a long history of being one of those quacks! Meanwhile, even Dr. Marty Makary, who until now I had considered perhaps the “least bad” of RFK Jr.’s picks, undermining his recommendation to vaccinate children against measles with the MMR by adding how measles is not that dangerous:
Quote:
At the same time we have to be honest about the facts about measles It has a very low mortality rate extremely low There’s almost certainly a underlying coor comorbid condition So again I’m not suggesting that people can skip it if they are healthy but we have to be honest with the data to people and that’s how we rebuild public trust.
Dr. Makary appears to be embracing the soft eugenics of MAHA. I can’t help but wonder what will happen the first time that RFK Jr. demands that approval for a vaccine or vaccines be revoked, and I know that’s coming, probably sooner than you think. No doubt Dr. Makary, his protestations of being science-based notwithstanding, will go along to avoid being fired.
Moreover, leave it to RFK Jr. to provide me yet more quotes consistent with eugenicist views, whether soft or not-so-soft. Yesterday morning, he appeared on a radio show—why is a supposedly good Catholic doing radio appearances on Easter morning instead of being in church?—and once again doubled down:
The health and human services secretary made the comparison during a Sunday interview with billionaire GOP donor John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM’s The Cats Roundtable. Moreover, he claimed that the “pure economic cost of autism” will cost the United States $1 trillion a year in lost “productivity” by 2035.
There you have it again, the purely economic argument, but, believe it or not, it gets even worse:
“Autism affects children and affects them at the beginning of their lives, the beginning of their productivity,” RFK Jr. said. “It dwarfs the COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people.”
A more perfect match between the Great Barrington Declaration’s implication to “let the elderly die of COVID-19” so that the young can go back to work and the economy can get moving again is hard to imagine. Again, notice how he says that autism affects children at the beginning of their lives and at the beginning of their productivity. Why does RFK Jr. keep saying that, or things like that? To MAGA, it’s not about saving lives. Not really. No matter how much RFK Jr. claims otherwise.
Seriously, he can’t help himself. He did it again in the same interview:
“Many of these kids are aging out and their parents worry every day. And I’m talking about people with severe autism, what’s called profound autism, which is about, which is about 26 percent of the total people who are diagnosed with autism,” RFK Jr. alleged. “Those families, those children are non-verbal, they’re non-toilet trained. They have all this stereotypical features of autism, head banging, toe walking, stimming, agonizing gut pain and head banging. Those kids are kids that will not hold jobs.”
He just can’t help himself.
MAHA and soft eugenics, revisited
Once again, when I say that there is a strain of what Conspirituality calls “soft eugenics” in MAHA, I don’t mean that RFK Jr. will be actively killing the “unfit.” What I do mean is that a lot of the language of MAHA echoes that of earlier eugenics movements. Remember, eugenics was hugely influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and wasn’t discredited until after the world saw the results after the Nazis had violently put it into practice. Even then, it never went away. Dr. Oz’s remarks reek of this “soft eugenics” or “social Darwinist” attitude, especially this emphasis first on how taking care of the body is an American’s “patriotic duty,” good for the military, and helpful because it save the government money, rather than on its being about primarily improving the health of the American public.
Indeed, there is an underlying attitude among the antivaccine movement that is such a part of MAHA that “natural” is better and that if a child dies of a vaccine-preventable disease like measles, it’s not because the measles killed the child, but rather because the child was somehow “unfit,” the usual reason being chronic disease, malnutrition, and the like. This makes the death of a child from such diseases sad and regrettable, but, to the antivaxxer, probably unavoidable because, of course, they believe that vaccines don’t work and are actively harmful. Meanwhile, the “correct” parenting, “virtuous” parenting, in which the children are raised the “right” way from a health standpoint (as defined by MAHA) will make the children virtually immune to vaccine-preventable disease and chronic disease. Far be it from me to say that a good diet, lots of exercise, and enough sleep are not important to children. They most definitely are. They are not, however, panaceas, nor are they a substitute for vaccines and modern medicine. Children should have access to both.
Meanwhile, never does anyone in this administration consider the social determinants of health or that universal health insurance would alleviate a lot of the problems. If you want to see the disconnect, just observe how recently the CDC had to decline to help the health department in Milwaukee when they requested that the CDC assist their investigation of elevated lead levels in Milwaukee public schools. You’d think that MAHA would be all over a known, science-based environmental toxic metal like lead, but, no, they fired all the people at the CDC who could help. One can’t help but wonder if this lack of concern stems from the likelihood that it is poorer communities and poorer children in Milwaukee who are most affected by lead exposure. Depressingly, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, the Milwaukee health commissioner, was quoted as saying, “I can’t pick up and call my colleagues at the C.D.C. about lead poisoning anymore.”
One only wonders how long it will be before “soft eugenics” becomes not so soft anymore.