As someone who has been writing about the antivaccine movement, its activists, ts misinformation, and its conspiracy theories for well over 20 years, I have, unfortunately, found myself recognizing the names of damned near every antivax sycophant, toady, and lackey that longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been hiring to stock federal public health positions with, ever since he was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in February. Many of the names have now become familiar, including those formerly not in RFK Jr.’s orbit but who, sensing which way the wind was blowing during the pandemic, fell under the spell of the American OG antivax crank of the 21st century. (In the UK, the OG antivax crank of the 21st century is clearly Andrew Wakefield.). Now, we have people like Jay “let COVID rip!” Bhattacharya in charge of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Marty Makary in charge of the Food and Drug Administration (with Vinay Prasad in charge of vaccine approval), and “America’s Quack,” Mehmet Oz, in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Most of these guys are what I like to call “new school” antivaxxers, who became antivax and radicalized during the pandemic, although Dr. Oz has long flirted with, but not completely embraced, antivax pseudoscience. True, we almost had old school antivaxxer Dave Weldon in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but, oddly enough, his nomination was withdrawn. It is also true that we have David Geier, one of the original antivaxxers whom I used to write about two decades ago, ensconced somewhere in NIH “reanalyzing” data to prove that vaccines cause autism. Now we have Mark Blaxill working at CDC, apparently.
From MSNBC, courtesy of Brandy Zadrozny, He helped build the anti-vaccine movement. RFK Jr. just hired him:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has hired anti-vaccine activist and author Mark Blaxill as a senior adviser, according to three current and former senior CDC officials and an internal profile reviewed by MSNBC.
Neither a physician nor a scientist, Blaxill claims without evidence that every child who takes vaccines is in some way injured, and has written books and articles promoting the disproven claim that childhood the shots cause a broad range of health conditions and that autism is a consequence purely of environmental exposures. Blaxill once helped lead the advocacy group, SafeMinds, which funded research aimed at proving a link between vaccines and autism and served as editor-at-large of the anti-vaccine website, Age of Autism. Blaxill has long and wrongly blamed thimerosal, a preservative in some vaccines, for what he calls an autism “epidemic.” His claims have been refuted by decades of rigorous research. The Institute of Medicine officially rejected any causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism in 2004.
Hoo boy. I’m having acid flashbacks to 2005, as RFK Jr. appears to be partying like it’s 1999 (a few years later, actually).
Mark Blaxill: Another washed up antivaxxer resurrected by RFK Jr. to be appointed as a senior advisor in HHS
As I said: Mark Blaxill. Now there’s a blast from the past! (Also, Blaxill has zero qualifications to “track autism” as a public health scientist.) Unfortunately. Blaxill is what I like to call a general in the mercury militia. Back in the day 20 years ago, there were two main branches of the modern antivax movement. The British branch, as you might imagine, held up Andrew Wakefield as its idol and blamed the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for autism, based on a small case series that Wakefield had published in 1998 linking MMR vaccination to what he called “autistic enterocolitis.” It turns out that the study was fraudulent, which led to Wakefield being “struck off” (having his medical license revoked) in the UK, but he continues to grift to this day portraying the MMR as a major cause of autism and even a potential cause of a mass extinction of humans. (Naturally, since COVID-19, he’s pivoted to that sweet, sweet, COVID antivax grift.) Of note, when President Trump suggested last week during the press conference when RFK Jr. announced that acetaminophen is linked to autism risk based on bad science that the measles, mumps, and rubella components of the MMR should be separated and giving individually because of the risk of autism from the combined MMR, that was an idea straight from Andrew Wakefield, who, coincidentally, was developing his own measles-only vaccine. (Yes, part of his fear mongering about MMR was to build a market for his new vaccine.)
Across the pond in the US, we had the mercury branch of the antivax movement, which many of us used to call the mercury militia back in the day, which believed that the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in several childhood vaccines was The One True Cause of Autism and were inspired by RFK Jr., who started out as the US overlord of the mercury militia. Never mind that thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001 and autism prevalence kept climbing, about as slam-dunk a natural experiment as I can think of showing that thimerosal is not associated with autism. There is, however, copious other evidence that mercury at the doses used in vaccines before 2001 didn’t cause autism, much less an “autism epidemic” or “autism tsunami,” but that never stopped antivaxxers from still bringing it up every now and then. It did, however, lead RFK Jr. to rebrand his antivax group the World Mercury Project as Children’s Health Defense.
In any event, Mark Blaxill was an old school antivax activist solidly in the mercury militia camp, hence my labeling him a general in the mercury militia. Or maybe RFK Jr. was the general, and he is more like a colonel. It doesn’t matter, and my knowledge of military ranks is rudimentary. What does matter is that he was a prominent antivaxxer back in the day and, like so many other antivaxxers, started pivoting from “mercury in vaccines is bad because it causes autism” to “all vaccines are bad because they cause autism” when the natural experiment of removing thimerosal from vaccines failed to cause a dramatic drop in autism prevalence—or even a leveling off. He’s written a number of books claiming a link between vaccines and autism, including The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic with fellow antivaxxer and blogger Dan Olmsted.
I first became aware of Mark Blaxill in 2005 as a result of his activism with the antivax group SafeMinds, noting his penchant for Holocaust analogies referring to vaccination and autism. He was, in fact, on the board of directors of the group. SafeMinds, some of you might recall, started out solidly in the mercury militia camp of antivaxxers. Indeed, one of its most famous publications is an article entitled Autism, A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning, published in 2001 in Medical Hypotheses, naturally. This is why it makes sense that Blaxill was also associated with Generation Rescue and wrote for its blog, Age of Autism, which was a frequent source for my blogging “inspiration” back in the day. Like SafeMinds, Generation Rescue was—is? I’m not sure if it still exists—the antivax group founded by J.B. Handley and his wife and later headed by model and comedienne turned antivax activist Jenny McCarthy that started out blaming autism on mercury in vaccines and later pivoted to the “all vaccines are bad” stance that all antivax groups eventually arrive at, as well as massively downplaying the danger of COVID-19 and fear mongering about COVID-19 vaccines, of course. (The group also appears to have pivoted to a more general “autism biomed” grift about a year before the pandemic.) At Age of Autism, Blaxill wrote posts like There’s a Funny Thing About Evidence: More Support for Autism-Mercury Link whose misinformation, bad science, and pseudoscience I routinely used to lovingly deconstruct back in the day.
If you really want to know how bad an antivaxxer Mark Blaxill is, though, you have to go back about eight or nine years, to 2016 to 2017. Does anyone remember? Does anyone remember a measles outbreak in a certain immigrant community in Minnesota that happened? That’s right, thanks to antivaxxers, including Andrew Wakefield, there were large measles outbreaks among Somali immigrants related to antivax propaganda. You can read what Steve Novella and I wrote about these outbreaks at the time for more details if you like, but the CliffsNotes version goes thusly.
Back in 2008, larger numbers of cases of autism were being diagnosed in the children of the Somali immigrant community in Hennepin County, which led to news stories asking if there was an autism cluster in this community and what might be going on. As you might imagine, these stories attracted the attention of prominent antivaxxers, who blanketed the area. Most prominent among the antivaxxers who made contact with the Somali immigrant community was Andrew Wakefield himself. It’s not clear exactly when Andrew Wakefield first made contact with the Minnesota Somali community, but I do know that Age of Autism was on the case as early as August 2008 and that the founder of the antivaccine group Generation Rescue J.B. Handley published “An Open Letter to the Somali Parents of Minnesota” in which he told them it was the vaccines and that they can’t trust the local health authorities. He even went so far as to urge them to declare a “state of emergency within your community and create a new vaccine schedule for your kids.” Meanwhile, also as early as August 2008, David Kirby had been writing stories like ‘Is Autism an “American Disease?” Somali Immigrants Reportedly Have High Rates.’
I do know for sure from media accounts and triumphant blog posts in Age of Autism that he met multiple times with the community and its leaders between 2010 and 2011 and that he appears to be still intermittently in contact. For instance, here is one contemporaneous account in local media from 2010. It was a time when he proposed as “study” of autism in Somali immigrants and promised to raise funds for it, something he appears never to have done.
Among the antivaxxers making speaking appearances and contacts among the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota was—you guessed it!—Mark Blaxill. From a 2017 story in The Washington Post:
The presentation by anti-vaccine activist Mark Blaxill drew cheers and applause. Blaxill, a Boston businessman whose adult daughter has autism, played down the threat of measles and played up local autism rates.
“When you hear people from the state public health department saying there is no risk, that [vaccines] are safe, this is the sort of thing that should cause you to be skeptical,” Blaxill said.
From MPR News in 2017:
Asia Dahir of Spring Lake is convinced that a measles shot her now 14-year-old son Adam received as a baby is responsible for his autism. No scientific studies have found proof of a connection. But Dahir says parents should make inoculation decisions themselves — and not give in to what she says is “bullying” by the medical establishment.
“If the consequences are greater than the benefits, it’s better to leave it alone,” Dahir said.
Dahir was among 90 people — many of them also Somali-American — who came to a Lake Street ballroom in Minneapolis Sunday night for a meeting organized by five anti-vaccine groups. Their message: autism is the real epidemic, not measles.
For an hour they listened as businessman and vaccine skeptic Mark Blaxill downplayed the risk of dying from measles. Blaxill, whose adult daughter has autism, repeatedly emphasized the purported but discredited link between vaccines and autism. And he claimed public health research on the matter is rife with fraud.
“It is a fact that vaccines can cause autism,” said Blaxill. “That’s not the controversy. The controversy is how many cases of autism are caused by vaccines.”
Not true at all, says Dr. Andrew Kiragu of Hennepin County Medical Center. Kiragu was one of at least three pediatricians who sat in the audience quietly fuming as Blaxill clicked through his Powerpoint slides.
At the time Mark Blaxill spoke to the Somali community in Minnesota, the community was in the midst of another measles outbreak.
I don’t have time to discuss the entire history of antivaxxers targeting the Somali community in Minnesota, and so let’s just cut to the chase. The result of the autism cluster and the resultant targeting of the Somalis.by antivaxxers, including Mark Blaxill, MMR uptake in the Somali community plummeted, and there were multiple measles outbreaks between 2008 and 2017, one of which in 2011 involved 21 children, two-thirds of whom were hospitalized:
effect of nearly a decade of antivaccine propaganda.
When Blaxill addressed Somali parents in 2017, the latest measles outbreak had reached 34.
What has Blaxill been up to lately, though? As of this interview in 2024, Blaxill was chief financial officer of the Holland Center, a “private autism treatment center,” although according to Zadrozny’s report he’s the chief financial officer of a “Minnesota company that buys and sells computer servers and IT equipment.” In other words, for a while at least, if the blog post containing the interview is correct, Blaxill oversaw the finances of a quack “autism biomed” clinic, which makes sense. As an aside, basically the Holland Center offers a combination of evidence-based treatment plus quackery like functional medicine, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and the like. Meanwhile, he echoes the eugenicist rhetoric of RFK Jr. about autism:
Blaxill co-authored a peer-reviewed paper warning of an upcoming “autism tsunami” as autistic children born in the 1990s and 2000s reach adulthood. The paper, published in 2022 in a Springer journal, was retracted and subsequently published in another journal.
“Those numbers are going to keep going up. … Over time, therefore, we’re going to see a cost of disease evolution that’s dramatic and very concerning,” he said.
Early in life, autism is very costly to parents, including mothers who often are obliged to stay home and abandon their careers. “Over time, those costs shift,” he said, as “the parents retire, the parents die.”
“Most autistic individuals in adulthood are unemployed and unemployable … Then they’re going to have to be housed somewhere and they’re going to have to have something to do during the day. Someone’s got to watch over them,” Blaxill said.
He also scoffs at neurodiversity and calls to celebrate autism:
Noting that the CDC stopped referring to autism as an urgent public health concern, Blaxill said Most of what the agency talks about now is, “Oh, let’s celebrate the fact that Black and Hispanic rates of autism are catching up to the white rates of autism, and we’re doing as good a job discovering autism in Black and Hispanic children.’”
Blaxill said that while he wants to celebrate his autistic daughter, he doesn’t want “to celebrate her disability or what happened to her because when I’m gone and when her mother is gone, there will be no one for her.”
“My daughter’s disabled for life. Don’t cheapen that disability by pretending that the fact that you’re a little nerdy makes you autistic. No, it’s not,” Blaxill said.
He also claims that every child who has been vaccinated is injured:
Nice guy. He has zero qualifications to be working in public health, much less in the Director’s office at the CDC. In fact, given his history, you might say he has nothing but negative qualifications.
So what will Blaxill do at CDC?
So Mark Blaxill is yet another old school prepandemic antivaxxer who’s found another career in RFK Jr.’s HHS. But what, exactly, will he be doing? Brandy Zadrozny can’t say for sure in her news report:
Blaxill’s role and remit at CDC is unclear. The internal profile showed he will be working directly under CDC chief of staff Matthew Buzzelli. One of the senior CDC officials said Blaxill’s name had been floated for weeks as a potential leader for a program that tracks autism within the Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
More importantly:
Blaxill’s quiet hiring is the latest in a series of staffing moves by Kennedy aimed at reshaping federal vaccine policy by ousting experts and installing former employees and longtime allies from the anti-vaccine movement.
“So Blaxill will join RFK Jr.’s inner circle,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and a vocal critic of Kennedy. “These are people who believe what Kennedy believes, that want to to promote an agenda, that vaccines cause autism. And so Mark Blaxill will be perfect, right?”
Exactly. What we have is yet another antivax activist and conspiracy theorist with zero relevant qualifications for any job in public health. Seeing Blaxill hired now, after RFK Jr. cronies like David Geier, Lynn Redwood (who, according to Zadrozny, joined the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Office with the title of “expert”) and others, I’m left with a painful question: Who’s the next antivaxxer who’ll be hired by RFK Jr.? The only reason I don’t think RFK Jr. will hire Andrew Wakefield is because Wakefield’s ego is on par with RFK Jr.’s, and two egos that large can’t coexist for long in the same organization, but who knows? I could be wrong.
In any case, RFK Jr. is doing his best to turn the CDC, FDA, and NIH, as well as the rest of HHS, into a tool to use in his quest to eliminate vaccines.