So recently somebody brought to my attention that Robert Kennedy Jr, nephew of John F Kennedy, is running for president. My first thought was, “good, someone other than Trump or DeSantis might be the next president”. And I can see why at first glance he might be an appealing choice. He’s a Democrat, and while I’m not a fan of the Democrats, they’re, eh, a little less evil than the Republicans, which isn’t that hard to achieve all things considered. And I can understand how for many people, there might be a lot of appeal in the fact that he’s the nephew of one of the most popular US presidents of all time.
But this was before I looked into the guy and, would he be worse than Trump or DeSantis? I don’t know, that’s like asking would you prefer to be shit on by a woodpigeon or a rock dove pigeon. But I’ll say this, I believe if Robert Kennedy Jr becomes president, it might well reverse the progress made on autism acceptance made over the last twenty years or so.
Here’s an episode of the Club Random Podcast, hosted by Bill Maher. If anyone doesn’t know Bill Maher, he’s the king of saying things like, “I’m not against vaccines, I’m just skeptical”, so he can backpedal if things don’t go his way. Stop being a coward and own the fact that you’re an anti-vaxxer! Sorry about that outburst, but Bill Maher irks me something fierce. This episode is 2 hours long, so I’ll just tell you that the points I want to talk about start at 40 minutes in:
In this episode , Kennedy claims vaccines are responsible for an “exponential growth in autism”, and claims that it changed from only 1 in 10,000 people “having autism” in his generation, to one in every 34 in his kids’ generation.
To be clear, this claim, “why are there so many of terrible minority group now, there were so few in my generation” has been applied also to gay people, to trans people, and even left handed people. Could it be that society got more tolerant (comparatively speaking) and now minority groups are able to openly be who they are? Could it be that the science of autism, for all the major, major problems it still has, has gotten better, and now autism is easier to diagnose? I was diagnosed at age 25, in 2010, so I was not successfully diagnosed with autism before then, despite taking vaccines before then. Maybe the evil vaccines gave me late onset autism!” And I know more than a few people who were diagnosed with autism later in life. By golly, it must all be late onset autism, mystery solved! I don’t think anyone has tried to claim there is any such thing as “late onset autism” yet. So, ironically, I’m the first it seems. Am I better at coming up with crackpot autism theories than Robert Kennedy Jr is?
I would say that the idea of vaccines causing autism has been debunked, but this would be to claim that it was ever “bunked”, whatever, “bunked”, means, it the first place. Perhaps a more appropriate phrase is “not even wrong”, a phrase attributed to the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, known for his, we’ll say, lack of sensitivity or tact.
The idea of vaccines causing autism was popularized by Andrew Wakefield, he produced a paper citing only 12 children, where children who had received the MMR vaccine were autistic. Aside from the fact that I’m not sure that all of these kids were autistic, even if all of them were, well, getting the MMR vaccine was quite common, using this logic you could find a link between the MMR and left handedness, the MMR and having freckles, the MMR and being tall, whatever you want really. But somehow, this paper was published in the Lancet, an extremely well regarded medical journal. The paper was retracted, but unfortunately, retractions are often not well remembered by the public, so the damage was done. Here’s a short Vox article that details the history of this debacle:
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/17057990/andrew-wakefield-vaccines-autism-study
Note that this article was published in 2019, so things were about to get far worse for vaccine pseudoscience! But if you’d like to do a deeper dive on this topic, I can’t recommend the following enough, this video essay by Hbomberguy:
And Brian Deer’s book, The Doctor That Fooled The World. Brian Deer has conducted very lengthy investigations into Andrew Wakefield’s pseudoscience, and for me this book is invaluable for learning about Wakefield’s lies:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52527565-the-doctor-who-fooled-the-world
I am deeply worried about the fact that a man who is promoting the idea that vaccines cause autism might well be arguably the most powerful man in the world soon. And I don’t think we can say he’s too much of a dangerous incompetent to be let anywhere near the White House, remember 2016? The idea that vaccines cause autism treats autism as if it were a horrific illness, like cancer, or AIDS. If you think that’s an exaggeration of how people with bad ideas about autism view it, check out this video from Autism Speaks, the world’s premier hate group against autistic people, no I didn’t mean to say that, I meant to say autism advocacy group of course!:
Vaccines do not cause autism of course, but think of what it means if a parent is convinced they do. What they are saying is, “I would rather my child have the measles, which kills people, then autism, which does not.” A deadly disease is preferable to having a child that has my neurotype. And this kind of anti-autism bigotry does not just cause irreparable harm to the autistic community, it causes harm to everyone. An unvaccinated neurotypical child is in danger of getting the measles. An unvaccinated dyslexic child is in an equal amount of danger. An unvaccinated ADHD child is in the same level of danger. This kind of disgusting pseudoscience, while it hurts the autistic community and is a large factor in why I went into denial about my autism status until I was 35, is a danger to people of all neurotypes. It risks the health of people of people of all neurotypes.
I understand why the American people might be tempted to vote for Robert Kennedy Jr. Biden is not an inspiring president, his main appeal is that he’s somebody other than Trump. You’ve got Desantis pedalling the usual far right drivel, and of course, Trump is running again. So I can understand how a Democrat who’s the nephew of one of America’s most beloved presidents might sound like a really good choice. But the damage done by the anti-vaccine movement has taken a long time to undo, and we’re still not even close to undoing it, and I do believe the election of Robert Kennedy Jr could undue all of the progress we have made on that front overnight.
Note, when I first put this blog post out, I said that Robert Kennedy Jr was JFK’s son, but he’s actually his nephew. Sorry for the initial confusion on this, some very bad research on my part!
Ponderings Of An Autist 