OARacle Newsletter

On February 13, President Donald Trump established through executive order the Make America Healthy Again Commission with a charge to investigate and address “the root causes of America’s escalating health crisis, with an initial focus on childhood chronic diseases,” including autism. He selected Robert Kennedy Jr., who was recently confirmed by Congress as Secretary of Health and Human Services, to lead the commission.

According to an article in Disability Scoop, the commission’s initial focus will be on chronic allergies, asthma, autoimmune disease, fatty liver disease, obesity, and attention deficit disorder/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in addition to autism. The order requires the commission to produce a strategy to improve the health of the nation’s children within 180 days.

Danielle Hall, director of health equity at the Autism Society of America, took issue with the ambiguity of the Commission’s goal as it relates to autism, saying in the Disability Scoop article that “autism is not a chronic disease, it is a complex developmental condition, and any federal initiative addressing autism must be grounded in scientific evidence, and the lived experiences of autistic individuals and their families.”

In that same article, Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, credited Kennedy for wanting to study autism’s causes so that treatments can be developed based on biology. She went on to say, however, that the “key is we can’t let the discredited vaccine hypothesis become a distraction. That question has been answered.”

Kennedy is known to be an anti-vaccine crusader, as noted in a recent NBC News article, who founded an anti-vaccine nonprofit and prominently upheld the false notion that vaccines cause autism. During his confirmation process, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, a polio survivor, spoke out against Kennedy’s claims, noting that he would “not condone the re-litigation of proven cures” and faulted Kennedy for “a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions,” as reported in Disability Scoop.

In fact, Kennedy refused to admit that there is not a link between autism and childhood vaccines during his confirmation hearings. A dozen organizations, including the Autism Society of America, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities and The Arc of the United States, put out a statement ahead of the hearings stating that vaccines do not cause autism.

He also wrongly said that autism rates “have gone from 1 in 10,000 … and today in our children, it’s one in 34,” according to an ABC News article. The article also noted Kennedy’s claims have been repeated by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. In 2000, approximately 1 in 150 children in the United States were diagnosed with autism compared with 2020, during which one in 36 children were diagnosed, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ABC News article said that it was “unclear where Kennedy got his 1 in 10,000 statistic.”

Zoe Gross, director of advocacy with the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, noted in the NBC article that the autism diagnosis was still evolving in the ‘60s. She held up Willowbrook as an example of how those with developmental and other types of disabilities were once hidden from society. “If you look at the video of the conditions that the people in Willowbrook were in, you’ll see the people that RFK Jr. describes as having been missing through his childhood. And you’ll see where they went, where they were forced to go,” Gross said.

A fraudulent study conducted in 1989 gave rise to the myth that vaccines cause autism. The study posited that measles, mumps, rubella vaccine caused intestinal inflammation, which, in turn, led to the development of autism, as ABC News described in its article. Its leading researcher, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license after an investigation into how he had conducted the research, as noted in a 2019 Vox article.

More than a dozen high-quality studies have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism, the Vox article reported.

Sherri Alms is the freelance editor of The OARacle, a role she took on in 2007. She has been a freelance writer and editor for more than 20 years.