“[H]ead-banging, football helmet on, non-toilet trained, nonverbal.”
This is how President Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has described the millions of Americans who are on the autism spectrum.
He was talking to fellow conspiracy trafficker and mega-podcaster Joe Rogan in 2023, when he repeated a line of argument he’s made many, many times. “I bet you’ve never met anybody with full-blown autism your age,” Kennedy said to Rogan, and proceeded to describe them with the callous, cartoonish, demeaning, stigmatized, inaccurate, and dangerous way that he did.
He often starts this way, insisting that childhood vaccines must cause autism because he didn’t know any severely autistic children when he was growing up, and doesn’t know any now.
To say this amounts to “science,” and in particular the kind of science a man in charge of our nation’s health should espouse, is obviously a joke.
There are millions of adults with autism now, and always were — most were misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and institutionalized during Kennedy’s childhood. Furthermore, “full-blown autism” is not an actual diagnosis or medical term.
But as Kennedy attempted to answer questions from senators Wednesday at his confirmation hearing about his questionable beliefs on everything from vaccines to COVID to abortion to food science, the autism community in particular watched with a personal interest.
That’s because Kennedy has harangued and harassed this community for years, pushing baseless conspiracy theories, dangerous lies, and degrading rhetoric onto anyone who will listen.
He’s described autism — a spectrum of developmental disorders that can manifest in all kinds of ways — as a “catastrophic tragedy…which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families.”
As a parent in this community, I can tell you we are not destroyed, nor shattered. Autism is not an affliction nor a catastrophic tragedy. It is a super power. We’re not ashamed of our kids — they’re thriving in a world of science-based treatment and education that has them conquering challenges and learning at their absolute best. They are killing it.
But the thought of a person who spreads the kind of dishonesty, quackery and junk science that Kennedy habitually does — especially about our precious kiddos — is nothing short of stomach churning.
Of course, I’m not alone in my concern and disgust.
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network urged the Senate not to confirm Kennedy, warning that in pushing fake “autism cures” and anti-vax pseudo-science, “Autistic people, the disability community, and the nation’s public health will all suffer.”
In a statement, the group was pointed:
“Kennedy has described autistic people in insulting ways meant to inspire fear, saying that ‘their brain is gone’ and that the purported effects of vaccination are ‘a Holocaust.’ By working to prevent childhood vaccination, he effectively communicates the message that living as an autistic person is a worse fate than dying of measles or pertussis.”
Likewise, the president of Autism Science Foundation, Alison Singer, said this:
“I fear that parents will think we don’t have the data that we do — from dozens of studies — and will withhold life saving vaccines from their children. Withholding vaccines will do nothing to reduce the chance that a child is diagnosed with autism, but will absolutely increase the chance that a child could contract and die from a vaccine-preventable disease. Vaccines save lives, period.”
Kennedy’s own family members have begged the Senate not to put him in this position of influence and power over our health.
On the eve of his hearing, his physician niece Kerry Kennedy Meltzer released a cache of private emails between the two, in hopes it would send a message.
In them, she shares with Kennedy her experiences working in the ICU during COVID, telling him she watched too many unvaccinated people needlessly die — to which he responded by challenging her hospital and the CDC’s data.
His cousin, Caroline Kennedy, also wrote a scathing letter to senators this week, calling RFK Jr. a “predator” who was addicted to attention and unfit to be in charge of the country’s health.
Three other family members wrote a letter back in 2019, calling Kennedy an “internet doomsayer” who “helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.”
This is all frightening enough — and as the hearing revealed, his bogus theories about AIDS, Lyme disease, and a slew of other public health issues make clear Kennedy is no friend of facts or science, and therefore should be utterly disqualified from HHS secretary.
But especially when it comes to autism and vaccines, it’s absolutely imperative: keep Kennedy away from our kids.