Never Mind Bird Flu, RFK Jr.'s CDC Is Going To Study If Vaccines Cause Autism, AGAIN
Spoiler, they don't.
Vladimir Putin would love it if America was crawling with disease, and is surely thrilled that it’s already happening! Bobby Brainworms, the guy who told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” is leading HHS now, the parent agency of CDC.
Surprise, measles are already becoming great again! There’s at least 237 cases confirmed and two deaths so far, in Texas and New Mexico. Cases of measles have also been reported in Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York City, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington too. Measles vaccine rates have fallen below the 95 percent that provides herd immunity, and Idaho’s rate is all the way down at 79.6 percent. Making America red again! With polka dots!
And that’s not all Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s been up to. The Centers for Disease Control now says it is seriously planning to study, AGAIN, if there is any link between vaccines and autism. For real, it is not just Bobby blather any more. “The rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” said Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
There’s a WHOLE LOT wrong with this! We already know what, exactly, is happening. The diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder has widened and become better known, so it is being diagnosed more often. Back in the old days, the only word we had for those kids was weird.
Also, there’s a notable correlation between autism and older parents, older fathers in particular, and parents have been getting older. About 80 percent of cases appear to be from an inherited genetic mutation.
For another thing, millions of your tax dollars have already been put to work in dozens of studies and meta-studies of studies searching for a potential link between vaccines and autism, and there is not one, hello wasteful spending, hello DOGE! (Ha ha, just kidding, DOGE is not looking for waste.) It would be less redundant to study the effect of astrological signs upon the four humors. Then there’s how Health and Human Services has been a target of the administration’s drunk-money funding freezes, and is in chaos of firings and rehirings, which is a fucking mess not conducive to studying anything.
And there’s a big fat ethical problem. Every vaccine on the schedule has already been studied in randomized trials, and to do a study would require a control group. No ethical researcher is going to run a study where a placebo group of babies is denied vaccines that have already been proven, millions of times, over decades, to be lifesaving.
And for this placebo group you would need to find a large-enough population not affected by herd immunity. Where would that be? Elon Musk’s colony of spawn on Mars? Let’s say all those parents sign their children up for this study. Still, a long-term study of outcomes, of the retrospective-cohort variety, would take decades. Kind of like the decades of studies of millions of children that we already have.
And/but, Bobby has already decided what the outcome will be, VACCINES BAD, and that is not how studying things works. If the dozens of studies that already exist won’t convince him, what kind of study would? Someone should ask him!
Where this “study” talk is actually leading to no one knows, but it sure sounds like a cooked-up pretense to not have Medicaid cover vaccines any more, or as a way to take money from schools. Donald Trump has already threatened to pull funding from schools and colleges that require COVID vaccines, even though since May 2024 no state has required that. Legislators in Montana have proposed a bill to ban mRNA vaccines entirely, full of insane claims like “mRNA vaccines have caused enormous numbers of deaths, disabilities, and serious adverse events [...] may integrate into the human genome and be passed onto the next generation [...] are contaminated with DNA, metallic particles, and other unknown nanoparticles.”
Anyway, now would be a good time to get yourself and your kids vaccinated for all of the things. Because one thing’s for sure, these people are out of their brainworm-munching minds!
[New York Times archive link]
Great article, Marcie. I would only add that the original autism/vaccine link was based on MADE UP DATA by a Andrew Wakefield who was trying to pitch his own vaccine. Let me repeat - THE DATA WERE MADE UP. There was never, ever any link between autism and vaccinations. None whatsoever. Fuck RFK.
“ The diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder has widened and become better known, so it is being diagnosed more often. Back in the old days, the only word we had for those kids was weird.”
Back when I was in middle school, nearly fifty years ago, there was a girl who we were told was “emotionally disturbed”. I can’t be certain, but I’d imagine she’d be diagnosed as autistic today.
EDIT: I think she'd be considered pretty severely autistic, too -- she could speak, but it was very difficult, and she'd occasionally curl up in a fetal position. She disappeared from our school mid-year; I'm guess she was sent to a "special" school.