The Canard of Epidemic Denial

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I am honored to introduce to you Secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

I'm going to go over

some of the key numbers.

Autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate.

In 1987, out of every 1 million kids, 330 were diagnosed with autism.

Today, there are 27,777.

for every million.

Shocking.

This is part of an unrelenting upward trend.

25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are non-verbal, non-toilet trained, and have other stereotypical features, headbanging, tactile and light sensitivities,

stimming, toe-walking, etc.

This is coming from an environmental toxin and somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food.

And it's to their benefit to normalize it, to say, oh, this is all normal.

It's always been here.

The epidemic is real.

There are many, many other studies that affirm this.

And instead of listening to this canard of epidemic denial, all you have to do is start reading a little science because the answer is very clear.

And this is catastrophic for our country.

I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

God, I hate giving the Kennedys any more press than they already get, but did you hear all the stuff RFK Jr.

has been saying and not saying about autism lately?

I find it infuriating how little this man wants to know about actual science, so I reached out to some autistic journalist pals of mine, and they suggested today's guest would be the perfect person to address this.

So my name is Eric Garcia.

I'm the senior Washtick correspondent of the Washington Bureau Chief over at the Independent.

Yes, it's that Independent.

If anybody's watched Ted Lasso, it's the UK newspaper.

Also the author of We're Not Broken, Changing the Autism Conversation.

I mostly cover the White House and Congress.

I covered the presidential campaign a lot last year, and now I cover the Trump administration pretty regularly.

So, and that's kind of how I began writing about Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

and why I was at his press conference last week.

Do you go into that weird, sweaty room, the press room where there's

the briefing room?

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, this goes to the point, like, I,

you know, I prefer covering Capitol Hill to the White House.

Not, you know, just because, you know, I didn't like it during the Biden presidency either.

Like, it's just, it's small and it's cramped, like, being in the one.

And like, you don't really have a lot of free movement in the White House for obvious reasons.

Whereas like with the U.S.

Capitol, you can really kind of go wherever you want.

I've just heard horror stories of like it just the stench of a like locker room.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it is kind of dingy.

It's under renovation right now, but I'm not optimistic.

It's going to be gross.

Okay.

So can we start with a little bit of your backstory?

Sure.

Yeah.

What do you want to know?

Well, I want to know where your personal

relationship to what RFK is talking about comes from.

Well, I was born to borrow from my friend John Marble.

I was born too.

Yeah, well, so the point I'm trying to make is: contrary to what Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

says,

autism is genetic.

It is something that's passed down from the parents.

It is not something caused by vaccines.

And, you know, so what was interesting, and I've talked about this a lot.

I'm an ADA baby, which is to say that I was born the year that the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, 1990.

And

I think that's really instructive for how I look at the world because I haven't grown up with a world where my rights weren't codified.

But at the same time, having your rights codified and having them enforced are two very different things.

Say more about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, so the point that I'm trying to make is that, you know, if you think about it, autism didn't get a separate diagnosis from schizophrenia until 1980.

Oh.

Really?

Yeah.

In the DSM.

Okay.

And then Osperger's syndrome was not included until 1994.

Because it was for girls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

yeah.

Well, like, you have to remember, like, initially, Hans Osberger didn't even believe that girls could be Autistic.

He changed his mind over time.

But, like,

so

to take that into account.

So, you know, it's funny because

all this stuff was being implemented, you know, in the same year, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed

which you know mandated that schools accommodate and provide not just all disabled students but specifically autistic students with a free appropriate public education so that just meant that these things were all coming together and the law was being implemented while I was growing up

and it wasn't you know look I'm a political journalist you know once I saw the effects of policy

uh I i couldn't stop seeing them right you know right were they mainstreaming by the time you got into elementary school they were they were mainstreaming at the time yeah by the time i got to elementary but like i would still get like sent off like to do like you know like for like an hour a day like an hour like three times out of the week i'd be taken over to like the special ed center you know and i'd get my i'd get my supports or like i'd get the you know the assistance or the tutoring or whatever and like i remember like you know because like I have dyspraxia as well which affects motor skills like my teacher would cut this cut paper with the scissors but but but but the reason why I'm saying this the reason why my the backstory is all important is because

I didn't think is that like when I started out in journalism

I didn't really disclose a lot that I was autistic not because I was ashamed or anything like that but just because I don't know if I could say this um I didn't think it was anybody's fucking business no say that you know say it again

My feeling was like, it's none of your fucking business.

So I don't want people to

pry into it.

You know, I'm a, believe it or not, I'm a very private person.

Everything about me is on a need-to-know basis.

Yeah.

uh when i go home like you know i go to work and i go home those are two very different things to me you know it's funny now that like i'm a public figure and i'm a media figure now like a lot of people i think uh believe that they're that they're entitled to parts of my personal life that they just aren't right but the the point being is that this is a long way of saying that like I really didn't want to write about it.

And it wasn't until 2015, I was working at a publication called National Journal.

It was a great time.

I was writing about economics and trade and politics.

What happens?

But then I go to a party and this guy by the name of Tim Mack, who is a great reporter, he's now in Ukraine.

He offered me a drink and I said, like, oh, I don't drink because I'm on the autism spectrum and the medicine I take doesn't mix with alcohol.

He's like, oh, there's a lot of autistic people in Washington, D.C.

You should write about that.

And it was funny because this is the first time that

somebody took me seriously.

And Tim's a friend.

I love Tim a lot.

And like, and I kind of blew it off because my feeling was I didn't want to write about that.

Then what happened was when I was working at National Journal, they decided to shut down the print edition of the magazine.

A lot of people were leaving.

My editor, the editor of the print magazine, a guy by the name of Richard Jost, who I adore, he said, like, I just want the most gopher broke stories.

Pitch me whatever, because I'm going to be out of a job at the end of the year.

Sure.

And so I pitched that story.

And initially, I wanted it to be kind of a, you know, like the secret lives of autistic people in DC.

Kind of like a chatty, you know,

one of those insider DC pieces, you know, like these people don't know they're working with an autistic person.

They're kind of stealth.

Like, and like, you know, I think a lot of people feel like, oh, well, like autistic people have such a difficult time socializing.

So like, how do you get by in like a city like Washington, D.C., you know?

And you're like, well, I happen to know that we're more common here.

Yeah, but like also like very difficult with a lot of difficulty.

Yeah.

Like, you know,

and God love Richard.

He wasn't satisfied with that.

And he shouldn't have been.

He was like, why does this piece need to exist?

And I said, like, well, I think that we need to focus more on autistic people living better lives instead of trying to cure them.

And that was really the beginning of me writing about that.

So I wrote this piece.

It was like 6,500 words.

It got published on my last day at National Journal.

I opened up my phone and my phone is unusable just because people are just sharing and my phone's blowing up.

And then that was the beginning of me writing What Would Be Come, We're Not Broken.

And all the while this was happening, this is in 2015,

Donald Trump begins running for president.

And in the Republican primary debate, he's asked about autism and he's asked about vaccines and has passed tweets about it.

As president, you would be in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, both of which say you are wrong.

How would you handle this as president?

Autism has become an epidemic.

25 years ago, 35 years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close.

It has gotten totally out of control.

And we've had so many instances, people that worked for me just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.

Dr.

Carson, you just heard his medical take.

He's an okay doctor.

Okay.

Should he stop saying it?

Should he stop saying the vaccines cause autism?

Well, you know, he can read about it if he wants to.

I think he's an intelligent man and will make the correct decision after getting the real fact.

Mr.

Trump, as president,

Trump is Trump and he lies.

Look, we know, we know now he lies about everything.

But the

other thing was like, they asked Ben Carson about Trump's comments.

And look, Ben Carson, whatever your thoughts are about Ben Carson, he's a pediatric neurosurgeon.

Yeah, he's a doctor.

Yeah.

He's a doctor.

He's a doctor at Hopkins, you know?

So like the fact that he kind of gave Trump a pass was

A, kind of emblematic of what would come

in the future of the Republican Party.

But B, it was also just like it showed how so many people, they needed to kind of like cater to that wing of the American electorate.

And the funny thing was that, like, you know, look, I grew up in Southern California.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so like my feeling was like, hey, look, like, okay.

Trump is a Republican.

He's an unconventional Republican, but he's a Republican nonetheless.

But like, I grew up in Southern California, and I know a lot of yoga bombs who vote Democratic and probably voted for Hillary Clinton and believe the same thing he does.

You know, like they don't want to put toxins in their kids' bodies or things like that.

Right, right.

And so my feeling about it was like,

if this is what our politicians are talking about when it comes to autism, what are they overlooking and how does that shape policy?

Because politicians are only as good as the information that they receive, right?

And so that was kind of the beginning of, to me, like, did how do these bad ideas around autism

shape autistic people's everyday lives right and what would happen if we did something different and we kind of the whole reason why i called it changing the autism conversation is i kind of wanted to move on from that what's funny about it the real kind of irony about all this is i only i don't i didn't mention robert f kennedy jr once in the hardback edition of the book.

I only mentioned him once in the paperback edition of the book.

And it was talking about COVID vaccines.

But people clearly read your book and went, oh, we got to ask this guy about what's going on.

Yeah, yeah.

But like

the point being, but like the point being was like, if you read the book, you notice that like I only talk about the autism vaccine thing really early on in the book.

And it was because I wanted to establish that this has been debunked.

We've known that this is not true for years.

So

let's start this discussion by establishing that that is not real.

That that's not real.

So we could talk about bigger stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, we've had, we've done, I don't know, three or four episodes already, I think, on like Andrew Wakefield and my friend Anna Merlin, who reports on this and wrote this book called Republic of Lies,

which

yeah, it's a great book.

I have to admit.

Before we move on, I have to admit a little bit of jealousy, which is that you're saying that you had the opportunity to hide your autism.

We live in a patriarchy and there's just no way for me to disguise it, really.

So, yeah, I mean, but like, that was, that was kind of the point.

Is that

like, I wanted to not spend so much time talking about this.

Right.

Right.

Because I felt like it was already, I was like, look, there's bigger stuff to discuss.

Let's, let's move on.

So, why aren't we moving on?

The reason why

that myth is so potent,

even though, look, you know, as you, as you guys have gone through, like, Andrew Wayfield lost his medical license.

He was a very unethical practitioner.

And who's the new guy?

Yeah, David Geyer, I believe his name is.

Yeah, the new guy is David Geyer.

He also doesn't have a medical license, I believe.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So like these guys were,

they've been discredited, but like, I think the reason why is that autism is still seen as something to be feared.

Autism is still seen as something to be scared of.

And that, you know, like if you listen to like what RFK's comments were last week, you know, he painted it in very apocalyptic colors, you know.

And, you know, he said that they'll never hold a job.

They'll never play baseball.

They'll never go on a date.

They'll never write a poem.

Never write a poem.

Yeah.

Like.

Can't use the toilet on their own.

Greatest resource, which are children.

These are children who should not be suffering like this.

These are kids who many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they're two years old.

And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date.

Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.

And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children

and i want to be clear like yes there are autistic people who are going to need high supports for the entirety of their life like like i don't want to be flippant about that sure and at the same time the thing that i want to really establish is that you know earlier today i was checking my instagram and you know i i use instagram a lot because i feel like it's a great kind of uh weather vein for how parents uh feel about autism because there's a lot of content creators and moms.

And the amount of

parents of autistic kids, including the quote unquote severe autism folks, the ones who say that like, oh, you know, there's regular autism and then there's severe autism or, you know, the other term profound autism, you know, like even they are furious about this.

And that was what stood out to me was that, was that like, they were, is that, look, they, you know, a lot of those folks don't like me you know

but i think that they recognize that this kind of rhetoric is seriously dangerous uh it's not a personality quirky issue everything has changed for the individual with autism and while there's a wide range of expression it does change the family and it does inevitably change the community and the society in which we find it that treats their kids like a problem

rather than a group of people with specific needs that need to be addressed.

Right.

And I think that's why his words hit such a nerve.

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Well, going back to the feminist part, and maybe this has nothing to do with anything, but, you know, it wasn't until 1998 that we like did an autopsy of like, like a clitoris, 1998, like we didn't care.

We did studies on healthy white boys and men.

Yeah.

And

all the literature that was out before 2000 was on healthy white boys and men.

And I feel like the

opening up of,

you know, grants and funding for for looking in other areas has taught us a lot.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah,

so

that's the point I was trying to make is that like, so RFK Jr.

talking about how the new numbers, the new CDC numbers show that it's one in 31.

The ASD prevalence rate in eight-year-olds is now one in 31.

Since the first ADDM report, which was 1992 births, autism has increased by a factor of 4.8.

The first ADDM survey was 22 years ago when prevalence was one in 150 children.

The report he was referring to is called the prevalence and early identification of autism spectrum disorder among children aged four and eight years.

And long short of what it does is that every two years it monitors, it puts out numbers about

autism diagnoses for children between four and eight years old

in the last two years.

And then it monitors it.

And so the conclusion, I'm just gonna, I have the report up in front of me.

So I'm just gonna quote straight from it, if that's okay.

Great.

It says that like differences in prevalence over time and across sites can reflect differing practices in ASD evaluation and identity and availability and requirements that affect accessibility of services.

such as meeting financial or diagnostic eligibility requirements.

So you got to have good insurance.

Yeah, well, like take into account that, you know, in the past, even when you controlled for Medicaid, like when a white child and a black child were both on Medicaid, there are other store studies about this, that like the black child will still get diagnosed with autism later than the white child.

The point, and then, you know, because they're not being sent to a specialist quickly.

Right.

They're not being sent to a specialist.

They're immediately pathologized as having like a behavior disorder.

Right,

You know, and this is to say nothing of ASD in or autism spectrum disorder, as it's called, you know, in Hispanic communities or communities where English is a second language.

So, like in AAPI communities or African immigrant families, you know, what was ironic is RFK Jr.

talked about like how this is especially prevalent in boys.

There's an extreme risk for boys.

Overall, the risk for boys of getting an autism diagnosis in this country is now one in 20.

But if RK has just done the research, the basic bare bones research, he would have seen that if anything, we're still under-diagnosing girls.

Yeah.

You know, like, but that goes back to what I'm saying.

Like, we don't do studies on girls or people of color.

Well, like, I mean, but like, you know, how many, you know, I'm sure you've had people on this show.

Like, how many autistic women don't get diagnosed until their sons are diagnosed?

You know, right.

Yeah.

Because it's genetic.

yeah, it's genetic, and also like because

society and social norms dictate that women are supposed to be quieter and supposed to be more demure, and supposed to, and so as a result, because these kind of fixed gender roles, right, girls just kind of get overlooked.

Because a girl who, I don't know, can name the

uh can list the entire track listing of every Taylor Swift album, and uh, you know, or or no, no, no, no, like, I'm not, I'm not.

I'm laughing at myself when you say that.

They're going to get, they're just going to be seen as like, oh, that's a, you know, a quiet, nerdy teenage girl who likes horses and Taylor Swift.

And that's going to be seen as very different from the boy who likes Hot Wheels or Roblox and

trains and trains, you know, which is funny.

You know, I should just say I'm autistic and I like both Taylor Swift and trains, but that's that's a whole that's a whole other thing.

But like the the

point being is like we finally are looking in the right corners and RFK is misunderstanding that.

He's yes, that's that's that's what I'm trying to say is our is that we're looking where we needed to look where we hadn't looked before.

And RFK is fundamentally misunderstanding it.

You know, it's funny is that the first major autism study in the United States was done by a guy by the name of Leo Conner at Johns Hopkins University, which is about an hour, two hours out from where I live in Washington, D.C.

And what's funny is that the first study that he did, all of his subjects in that first autism study, eight of the 11 kids were boys, three of them were girls, nine out of them were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and two of them were Jewish.

So,

but like what's funny about it, if you know the history of Baltimore back, like I've thought about it, it's like wait, Baltimore in the 1930s and 40s was not

it was italian it was polish it was jewish it was uh it was irish you know uh but but like you know guess who could send their kids could afford to send their kids to johns hopkins university to be evaluated because it was upper class white yeah so the point that i'm making is that rfk's fear-mongering you know that those statistics should be a sign for a science working and you know for all of the uh you know despite what elon musk says, our research universities and our researchers in the United States are still the envy of the world.

And, you know, numbers like this are proof positive of that.

And I think, second of all, it should lead to these questions of like, okay, we know that there are these numbers.

What do we do next with this?

How do we serve these people?

Like, how do we make sure that when they become adults, that they transition to adulthood in the right way, or that Medicaid is fully funded, or that uh vocal vocational rehabilitation courses are are fully paid for you know

and we haven't even had a good um nationwide discussion about like the best way to help folks with autism yeah exactly i mean i think there's like great disagreement around you know if it's a behavioral therapy or all of that hasn't even happened yet yeah no yeah and i mean that that's the point is that like this vaccine discussion is really a distraction from the real legitimate discussion, the real legitimate debates.

You know, it was funny.

It was last week after RFK made his remarks.

Yeah.

One of the fascinating things was to me was that the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and the Autism Women, Autistic Women, and Non-Binary Network, and groups for like Autistic People of Color and all that, they all put out a joint statement with Autism Speaks.

What?

And like, I was just like, do you recognize?

Yeah, they put out like

whoops.

Sorry.

You kind of united all of these warring factions.

All these warring factions kind of came together in such a unique way.

And it was because, like,

I almost kind of joke that it's like, look, we're going to have these debates.

We don't want RFK Jr.

to have these debates.

Let us just fight this out on our own.

Right, right, right.

Well, but that brings me to

an important question.

So I feel like the Kennedy family, including John F.

Kennedy himself,

has a history of hiding their diagnoses, disabilities, etc.

And the biggest story out of that is that John F.

Kennedy and Robert F.

Kennedy,

their sister Rosemary, was basically disappeared from the family.

Yeah,

I wrote about this a while back.

And I think that that being RFK Jr.'s aunt, I don't know why he has l he doesn't have more sympathy but maybe it's just well we'll like well yeah well like you know ironically enough it did kind of have the opposite effect with his uncle ted

you know who co-authored the americans with disabilities act yep uh you know his aunt eunice kennedy shriver started the special olympics

You know, John F.

Kennedy, you know, President Kennedy was very dedicated to getting people with disabilities out of institutions.

Even his father, Robert F.

Kennedy Sr., when he was a senator, famously exposed

the Willowbrook Institution

in New York, you know, where like, you know, the people with intellectual disabilities and disabilities as a whole were just living in like, just living in their own shit.

I visited the state institutions for the mentally retarded, and I think particularly at Willowbrook that we have a situation that borders on

a snake pit and that the children live and built.

But many of our fellow citizens are suffering tremendously because lack of attention, lack of imagination, lack of adequate manpower.

There's very little future for the children or for those who are in these institutions.

Both need tremendous overhauling.

I think all of us are at Paul.

It's long overdue that something be done about it.

But let's talk about that because that's where Rosemary ended up.

So if you don't mind explaining for us, like, what happened with her?

Yeah, so what happened with Rosemary Kennedy was Joe Kennedy, RFK Jr.'s grandfather and President Kennedy's father

eventually just decided to send her to an institution, I believe in Wisconsin, but don't quote me on that.

And then essentially opted to have her lobotomized.

Yep.

She had anoxic brain injury, apparently, as a baby,

which is not uncommon.

Right.

But she was fully functioning in terms of like able to write a poem and go to the bathroom.

Like,

you know, but then apparently she suffered from, in terms of what was written at the time,

feeblemindedness and nymphomania and a few other symptoms that were mostly placed on women or given to women.

And then her family had her lobotomized.

Yes, correct.

And it went slightly awry.

Yeah, exactly.

The fascinating thing, you know, and I wrote a call about this from this NBC like about two years ago.

And like, you know, initially, Joe Kennedy gave, so Joe Kennedy was the one who gave approval for what was believed to be the first lobotomy in the United States performed on an intellectually disabled person.

And, you know, what was

he saw it as this thing to be ashamed of, you know, because like Joe Kennedy Sr.

wanted to have his family, they were Irish American and they wanted, you know, this Irish American family to be seen as the same as like wasps, essentially.

Yeah.

And the royal family.

Yeah, the royal family.

And in many ways, you know, look, my, my, my stepdad is Irish Catholic.

Like, my God, the Kennedys are royalty.

And, you know, you know, to a lot of Irish Americans, even my dad, who's a Republican, admires.

John F.

Kennedy.

My mom, my goodness, my mom's a moderate Democrat.

Oh, my God.

You know, the Kennedys are, as you said, they're royalty.

When the Botomy didn't quote unquote fix her then uh she was sent to the st coletta school for exceptional children in wisconsin and eunice kennedy shriver said she didn't know about rosemary's whereabouts for more than a decade i think eunice didn't visit her for 20 years until something like that yeah joe never visited her yes after the lobotomy and then 20 years later once he had a stroke eunice felt like she was allowed then to go visit her daughter yeah correct she felt that she felt like she had the she had the ability to yes or she she she had the capacity to and then there was also you know jfk himself had health issues that were hidden he had addison's disease yeah yeah he had addison's disease yeah and you know but but like weirdly enough like i've joked in the past that uh or said only half jokingly that

Rosemary's siblings really spent a lot of their time trying to pay for the sins of their dad.

So, you know, John F.

Kennedy signs the Community Health Act, and he wanted to cut the population of people in mental health hospitals by half.

You know, John F.

Kennedy, ironically enough, was one of the people to sign the Vaccine Assistance Act in 1962.

So what happened to RFK Jr.?

What's his, where did he go?

It really, if you're listening to him, it really, he really comes through

his activism on the environment and trying to understand food allergies and recognizing that vaccination, you know, is somewhat tangentially tied to food allergies, as far as I understand.

And so that really begins him down the rabbit hole.

And like,

if you're an environmentalist, if you're like, if you're a certain type of environmentalist, that isn't too much of a leap, if you know what I'm saying.

But I also feel like

is his genetic disorder that he,

because he comes from this family of politicians, that he just has to hitch his wagon to something?

well like i mean i think the thing of it was was that when you know when his father was assassinated you know he did have a very traumatic childhood you know he obviously dealt with substance abuse you know and far be it for me to criticize somebody's past on substance abuse you know and i have admiration for anybody who gets sober or who tries to get sober because that could very easily be any of us You know, what was interesting is that the generation after the initial Kennedy generation, like a lot of the kids had a lot of troubles, but like they also like they often all tried to find something to latch on to, like a cause to latch on to.

You know, Carrie Kennedy is really the leader of her, you know, the Robert F.

Kennedy Human Rights Center, or Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who was lieutenant governor of Maryland and ran for governor.

You know, Joe Kennedy III, you know, who is RFK Jr.'s nephew, he became a congressman.

Like, you know, in the Kennedy family, it was seen as like, even if you don't run for office, like public service was seen as a noble calling and a no like almost almost divine.

So I think that his disposition, like him finding something like the environment was something that like he felt he could do some good in.

And he did do some good, like with cleaning the Hudson River.

You know, the fascinating thing about RFK Jr.

is if he had just stuck to the environment, he would be seen as carrying on his father and his uncle's legacies on the environment and protecting the planet.

People forget at one point, uh, Barack Obama thought about making RFK Jr., I think, his EPA administrator or something like that.

So,

but like, again, like, think about how different things could have been.

Yeah.

But, like, what would happen is that he puts up this article in salon.com called Deadly Immunity, and it's also co-published in Rolling Stone.

And immediately, it's riddled with errors and fact-checking issues.

And then ultimately, they had to retract it.

And it's about the vaccines and vaccinations.

And again, like, I think that

if you are a certain type of environmentalist, that's not too hard of a leap to make, which is if you believe and it's true.

Look, is it true that major corporations pollute our waters, pollute our oceans?

Like, I grew up near Flint, Michigan, south of Saginaw, cancer clusters all over the place,

you know, and that would be something noble to address.

They don't even care about drinking water in that area, you know, but

precisely.

Yeah.

And so it's not that hard hard of a leap because, like, what the way that, like, some profiles, my friend Brandy Zadronzny has written about it, it's like, you know, he would be talking to people about the earth and about the planet.

And then every once in a while, someone would come up to him and mention autism and the vaccines.

So, it's not the most illogical step is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah,

I get the logic of that step, but but I don't get the logic of

read a fucking paper, dude.

Like, just read

a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, well, like, I think, I think that, like, if you are already predisposed to saying that, like, okay, government agencies are predisposed to regulatory capture, and which again is true,

you know, that the government often provides special treatment for pharmaceutical companies.

Again,

true.

Yep.

You know, it's very easy to make that leap.

And we've spoken on this program about the Quaker Oats radiation studies where they

gave babies irradiated oats to see what would happen, or

the Tuskegee study.

Like, there's a lot of wrongdoing, obviously, but that doesn't negate the science that's been done.

Yeah.

And I think about this in the framing of, like, as a journalist, it's actually like a great framing through a media story.

It's like these are concerned parents who are fighting the drug company.

So, like, the framing works really well.

And I think that's why the narrative around vaccines and autism was so compelling.

Because, take into account, like,

this was after we had just disposed of the idea of unloving mothers causing autism.

Yeah, it's always our fault.

Yeah, but like, but so, so, like, think about like the guilt that it put on parents for a long time.

If someone came up to me and said, actually, your kid's autistic because of the doctor and not because of you, I'd be like, Yes,

yeah, yeah, it is such a

salve and it's such a relief, yeah.

Uh,

and that you know, you combine it with like the vaccine panic really begins when you see these autism numbers go up because of the IDEA and the ADA that I mentioned, yeah, it creates this kind of moral panic, and there's this there's this misperception that this is being caused, that there's this epidemic, right?

You know, when really it's just better detection.

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Did you know that Andrew Wakefield had a patent out on a single measles vaccine before he

was like, he was like, the MMR causes autism, but my M

is going to be great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, so

he had a vested financial interest in this, didn't he?

Yes.

So, so, so, like, the point that I'm trying to make is that, like, it was kind of this apotheosis and nexus of all of these different things coming together at the same time.

And it's funny because, like, I talk about this all the time with like my family and friends.

I first stumbled across the anti-vaccine thing when I was like a teenager and it was on CNN and Larry King was interviewing Jenny McCarthy.

Oh boy.

And like, and I was like, hey mom, did I get vaccinated around the time that I got diagnosed?

And my mom was like, what are you talking about?

You know, everyone gets vaccinated.

And I tell that story to be very, very specific, that it's like, I'm almost kind of glad that for all of the issues that living in that time came with before there was a lot of information.

I'm almost kind of glad that I got diagnosed and I kind of grew up in that time because it was before the advent of the internet and before the internet became like an essential part of everyday life.

And before Jim Carrey and Jennifer.

And Jerry McCartney.

Yeah.

And before the internet became really a cesspool of misinformation, you know?

Do you still pledge to have answers by September, or is that going to be the beginning of this process?

And are you open to following the science regardless of whether it confirms some of your expectations or not?

Yeah, I mean, we're going to follow the science no matter what it says.

And

we will have some of the answers by September.

What do you think RFK's September plan is?

Yeah, so you know, Trump essentially tasked him with trying to find out what's up with this, you know, this epidemic and vaccines or whatever, and to come up with like results by September, which, you know, I joke all the time that like if RFK really wants to know what's up with autism, all he needs to go is go to the NIH and save all the studies that Elon Musk hasn't cut.

But

but uh

but

but but like, you know, it's impossible to do that within what five months?

So, you know, what worries me about this,

you know, we're joking a lot about this.

We're having fun.

But like, the thing that I worry about the most is like, look, you and I are high info.

We're sickos.

We enjoy following this stuff.

But like for the average everyday person who their kid just got diagnosed or they're trying to get IEP accommodations or

whatever, if they see on TV the health and human services secretary say this,

even if it is somebody who works for Donald Trump, even if it's a Democrat, there's this expectation that government data are accurate.

That he's that he's drawing upon.

That he's drawing upon expertise, that it's not just him.

I remember around COVID, like there was a lot of talk about like, oh, would you take the vaccine under Donald Trump?

And I was like, sign me up, man.

I'll go get vaccinated in a Trump golf course, man.

These agencies are supposed to be seen as nonpartisan.

So even if, you know,

you know, for any issues that people might have with Donald Trump, they should be able to trust their government on this information and this data.

And so what I worry about is that just him having this perch gives credibility to these ideas.

Right.

Right.

That's what I'm worried about as well, is that it like he's in charge.

Yeah.

And he's, he's espousing clearly disproven theories about the origins of autism.

And then this promise that he's going to find the environmental cause.

Yeah.

And that worries me a lot because does that mean that we don't vaccinate anyone anymore?

Yeah.

And then we all just have polio?

Yeah.

Or like, you know, I mean, and I think we should also take into account the Department of Health and Human Services is a sprawling bureaucracy.

I'm sorry for being like wonky.

No, yeah.

But like, I'm talking like, like this includes the CDC, which is like tracks infectious disease, tracks pandemics, is our main,

is almost on the front line of combating the pandemic as we saw during COVID.

This is the NIH, which is the biggest financial benefactor of autism research, not just in the country, but arguably the world.

This is Medicare and Medicaid.

And they also work in conjunction with all of our kind of emergency services like FEMA and

they're everywhere.

FEMA, the Pentagon.

It determines, you know, when I mentioned Medicare and Medicaid, I'm talking about

what are the kind of treatments and therapies that are covered under insurance.

Yeah.

RFK is in charge of that now.

Yeah, like this is a huge bureaucracy.

This is a huge, huge government entity.

And he has a lot of discretion.

Like, I don't think people recognize how much discretion he has as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

And meaning that he could say to Medicare and Medicaid, oh, we are no longer covering such and such treatment or vaccines or

the exact opposite, which is that he'll mandate

coverage for like, I don't know, like collation therapies or like

that's where you're supposed to, that's where when people have mercury poisoning, correct?

Yes, correct.

Yeah.

Metal poisoning, yes.

Yes.

And they, and, but, but, but that's meant for acute cases, not, not just

a kid who chewed on a windowsill for a second.

Yeah, exactly.

But like, I mean, but like, that's the point that I'm trying to make is that it is he has the ability and the discretion to reallocate billions of dollars

with a B, you know.

To his crusade.

To his crusade, correct.

Yes.

Yeah.

You know, that's the point that I want to make.

You know, him promoting this information from his perch is in and of itself bad, but it is also the authority he has vested in it through that

agency.

Besides recommending chelation therapy to detoxify folks, are there other things that he could do to change our health nationally?

Well, well, like, I mean, I don't know if you saw yesterday, Jay Bottachario, who's now the head of the NIH, was talking about like collecting health data of autistic people.

So like that's something that we would have to take into account.

Bottachari says that new data would allow, this is from CBS news, new data will allow external researchers picked for Kennedy's autism studies to study comprehensive data with broad, quote-unquote, broad coverage of the US population for the first time.

The NIH says, he said, the idea of the platform is that existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain.

The NIH itself will pay multiple times for the same data resource.

So, basically, it's going to create like this centralized hub for sharing information about autism.

So, HIPAA's done.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, they're saying like a swathe of confidential medical data to link together for the first time.

So like that's what that's what Bonacharya said.

Why don't they understand that that's what research studies are?

I mean, I'm not saying you understand you would know the answer to this.

Yeah, no, no, I mean, I know it, but like, you know, the point being is that, like, I mean, well, Bonacharya was also like the COVID fringe person on the fringes with COVID.

Yeah.

So like a lot, I mean, it's important to recognize a lot of these folks gained prominence during COVID-19.

And then it's important to to recognize that a lot of the covid conspiracy theorists gained you know cut their teeth in the autism vaccine pitch

why would he want to basically violate hipa and compile health data from folks who have been diagnosed as autistic rather than

spend money continuing very fruitful research and studies that are done ethically.

Yeah.

Well, like, I mean, I think that to them, this is the way that they can look into the epidemic and why the numbers are so high.

Yeah.

But,

I mean, and again, it's a complete disregard for the actual research and the actual study and science.

There are real legitimate things that we should be looking at when it comes to autism.

For example, like I think something like a third of all Autistic people will develop epilepsy.

And look, epilepsy can be deadly.

Yep.

Right.

Yep.

You can die from seizures.

You know, heart disease is one of the biggest killers of Autistic Poole without intellectual disability, followed by suicide.

We should be focused on, you know, what are the best long-term care and support services that Autistic People.

Yeah, the fallout is immense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like, this is going to take away really crucial resources when we have such limited time.

I really appreciate you giving us your time.

And I find this endlessly fascinating and something that we'll keep returning to because

I like science.

Me too.

I'm a big fan of science.

Same, same.

But Eric, again, thank you so much for giving us your time.

Thank you so much.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Thank you.

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