RFK Jr.’s Autism Investigation Offers Americans ‘False Hope’

Plus: Failing at the ballot box is the fastest way to a promotion.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

A KEY GOAL of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda is to get to the bottom of what is driving the rise in autism diagnoses in children and adults. He and his followers have for years falsely claimed it is the byproduct of vaccinations.

“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said during a White House cabinet meeting last week. The causes of autism have been studied for decades. For anyone, let alone a person with no scientific or medical training, to claim we will be able to divine the true cause of autism and counteract it on a timeline of months is the height of hubris.

Dr. Peter Marks, the recently forced-out director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told CBS in an interview last Friday that Kennedy’s timeline is preposterous.

“If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly?” Marks said. “I don’t see any possible way.”

“There are people, probably, who are hearing me now who know that I cared for leukemia patients for a significant number of years,” Marks added. “Giving people false hope is something you should never do. . . . You can be incredibly supportive of people, but giving them false hope is wrong.”

In a Fox News interview, Kennedy declared that “an environmental toxin” is causing the high rates of autism, and he is enlisting all the scientists he can to determine precisely which one:

We’re gonna look at vaccines. We’re gonna look at everything. Everything is on the table: our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic. It is an epidemic. Epidemics are not caused by genes. Genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. So we know that it is an environmental toxin that is causing this cataclysm.

Among the things Kennedy declared were back “on the table” are several hypotheses about the causes of autism that have long been discredited by the medical community. For instance, in a 2015 article for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Dr. Mitzi Waltz, an autism researcher, discussed the history of blaming what Kennedy called “different ways of parenting” for producing autistic children. “Radical behaviorists saw infants as a ‘blank slate’ onto which behavior was imprinted through infant-parent interactions,” she wrote, which gave parent-blaming—and specifically mother-blaming—new academic cover starting in the 1970s.

“The costs of continued mother blaming are high, and not only financially. Encouragement to heroics”—that is, expecting autistic children to receive “full-time, ‘professional’ autism parenting” from their mothers—“can cause direct physical harm to autistic people,” Waltz wrote. She continued:

Psychological damage may also occur, both to wrongfully guilt-ridden parents and to people with autism, who get the message that they are “sick” or even, since some extreme therapies carry fatal risks, that having autism is a fate worse than death. The extreme focus on child saving also contributes to a lack of services for autistic adults: if you believe your child can and should be cured, that becomes the goal rather than fighting for inclusion, services, and support in partnership with disabled adults.

“For the sake of people with autism and their families, we need to do better,” Waltz concluded. But why do better when you can instead put parent-blaming back “on the table”?

BUT HYPOTHESES ABOUT the causes of autism aside, Kennedy’s basic characterization of the problem depends on flawed assumptions. A 2005 article in Current Directions in Psychological Science outlined three reasons people who use the term “epidemic” to describe the rise in autism diagnoses are wrong:

They are unaware of the purposeful broadening of diagnostic criteria, coupled with deliberately greater public awareness; they accept the unwarranted conclusions of the M.I.N.D. Institute study [a flawed 2002 paper that received widespread attention]; and they fail to realize that autism was not even an IDEA [Individuals With Disabilities Education Act] reporting category until the early 1990s and incremental increases will most likely continue until the schools are identifying and serving the number of children identified in epidemiological studies.

The “epidemic” framing is not harmless. President Trump responded to Kennedy during the cabinet meeting where the HHS secretary described his September goal. “There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this,” Trump said. “If you can come up with that answer, where you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it.” The idea that “maybe it’s a shot” must have pleased members of the anti-vaccine movement Kennedy long led. And Kennedy’s framing of autism as an “epidemic” downplays an actual epidemic that is killing Americans with a vaccine-preventable disease.

So far, three people have died in Texas amid a rampant outbreak of measles, one of the worst seen in the United States in decades. In an interview with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group Kennedy founded and led for years, Peter Hildebrand, the father of one of the children who died in the Texas measles outbreak, defended his decision not to give the MMR vaccine to his daughter. Asked directly by a CHD interviewer if he has any regrets, he said he has none at all.

“From here on out, if I have any other kids in the future, they’re not gonna be vaccinated at all,” Hildebrand said.

TO GET A BETTER SENSE of the dynamics of this story, I spoke with Eric Michael Garcia, a fellow Capitol Hill reporter who works as the D.C. bureau chief of the Independent and is the author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation.

“What I worry about, and what a lot of other people worry about, is this idea that measles is somehow worse than having autism. Measles is a deadly disease,” said Garcia, who is autistic.

Autistic people have a lot of co-occurring conditions. A lot of autistic people die from epilepsy. They die of epileptic seizures, a lot of them; heart disease and suicide are the biggest killers of autistic people without intellectual disabilities. Autistic people with intellectual disabilities have a lot of other major things that are big killers. A lot of autistic people with intellectual-ability disabilities, their life expectancy is only around 30 to 34 years.

So I’m not diminishing the real needs that autistic people have. In fact, I argue that we need more money to research them. But autism isn’t deadly. It isn’t going to kill you like measles.

Both vaccines and autism are incredibly complicated subjects. The claim that they are causally linked, with the former giving rise to the latter, has been thoroughly studied for decades, and the strong medical consensus is that it has no merit. Meanwhile, Kennedy has spent his career claiming a link between the two while ignoring research that contradicts his narrative.

Since being confirmed by the Senate to become America’s top health official, Kennedy has put deeply consequential actions behind his arguments. He has moved to quash further vaccine-related research—both the kind having to do with combating diseases and the kind that helps us understand how to cultivate public trust in treatments for preventable illnesses. Kennedy did rile his fans when he gently advocated for the MMR vaccine recently, but with each followup and new interview, he has since undermined that position.

But this behavior was widely expected of Kennedy even before Trump first announced his nomination to lead HHS. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kennedy held events catering to the conspiracy theorists and his loyal supporters on this very issue. In his own Senate confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge prior studies and medical consensus on vaccine safety, a sop to the movement he used to lead.

All this to say: Let none be surprised by Kennedy’s moves now, nor by the ones he’ll likely make while getting to the bottom—rock bottom, you might say—of this issue.

Failing up

Donald Trump 2.0 has given rise to a hot new fad: failing up. In 2024, a total of seven House Republican incumbents lost their re-election bids. (Remarkably, the GOP majority in the chamber was narrowly preserved anyway.) But instead of casting aside these failed candidates, Trump has given a majority of them plum positions inside his administration.

The most notable is former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), a one-term representative the Senate confirmed to lead the Department of Labor. In addition to Chavez-DeRemer, Trump tapped three other single-term Republicans for administration positions.

Trump nominated Reps. Brandon Williams to serve as under secretary for nuclear security, Anthony D’Esposito to be inspector general for the Department of Labor, and Marc Molinaro to head the Federal Transit Administration. These guys all hail from Trump’s former home state of New York.

The remaining three ex-House Republicans who have yet to be called up for administration gigs are former Reps. Michelle Steel, Mike Garcia, and John Duarte. All of them are from California; only Duarte is a one-termer like the New Yorkers.

Trump has also appointed other political losers to administration jobs, including Arizona’s most variously failed political personality, Kari Lake, who is now abetting the destruction of Voice of America while working at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA; Washington’s 3rd Congressional District back-to-back Republican loser Joe Kent, whom Trump nominated to serve as director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and the failed North Carolina attorney general candidate (and former House Republican) Dan Bishop, who works as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Livin’ large, Marge

As I noted in last Thursday’s edition of Press Pass, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a spending spree as the stock market crashed last week, making more than a dozen purchases with a combined value that could exceed a quarter-million dollars.

It turns out that Greene was calling more trades than anyone realized. A new financial disclosure shows Greene conducted almost twice the number of trades she first reported, and her new pickups include shares of Apple and Tesla. In total, Greene added 21 purchases to the 19 she had disclosed earlier in the month. She also sold between $50,001 and $100,000 in U.S. Treasury bills.¹

Greene’s financial behavior as the market tanked has been a major focus of Democrats who suspect foul play among Trump’s inner circle.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) at an Idaho rally Monday night. “How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off of that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering? No more. We can’t accept it.”

The normally pugnacious Greene provided one reporter a statement in which she claimed that all of her transactions are above board. As she wrote to Tia Mitchell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I have signed a fiduciary agreement to allow my financial advisor to control my investments. All of my investments are reported with full transparency. I refuse to hide my stock trades in a blind trust like many others do.”

In any case, Greene owes the person managing her portfolio an enormous debt of gratitude. According to Newsweek, her net worth “ballooned from around $700,000 before taking office to an estimated $22 million today.”

In an Instagram post on Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called for action.

“It’s time to ban stock trading by sitting Members of Congress,” Jeffries wrote alongside an image of Greene. “And hold these Crooks, Liars & Frauds accountable.”

Jeffries’s endorsement of a ban on congressional stock trading is the first of its kind by a sitting party leader in the House or Senate.

1. Treasury bills are short-term investments. They are not to be confused with longer-term Treasury bonds, which investors have been dumping as uncertainty about the United States’ long-term stability has grown.