Kennedy's pledge to end the Autism Epidemic draws criticism from the Autism community. A response from Charles Eisenstein

Kennedy's description of people with severe autism results in a backlash of criticism from some in the community. Charles Eisenstein finds a way through it all.

It is an epidemic. At least that is what the numbers say. At a press conference last week, Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. grimly went through the data with the public. The baseline prevalence of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) was approximately 1 in 10,000 in 1987. Today it is 1 in 31, up from 1 in 36 two years ago. Among boys the prevalence is 1 in 20. In the state of California, which Kennedy says has the best data, the prevalence is 1 in 12.

ONE in TWELVE.

Kennedy reported that the majority of the money spent to research this disorder has been directed at genetic causes. While acknowledging that it is plausible that there could be a genetic condition that makes people susceptible to an environmental toxin, attributing the meteoric rise (300 fold in four decades) to genetics is non-sensical. There must be an environmental factor involved. That should be good news. We can get rid of toxins. And we should, at least before we go tinkering with our genes.

That same week at a cabinet meeting Kennedy announced that by September of this year we would know the cause of the autism epidemic in this country. That is a bold statement. Has he seen evidence that the public hasn’t?

Despite the media’s characterization of him as an irresponsible spreader of misinformation and supporter of wild claims that have been repeatedly debunked by “scientists”, Kennedy is a seasoned attorney who, in my estimation, is very careful with his statements. He may not always be right, but he always has evidence that supports his claims. “Show me where I have gotten it wrong”, has been his request to his naysayers. None can and none did though they had ample opportunity to debate him directly. Giving him a platform, they said, would be too dangerous. The public might get the wrong idea because of his logic, evidence, coherence, understanding of the flaws in the counter arguments and willingness to engage with the experts. Indicators that he is attempting to mislead us, apparently.

He has a much bigger platform now, and I will be excited to hear what he has to say at the end of this summer. The problem is that not everyone will believe him, no matter how sound the evidence is coming from an NIH, CDC and FDA if they are under his stewardship. This is especially true of medical professionals, many of whom regard the spectacular turn of events which placed the “antivax” spokesperson at the head of the HHS as a detour in the trajectory of public health in this country. They just need to wait the man out.

As I have written before, Kennedy and the health of our country has already won. Too many eyes are open now. Vaccine hesitancy was on the rise before Bobby took the reins, primarily because of the disastrous handling of the pandemic and the atrocious Covid “vaccines” that were forced upon us. Beyond that, the medical orthodoxy has no substance behind their position that vaccines are not contributing to the rise in childhood chronic diseases. Where are the properly powered retrospective studies that compare unvaccinated children to vaccinated ones? Without them, much of the public won’t ever go back to blind compliance with the CDC’s immunization schedule. There’s a reason why the CDC has never sanctioned such a study. It probably would confirm results like these (taken from a study involving 47,000 children in the FL Medicaid program):

This kind of result would be devastating to the vaccine industry if the media would report on it honestly. Why? It’s proving that the “antivaxxers” have been right. While the contribution of individual vaccines to the risk of autism may be small, the impact of a large vaccine load has not been studied. Of the 47 thousand kids in this study about 1 in 10 were completely unvaccinated, and they had a significantly lower risk of ASD then kids who were vaccinated. The risk of ASD went up with vaccine load—this means there is dose dependency, a hallmark of causality. This was a relatively small study but the p values were very low (less than 0.002 for one vaccination visit and less than 0.0001 for more than one). This means the effect is very real and can be demonstrated very easily, if only one bothered to do an investigation.

Vaccinated children not only suffered a greater incidence of ASD, the study also indicated that they had an increased risk of a spectrum of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDDs):

Compared to the unvaccinated, children who received one or more vaccines had significantly higher risks of having hyperkinetic syndrome, seizures, encephalopathy and tic disorders. They had nearly a seven times greater risk of having a learning disorder. While the study did not indicate how severe these disorders were, it hints at the sobering reality that exposing children to vaccines has deleterious effects on their brains, further validating the link between vaccine load and autism risk. Do the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks? We don’t know. That is why we need bigger and better studies. That is what Secretary Kennedy has been demanding of our health agencies for decades.

The problem for the vaccine industry is that unless there is a problem with the methodology behind this study, these kinds of results cannot be upended by any number of studies that show “no risk”. That’s the way science works.

Instead voices like this one brandish irrelevant references to prove their point to the “antivax liars”:

Copeland is a young post-doc geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine (where I did my medical degree and internship) who has a loyal following on X. He cites this table as proof that “vaccines don’t cause autism”. The table was taken from a oft cited study by Madsen et al, published in the NEJM, which purportedly put the issue around the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism to rest.

First and foremost, this study was published 23 years ago on children observed in the 1990’s. How relevant is it now?

Copeland refers to the data columns that demonstrate that age adjusted relative risk of autism and other autistic-spectrum disorders is not elevated in the vaccinated. The problem is that that the unadjusted relative risk is actually significantly higher in vaccinated children. The unadjusted relative risk is calculable from the number of cases in each group by interval since vaccination. The horizontal line in the plot below is the rate of autism in the unvaccinated—11 per 100,000 per year (53 in 482,360 person years).

Why is the rate higher in the vaccinated between 12 to almost 72 months after vaccination and nearly three times higher in kids 30 months out? We don’t know. The authors never explain their calculations. If this paper was properly peer-reviewed it would have not gone into publication unless the authors explained why the crude risk ratios (plotted above) were significantly higher in the vaccinated cohort but lower after age adjustment. That is the key finding of the study after all. This aberrancy points to a more insidious problem: what are we to do if the peer review process is broken? And why did the editorial board of the NEJM let it slide unless they too were incentivized to publish studies that fit a narrative?

Beyond that, Copeland states emphatically that this study proves that there is no increased risk of autism after vaccination and anyone who claims otherwise is LYING. However the “unvaccinated” children in this study weren’t unvaccinated, they just never got the MMR shot. The authors never report how many vaccines their control group received. Is it possible that Copeland was unaware of this too?

I simply don’t know if people with scientific training are able to read medical literature with a critical eye anymore. Most doctors I know readily admit that they haven’t challenged a study’s conclusions since they were in training, but why would someone like Ian Copeland, PhD be so bold and so wrong—publicly?

Much bigger voices than his have gone off the deep end over the last couple of years. I have written about Dr. Paul Offit and his increasingly desperate (and wacky) efforts to delegitimize Kennedy here, here, here and here. Offit is co-inventor of the Rotateq vaccine and sits on the the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

RFK Jr. faces rebuke for comments on the severely autistic

Things took another twist after Kennedy pledged to find the root cause of the autism epidemic last week. I was stunned to see social media light up with criticism from some autistic communities: Why was the HHS secretary saying there was something wrong with autistic people? How dare he?

The rebuke came because Kennedy spoke of the desperate situation faced by families with a severely autistic child. A quarter of people with autism are considered to be severely autistic: non-verbal, unable to use the bathroom without assistance, no hope of being independent. “They will never be able to play baseball”, he said, “or pay taxes.”

High functioning people with ASD and some of those who support them took offense.

Author Charles Eisenstein penned a response to this new attack on Kennedy’s intentions. I have come to know Charles over the last year and a half. Though our priorities aren’t always aligned, I fundamentally agree with him on all the big topics.

In this essay Eisenstein does what he often does best. He helps us to reach common ground by inviting us to find compassion for the voices who aren’t acknowledged in this emotionally charged contention. He offers some poignant stories from parents of severely autistic children.

These are anecdotes. Anecdotal evidence is what once drove safety concerns. How else would we discover a potential problem? It were the anecdotes that opened my eyes to the concerns of the vaccine hesitant. In medicine we are taught to pay close attention to the stories of our patients before deciding how to proceed. How can a doctor attribute an immediate and rapid decline of a toddler’s neurological state immediately after a series of vaccines to coincidence especially if these concerns are explicitly mentioned as potential side effects by the manufacturer? Where are all the stories of children who suffer similar injuries immediately before a planned visit to their pediatrician? Why has the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund paid out 1.8 billion dollars to 2,400 children during the first 20 years of its inception if these things don’t happen?

Then he encourages us look closer at the most important clue aiding the layperson to decide which set of medical experts is correct about vaccine safety: Counter arguments to the so-called antivax position are often misguided and reveal unmistakable bias. He writes:

“I understand that these anecdotes won’t convince anyone that vaccine injury is real. Maybe if you read hundreds such stories, you would change your mind, especially when you really examine the science that supposedly debunks the vaccine-autism link. Following a pattern that is by no means limited to the pharmaceutical industry, corporations and captured government agencies wage a campaign of propaganda, tendentious science, persecution of whistleblowers and dissidents, and cover-ups. Read this overview of the persecution of Dr. Andrew Wakefield to get a sense of the machinery that keeps reigning paradigms and profits in place. If you want to also look him up on Wikipedia, I’ll save you the trouble. His bio starts with: “Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British fraudster, anti-vaccine activist, and disgraced former physician.” Then, if you dare, read Vax-Unvax or Dissolving Illusions and observe how the critiques of those books touch very little of the substance of their arguments.

“That will take a lot of work. Why would you do that if you already know they must be wrong? Why must they be wrong? Because if they are right then the whole edifice of modern society — its systems of knowledge production, its public institutions, academia, government, and the ideology of progress — must be unsound, for the core medical practice of vaccination is embedded within them. You can’t believe “We got this one item wrong” without impugning the rest of the edifice along with it.

A very moving read:

There is nothing “wrong” with anyone, and…