Tag: anti-vaxxers
At First HHS Press Conference, Kennedy Enrages Autism Families With Falsehoods

At First HHS Press Conference, Kennedy Enrages Autism Families With Falsehoods

Conducting his first press conference as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. moved swiftly to demonstrate yet again why he is so unfit for that critical cabinet post.

In one of many egocentric abuses of his newfound power, Kennedy has directed his department’s resources away from vital research on cancer and Alzheimer’s, among other major diseases, initiating instead a massive effort to discover an environmental cause of autism – which reflects his own obsession more than sound science.

But leaving aside the gross mismanagement of HHS, the National institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the many other agencies whose capacity for good he is rapidly destroying, Kennedy went out of his way on Wednesday to stigmatize the autistic children he is supposed to be helping.

"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,” Kennedy intoned, gravely and inanely. “Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

This broad-brush smearing of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder was both damaging and grossly inaccurate. There is a reason why scientists and doctors use the word “spectrum” to describe what is a very broad category that ranges from those who require intensive care and assistance to those who are fully autonomous and indeed display extremely high levels of intellectual capacity and talent in many fields.

Perhaps Kennedy should have a word with his fellow Trump henchman Elon Musk. Americans have at least vaguely understood the wide variations in autism ever since the tech zillionaire revealed his own childhood diagnosis on various platforms, including a monologue on Saturday Night Live and a TED talk. For all his egregious faults and fascistic inclinations, Musk does appear able to toilet himself and to get a few dates. He may or may not be able to write a poem but produces an alarming number of deceptive “Xeets" on his social media site X.

As for Kennedy himself, there will be much more to say about his grimly incompetent and ruinous stewardship of the public health institutions that his family – and especially his late uncle Sen. Edward Kennedy – helped build into exemplars of American greatness.

For the moment, let’s note that contrary to his suggestion, millions of autistic human beings around the world and in America go to work every day. They contribute to society by creating value in myriad ways, the least of which is their payment of taxes. They go on dates, fall in love, nurture families, and some of them not only can hit a baseball but are top athletes, including an Olympic snowboarder and a Division One basketball player. (I happen to know an autistic young woman who was the star of her Little League softball team.)

While acknowledging that some autistic kids are burdened with the disabilities recited by Kennedy, let’s also note that the great majority of our autistic fellow Americans, unlike him, have never lapsed into heroin addiction for a decade or more; never peddled narcotics to fellow students; never serially betrayed their spouses with humiliating adulteries; never abused animals in public displays of weirdness; never injected themselves with overdoses of steroids; never profited from lethal disinformation about a pandemic; and never, ever blamed their own bad conduct on a hungry brain worm. He has prospered and risen the same way he avoided prison and got the medical care he needed, strictly by accident of birth.

The more we learn about Kennedy, who has veered further and further away from his once-illustrious career as an environmental advocate, the less there is to admire. Were his story not so sad, Bobby Junior would be a classic caricature -- the buffoonish nob whose inherited wealth and status catapulted him into a position for which he lacks essential knowledge, experience, and character.

Now he has showed us again how Trump cheated the nation by elevating him to this position of trust, at the expense of vulnerable children and their families.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. He is the author of several books, including The Raw Deal: How The Bush Republicans Plan To Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

David Geier autism

RFK Jr. Hires Weird Anti-Vax Activist To 'Analyze' HHS Data On Autism

The Department of Health and Human Services has hired anti-vaccine activist David Geier to analyze government data in search of thoroughly debunked links between immunizations and childhood autism.

Geier, who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology, has spent decades pushing discredited theories linking vaccines to autism. Geier and his father Mark Geier have long been known for peddling bad science, with the scientific journal Nature even naming them among the world’s top science deniers in 2010.

More than a decade ago, Geier was charged with practicing medicine without a license, while his father’s medical license was suspended for treating autistic children with the reckless “Lupron protocol,” which involves a drug used to treat prostate cancer and in chemical castration of sex offenders.

Geier’s new role within HHS signals another win for the anti-vaccine movement—and a loss for public health.

“This is a worst-case scenario for public health. It’s a slap in the face to the decades of actual credible research we have,” Jessica Steier, a public health researcher who leads the Science Literacy Lab, told the Washington Post.

Despite having his access to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revoked in 2004, Geier will now be given multiple sets of CDC data on vaccine safety.

During HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearings, Democratic lawmakers highlighted his inadequacy to lead the country’s public health agencies.

Now, his mismanagement of the ongoing measles outbreak, unconscionable reductions to the federal health services workforce, and hiring of Geier prove that he is a danger to public health.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

How RFK Junior's Farcical Campaign Betrays The Kennedy Legacy

How RFK Junior's Farcical Campaign Betrays The Kennedy Legacy

When a neophyte named Edward Moore Kennedy first ran for the Senate in 1962 at barely 30 years old, his primary opponent delivered a debate quip that still echoes.

"If your name were Edward Moore," cracked Ed McCormack, then Massachusetts attorney general, "your candidacy would be a joke." Ted Kennedy won that primary, ascended to the Senate, and then spent a lifetime winning over skeptics with hard work and liberal commitment.

But that harsh zinger could score a bullseye on a different target now: Uncle Teddy's errant nephew Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., the grifting anti-vax lawyer and conspiracy monger whose campaign for president of the United States should be a joke — and certainly would be if his name were merely Robert Francis.

The difference is that RFK Jr., seeking public office for the first time, isn't 30. He is 70, a senior citizen, with a long and checkered record whose bright spots are overshadowed by menacing darkness. Far from upholding the values his family represents or the legacy of his martyred father and uncle, Bobby Jr. is an opportunist whose ambition, greed, dishonesty and arrogance have led him far astray.

There was a time many years ago when, as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy did useful work — usually under the tutelage of wiser heads — after he emerged from the drug addiction that followed his father's murder. At one point, I even wrote an admiring magazine profile of him.

But not too many years later, Bobby began the deceptive anti-vaccine campaign that has marked his moral and intellectual decline ever since. Having authored articles claiming childhood vaccines cause autism, he clung to their refuted arguments and falsified data long after the magazines were forced to withdraw them. He insists those lies are true to this day — and the anti-vax propaganda from which he profits is leaving American kids vulnerable to disease.

How would his late uncle John F. Kennedy, whose memory he so often invokes in his current campaign, react to what Bobby has done? In 1961, President Kennedy worried that resistance to the polio vaccine, which was still rather new, meant millions of schoolchildren might contract that deadly and crippling virus.

At a press conference that April, the president said: "I hope that the renewed drive this spring and summer to provide vaccination for all Americans, and particularly those who are young, will have the wholehearted support of every parent in America."

The following year, JFK pushed through the Vaccination Assistance Act, which financed immunization drives in every state for polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. That massive campaign established the federal government as the central authority in establishing and coordinating immunization policy for the nation — a role Robert Kennedy Jr. has persistently sought to undermine or even abolish, at potentially enormous cost.

Bobby's betrayal of his family goes further with every step he takes in this campaign, and in every direction. JFK and RFK were both known for surrounding themselves with advisers whose intelligence and experience drew admiration; Bobby is drawn to intellectually null sycophants and boobs, including a large contingent of crooks like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, as well as the anti-vax scammers, some of whom are outright fascists. These are people his father and uncle would have privately mocked and publicly shunned.

Even worse, Bobby has become a shill for Russian propaganda and an opponent of American military aid to Ukraine's besieged democracy. We don't have to wonder what his uncle would have said, because history tells us.

In his inaugural address, JFK uttered this indelible sentence: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Liberty doesn't mean surrendering to Putin and abandoning our allies.

Lately, Bobby has been sucking up to the Libertarian Party, whose platform would tear down all the achievements of his father and both of his uncles in civil rights, education, health care, environmental protection, food security and a score of essential programs. He wants their ballot line, and he is willing to promote their destructive ideology for his own benefit.

In this campaign, he has reversed the old epigram about history and its personages. In the first act, he presents a farce — and in the second act, should he help to elect Donald Trump, he will bring forth a tragedy.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom formerly known as The Investigative Fund, and a senior fellow at Type Media Center.


How The Republican Party Endangers The Health Of American Kids

How The Republican Party Endangers The Health Of American Kids

When it comes to children’s health, there are two terrifying headlines this week. The Washington Post reports that “CDC data shows highest level yet of vaccine exemptions for kindergartners.” The New York Times says, “At Least 2 Million Children Have Lost Medicaid Insurance This Year.” These interlinking stories are both the results of decisions by Republicans to put MAGA anti-vaccine politics above children.

Vaccination refusal for kindergarteners increased from 2.6 percent during the 2021-2022 school year to three percent in 2022-2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in its most recent review of vaccination records. Every state and Washington, D.C., requires proof of vaccination for measles, whooping cough, and polio at a minimum. Every state allows exemptions for health reasons, but an increasing number of states allow them on religious or “philosophical” grounds.

No, it’s not just MAGA parents who refuse to participate responsibly in civil society by protecting their and other children. But the big increase, according to a December 2022 survey from Kaiser Family Foundation, is among Republicans. “Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, there has been a 24 percentage-point increase in the share” of people who say “parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their school-age children, even if this creates health risks for others.” That’s an increase from 20% in 2019—before the pandemic and MAGA vaccine hysteria—to 44 percent in 2022.

Plenty of those kids and their school and playmates who either aren’t vaccinated or are put at greater risk by being exposed to unvaxxed kids don’t have health insurance anymore since pandemic-era expansions ended; more than 2 million of their policies, as the Times reports. It’s not clear how many have found coverage from other sources, Medicaid expert Joan Alker told the Times. She estimates that there are at least 1 million children without coverage.

That information comes, again, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been following the “unwinding” of Medicaid coverage since the pandemic expansion of the program expired. That’s just among the 21 states that report the data on who has been kicked off the program by age.

“As of November 8, 2023, at least 2,006,000 children had been disenrolled out of 5,238,000 total disenrollments in the 21 states” KFF reports. Here’s the chart of those 21 states. It’s pretty clear that some of the reddest states have been the most effective in taking health care away from children.

Bar chart showing percentage of children dropped from Medicaid in 21 states reporting that data.

The Medicaid unwinding process has been complicated and difficult for most states. Through the pandemic, Medicaid enrollees didn’t have to continuously prove their eligibility for benefits and 21.2 million people, including children, were added to the program during the pandemic. Some states (mostly the blue ones) worked hard to reach out to enrollees to explain to them how to keep their families covered. And some states (lots of the red ones) were less proactive in helping their citizens.

Both issues are political, and the results are children subject to harm. Kicking kids off of Medicaid and promoting the idea that vaccinations are dangerous and that public health isn’t as important as MAGA beliefs are part and parcel of the Republican ideology these days. That would be the self-proclaimed “party of life,” forcing children to be born so that they can then be neglected and out-and-out harmed by Republican policies.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

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