Our mad, idiot king recently declared war on Tylenol. Nobody really knows why, exactly. There’s only shaky, correlational data to support any link between Tylenol and autism (did you know summertime ice cream consumption leads to an increase in shark attacks?).
And even the backers of those studies say telling pregnant mothers to avoid Tylenol is irresponsible. Mostly, Trump appears to be trying to maintain his flimsy veneer as a populist for the conspiratorially minded MAHA movement. He lies to that gullible segment about cracking down on pharma much like he lied to Matt Stoller types about cracking down on corporate power in general.
That’s certainly not stopping the MAGA propaganda machine from behaving irresponsibly. Sinclair Broadcasting, the local broadcast affiliate that has been censoring comedians that give our mad idiot king a sad, has been really busy helping the administration spread disinformation about Tylenol.
Media Matters notes that while you couldn’t watch Jimmy Kimmel on Sinclair last week, the affiliate was repeatedly platforming a member of an organization who has spread medical misinformation on more than 60 Sinclair stations across 37 states in segments since the Trump announcement:
I hate to beat a dead horse, but media academics have been warning for fifty+ years about the dire problems created by letting media companies (especially local broadcasters) fall into the hands of just a few rich people. Most of the time, the press, public, and even policymakers yawned. Now, every single day, we get ugly, glaring examples why it was a bad idea to ignore their advice.
Authoritarians and corporations in particular love having a monolithic, homogenized media (with all the critical, informed voices marginalized to the fringe), happy to parrot their lies and bullshit. Still, we were endlessly told by corporations (and even “free market Libertarian” groups purportedly super concerned about unchecked state power) that maintaining functional media consolidation limits was a dated relic that “harmed innovation.”
Now the Trump administration is pushing to remove the last remaining media consolidation limits that exist in the U.S., built over generations of bipartisan collaboration. Local right-wing broadcasters Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna are all preparing to merge. In addition to massive consolidation among major national networks.
And this isn’t just a “problem for dying traditional media” you can casually dismiss as irrelevant. As we let Twitter, TikTok, and other major social, telecom, and media companies all fall into the hands of a few authoritarian-loyal billionaires, the evidence of harm from mindless consolidation is everywhere you turn. And it’s not remotely subtle.
Back in April, RFK Jr. committed publicly to firmly knowing the cause of autism by September of this year. In May, Donald Trump himself weighed in with the already baked conclusion that autism doesn’t “occur naturally” and therefore must have some environmental cause. Both statements were absurd at the time. Autism causes have been studied for decades and RFK Jr. has no magic wand to make the answer more knowable to him than the collective medical community. Donald Trump is not a doctor, nor a medical researcher, and unless he has actual evidence and research to back up his claim, it is fit for being ignored and nothing else. Meanwhile, Kennedy also shut down the research that was actually being done to find causes of autism.
But it’s now September and a promise was made, so the Trump administration had to at least pretend to make it a promise kept. To that end, reporting came out last week that Kennedy and HHS would be pointing the finger at prenatal use of Tylenol as a major cause of autism. And just this week, that’s exactly what Trump and Kennedy did.
“Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump instructed pregnant women around a dozen times during the unwieldy White House news conference, also urging mothers not to give their infants the drug, known by the generic name acetaminophen in the U.S. or paracetamol in most other countries. He also fueled long-debunked claims that ingredients in vaccines or timing shots close together could contribute to rising rates of autism in the U.S., without providing any medical evidence.
The rambling announcement, which appeared to rely on existing studies rather than significant new research, comes as the Make America Healthy Again movement has been pushing for answers on the causes of autism. The diverse coalition of supporters of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. includes several anti-vaccine activists who have long spread debunked claims that immunizations are responsible.
Okay, so where is this coming from, you might be asking? Well, to start, studies do exist that point to correlational data between use of Tylenol and autism rates. That’s just the truth. So, if you hear any opponent of this administration tell you that there is zero data or studies indicating that this might be a concern, that is simply not true. It’s important that we be really precise about this sort of thing.
One such Harvard study, for example, did find that there was an uptick in rates of autism diagnoses among children who’s mothers took Tylenol while pregnant, primarily to reduce a high fever in the mother. The problem is that even those who performed that very study don’t agree with Trump’s message to pregnant women, which was, again, “Don’t take Tylenol.”
One of the researchers on that study was Ann Bauer, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts. Bauer said she thinks pregnant women should be told about a possible risk from acetaminophen. But the researcher also was worried that it might be too soon to have the federal government offering guidance on its use.
“I’m a little concerned about how this message is going to come because I think they may be jumping the gun,” Bauer said before the announcement was made. “I think those of us in the research community would like to see stronger evidence.”
This is how scientists talk when the evidence is, at best, inconclusive. We’re talking about one study, with a relatively small sample size and for which all kinds of externalities that could impact an outcome of autism were not accounted for. “We need more data” is exactly the right conclusion of such a study, as opposed to “Don’t take Tylenol.” Again, precision here matters very much.
Trump and Kennedy didn’t bother being precise. They advised the nation on a health matter that they can’t possibly understand, since the current researchers of it don’t understand it. And they even took it further than studies like the Harvard study would suggest even if we wanted to draw conclusions based on it.
One challenge is that it’s hard to disentangle the effects of Tylenol use from the effects of high fevers during pregnancy. Fevers, especially in the first trimester, can increase the risk for miscarriages, preterm birth and other problems, according to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.
Trump also urged not giving Tylenol to young children, but scientists say that research indicates autism develops in the fetal brain.
Responding to Trump’s warnings, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine said they still recommend Tylenol as an appropriate option to treat fever and pain during pregnancy. The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said Monday that suggestions that Tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism are “irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients.”
Ironically, high fevers in pregnant women have also been suggested as a potential cause of autism diagnoses in children, among many other negative healthcare outcomes for the unborn child. This is the same flavor of medical advice that Kennedy had on COVID vaccines: the cure is worse than the disease. That’s bullshit, of course, but it’s the kind of bullshit you get when you believe that those who suffer negative health outcomes are at fault for those same outcomes.
And, despite the plain advisory language from definitely-not-a-doctor Donald Trump, he also threw out the repeatedly debunked claims about vaccines being linked to autism in the same announcement. Perhaps he did so because he really believes in such a link, but I doubt it. Instead, this was red meat to Kennedy’s base of supporters, because they were fucking furious when the news first broke about the announcement of the link to Tylenol.
“We didn’t wait 20 years for Bobby to finally speak and then get served Tylenol as an answer,” anti-vaccine group Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice wrote in an unhinged Facebook post on Monday morning. “If that’s all we hear – is that the end? Not thimerosal. Not aluminum. Not MMR. Not Hep B. Not the insane schedule pushed after pharma got liability protection. Are we supposed to just forget?”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD)—the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy—even got in on the backlash, retweeting a post on Monday about parents who falsely blame vaccines for their children’s neurological condition, with the statement: “THIS WAS NOT CAUSED BY TYLENOL.”
And if that’s not good enough for you, here’s Steve Bannon and a guest on the matter.
In an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room Monday, CHD President Mary Holland downplayed the link, telling Bannon: “Today may be something of a sideshow—Tylenol is not the primary cause. Vaccines are the primary cause [of autism],” Holland said. (The claim that vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked.)
Bannon, for his part, slammed Kennedy’s effectiveness as health secretary, calling his efforts to implement an anti-vaccine agenda unserious and amateurish. “This Tylenol thing stinks to high heaven,” he said.
Again, precision in how we talk about this matters when we’re talking about science and healthcare. I am unwilling to say that vaccines definitely do not cause autism. Instead, I say that there is no scientific evidence that has gone through a rigorous process to suggest that it does, so there’s no reason to operate as if there were. I will not say that there is zero link between Tylenol use in pregnant women and autism. But I can sure as shit say that here too there is certainly no conclusive causal link of significance between them, only correlational data that doesn’t account for a zillion other factors, and therefore we don’t put too much weight on this claim until more studies and data shows otherwise.
Many medical experts, instead, point to a novel 2024 study conducted in Sweden. The study, published in JAMA, used data from a population of 2.5 million children and was also able to compare differences among (full) siblings. This provided a simple way to skirt confounding variables, such as genetics and environmental factors, to which siblings would have similar exposure.
In the entire population, children exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy were slightly more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who weren’t—echoing some earlier studies. But, in the sibling analysis, which compared siblings who were exposed to acetaminophen to siblings who were not, the association vanished. In all, the data suggests that acetaminophen was not causing an uptick in autism diagnoses; rather, there were other confounding factors behind the link.
Meanwhile, the President tells the public “Don’t take Tylenol.”
There is so, so much damage being done by these halfwits looking for a headline rather than real answers. It seems obvious to me that some non-zero number of pregnant women out there will adhere to Trump’s message and their unborn children will either suffer the consequences of high fevers in life, or miscarry and never have that life to begin with. Some will even refuse to give their already-born children Tylenol as Trump instructed and some, almost certainly, will die. On who’s ledger will we place those deaths? The answer must be on Kennedy and Trump.
And beyond that, this cavalier attitude towards healthcare pronouncements will do no favors when it comes to getting the public to trust doctors and researchers on matters of health and medicine. And that is of paramount importance, as the American people today trust both their leaders and medical institutions in particular less than perhaps they ever have in the past.
On matters of life and death, that will literally kill people.
Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat Senators are aligned, and in fact demanded his resignation before the hearing, while even GOP members such as Bill Cassidy have begun signaling wavering support for Kennedy.
But this wasn’t just contentious; it was a disaster. USA Today has one of many live update pages where you can go back and relive the timeline, but the topline summary is that Kennedy shouted over the Senators questions, often asked them questions instead of answering the questions he was asked, dissembled all over the place when asked direct and honest questions, and otherwise spouted conspiracy theories without a scintilla of evidence to back them up. And while it’s certainly true that questions from Democracts were done in a more hostile tone than those from the GOP, the open disdain, or at least concern, about Kennedy’s actions as of recent was entirely bipartisan.
I’ll give you some highlights, for lack of a better term, along with a summary of the key thing we learned in each highlight.
Mark Warner (D):
Kennedy claims neither he, nor anyone else, has any idea how many Americans died from COVID-19
Kennedy is unwilling to state that COVID vaccines did “anything” to prevent deaths from COVID-19
Kennedy was unaware of some specific implications of the latest budget bill on American healthcare
John Barrasso (R):
Barrasso points out all the chaos and failure that has happened under Kennedy, including the largest measles outbreak in decades.
Kennedy claims that CDC vaccine guidance has never before, in the history of the agency, been “clear, evidence based, and trustworthy.” He claims his leadership is the first time this will ever have happened.
This, by the way, is precisely how you get situations like unhinged people shooting up the CDC’s Atlanta campus. The CDC was born in 1946, initially to combat malaria. But, according to Kennedy, it has never in its entire history been trustworthy on the topic of vaccines. It’s a lie, of course, but those that believe it would logically be very, very pissed off.
Thom Tillis (R):
Tillis starts off by saying he’s going to make a statement and essentially begs Kennedy to not respond in the moment, but to go and gather his answers after the hearing and present them. Kennedy repeatedly attempts to answer those questions anyway.
Tillis points out that based on the myriad of conflicting statements Kennedy made within the hearing, he has no idea whether Kennedy thinks Operation Warp Speed was a good thing or not. On the one hand, Kennedy agrees with Tillis and others that Trump should be a Nobel prize for the government’s efforts in creating the mRNA vaccines. On the other, Kennedy claims the vaccines were deadly and can’t account for them being effective at all.
Tillis asks how a CDC Director can be lauded a month ago and fired four weeks later.
Tillis asks for evidence that Kennedy has kept any of the promises he’s made to Congress in the past.
Tillis points out that all he can get out of Kennedy’s HHS to a question about the economic impact of the budget bill that was passed amount to “word salad.”
Kennedy affirms his position that the COVID vaccines cause “serious harm” and “death”.
Folks, that’s as polite a way for a GOP Senator to state publicly that they don’t trust Kennedy as is possible.
Bernie Sanders (I):
This one takes a brief bit of preamble. When Senator Warren was questioning Kennedy about his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as Director of CDC, she asked Kennedy about Monarez’s public claim in a WSJ editorial that he demanded she sign off on what ACIP would recommend prior to them even meeting and insisted she fire a slew of senior staffers at CDC for who knows what reason. Kennedy told Warren that was not true and, when she asked what was the reason he fired her, got this in response.
That is obviously not a believable story. I mean, to make light of it, why would an untrustworthy person tell their boss they were not trustworthy instead of lying?
In any case, with that context, we move on to the takeaways from the back and forth with Bernie Sanders.
Kennedy reiterates his claim that Monarez lied about why she was fired and that, again, he did so because she told him she was not trustworthy.
Kennedy calls a net -$100 million investment in rural healthcare “the largest infusion of public money” into rural healthcare.
Kennedy affirms the COVID vaccines are the deadliest vaccines in history and that Trump should get a Nobel prize for helping develop them.
Kennedy launches into a conspiracy theory in which the largest NGOs and others that disagree with him have all been corrupted by the pharma industry.
Bill Cassidy (R):
Cassidy is the one many of us were waiting to see in this hearing, for multiple reasons. He’s a doctor, for instance. He was a pivotal vote in Kennedy’s confirmation hearings and extracted several promises about vaccines and policy during those hearings. And, finally, several other Republican Senators have pointed to him as the one they trust on healthcare and medicine issues.
Kennedy again affirms that Trump deserves a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, despite saying those vaccines killed people. Cassidy then points out that Kennedy sued to limit access to COVID vaccines before his time in government.
Cassidy points out that the ACIP conflicts of interests data that Kennedy has claimed was wildly inaccurate. Kennedy attempts to argue the point, but fails.
Cassidy points out that several current ACIP members, which Kennedy hand-picked, serve as paid witnesses in vaccine injury trials and asks Kennedy if that is a conflict of interests. Kennedy responds it may be a bias, but not a financial conflict of interest, which makes zero sense.
Stick around for the end in which Cassidy shares some personal interactions he’s had with constituents demonstrating precisely how Kennedy’s policy actions have introduced a limitation of vaccine access and chaos and confusion among doctors as to what they can prescribe or not, which is exactly what we indicated would happen.
There was much, much more. More dissembling. More conspiracy theories. More lies. By any honest viewing of the hearing, it was a bipartisan verbal indication of no confidence in Kennedy, with some Senators choosing to be more polite about it than others. This was a more pointed and thorough takedown of Kennedy from both sides of the aisle than even I had hoped for.
So of course the White House is pretending this is all a partisan hitjob because Kennedy is so awesome.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Kennedy after he faced tense questioning by both Democratic and Republican senators.
The Health secretary “is taking flak because he’s over the target,” she said on X several hours after the hearing concluded. “The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science.”
Although she blamed Democrats for attacking “that commonsense effort,” Republican senators such as Cassidy and Barrasso had also expressed disapproval during the hearing with some of Kennedy’s most recent actions concerning vaccines.
As I said in a previous post, this is by no means the end of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS. But it just might be the beginning of that end. No amount of White House gaslighting is going to be able to counter rising illnesses, full hospitals, or explosive growth in the casket manufacturing business.
Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.
For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.
He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.
In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”
Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”
As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.
Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.”
Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.
Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.”
But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism.
“I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.”
McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism.
It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk?
The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized.
Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses in California. While others had asserted the rise was due to increased awareness and broadened diagnostic criteria, Hertz-Picciotto found those factors could only partially explain it. She and others went on to document additional contributors to autism risk, including parental age at the time of birth, a mother’s fever during pregnancy and more traditional environmental considerations, such as chemical exposures.
McCanlies hadn’t studied autism. But she offered Hertz-Picciotto her experience in genetics and epidemiology as well as the considerable resources of her agency. NIOSH was established in 1970 to investigate the dangers of the workplace, and its statisticians and industrial hygienists were among the world’s experts on the health impacts of chemical exposures.
Their first collaboration, published in 2012, used Hertz-Picciotto’s data to see if parents of children with autism were more likely to have been exposed to chemicals already thought to be dangerous to the developing brain. The work was technical and time-consuming, but the analysis showed a clear relationship: Mothers and fathers of children with autism were more likely than the parents of unaffected children to have been exposed to solvents such as lacquer, varnish and xylene on the job. These solvents evaporate quickly and can be easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Chemical plant workers, painters, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, cleaners and medical personnel are among those who may be exposed to these solvents.
The sample size was small — just 174 families. But the results lined up with recent findings showing possible links between autism and exposure to metals and certain solvents during pregnancy or early childhood, including a solvent called methylene chloride. They also tracked with studies linking the chemicals to miscarriage, reproductive problems, birth defects and developmental problems other than autism.
McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto followed up with a 2019 study that looked at more than 950 families. It showed that women exposed to solvents at work during pregnancy and the three months leading up to it were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism than women not exposed to the chemicals. (The study did not find a link for chemically exposed men.)
Their third study, published in 2023, took the link between solvent exposure and autism as a starting point. Using blood samples to examine the genetic makeup of the parents of children with autism, McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto found that when exposed to solvents on the job, people with specific variants of 31 genes had an especially elevated risk of having a child with autism. Their genetic makeup appeared to increase the risk that solvents by themselves posed. Some of those 31 genes help cells connect with one another; others play a role in helping cells migrate to different areas so they can grow into the various parts of the brain; still others ensure that cells clear away toxic substances.
Researchers were also making strides under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of Health and Human Services, which has financed investigations into dozens of environmental contaminants. Several have been linked to autism, including air pollution, certainpesticides, a plastic additive known as BPA and diesel exhaust, which causes “autism-like behavioral changes” in mice. In 2021, Hertz-Picciotto co-published a study linking “forever chemicals” called PFOA and PFNA with the condition. (In 2023, a second paper also found an association with PFNA.) Other government-funded research has established a link between autism and another solvent, trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines.
Together, the results have shown that many exposures can increase the likelihood of autism, and that there can be multiple causes for any one person.
At least one exposure can have the opposite effect: A study by a researcher named Rebecca Schmidt — and funded by the NIEHS and NIH — found that a B vitamin called folic acid was associated with a significant decrease in the chances of an autism diagnosis. More than a dozen studies have since confirmed the association.
One problem hung over much of autism research. The sweeping diagnosis includes everyone from people who treasure their neurological differences to those with debilitating symptoms, including repetitive behaviors, excruciating sensitivity to touch and sounds, and difficulty responding to social situations. McCanlies and Hertz–Picciotto wondered whether certain chemicals were linked to the most severe cases or to specific symptoms.
In 2023, they set about finding out.
They were preparing to submit their study for publication when newly inaugurated Trump put Kennedy in charge of America’s health.
Despite having made chronic health conditions the focus of his agenda, Kennedy has quietly abided environmental policies that will exacerbate these problems, including autism.
The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiplestudies have linked toautism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditionscontributing to autism. According to an EPA spokesperson, more than 2,300 workers have so far elected to leave the agency through Trump administration programs encouraging early retirement and resignation.
The EPA also began canceling grants, including one it had given to Schmidt, the researcher who studied the protective effect of folic acid. Schmidt had been awarded $1.3 million to determine whether air pollution from wildfires might increase the risk of various neurological conditions. Schmidt and her colleagues had just done preliminary analysis and found that there was a significant association between wildfire pollution exposure and autism when she received a letter saying that the grant was terminated because the project was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” After a judge ruled in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of University of California researchers alleging their funding was unlawfully terminated, her grant was reinstated last month. But the EPA has appealed the judge’s ruling, leaving Schmidt unsure about the fate of the project.
Schmidt said there is an urgent need to finish the study and warn people about how to avoid the dangers from wildfire smoke by staying indoors and using air filters and N95 masks. “Millions of pregnant women are getting exposed as we speak,” she said.
Meanwhile, Kennedy has presided over his own gutting of research. Known for sharing videos of his bare-chested workouts, he likened his agency’s cuts to getting rid of “unhealthy fat,” but his plan to reduce the staff of HHS by 20,000 amounts to slashing the workforce by roughly a quarter, including veteran scientists. Among the divisions Kennedy eliminated was one that studied air quality and collected data on chemicals found in human blood. Some workers in the division were subsequently reinstated. After a lawsuit and pressure from Congress, HHS has also rehired some NIOSH workers, though none at the division where McCanlies worked. Those whose jobs have not been reinstated remain on administrative leave.
The reorganization plan for HHS involves consolidating the remnants of these parts of the agency, along with several others, into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. Asked about the transition, an HHS spokesperson told ProPublica in an email that the reorganization would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year and that “critical programs will continue.”
Meanwhile, a ProPublica review of federal data found that more than $40 million in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for dozens of autism-related research projects were canceled under Kennedy’s watch. Some had been awarded to universities the administration is now targeting, while others ran afoul of Trump’s “anti-woke” priorities by mentioning gender and other verboten terms. Among them was a grant to Harvard University to use data on nearly half a million Israeli children to evaluate whether men’s exposure to air pollution affects the risk of having a child with autism. (A small number of grants have been recently reinstated.) A survey of researchers conducted by the Autism Science Foundation, which tallied cuts to training grants and the anticipated cuts to future grants over the next few years, estimated that the total loss of funding could be tens of millions more.
“We’re talking about probably decades of delays and setbacks,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation. “To take money away from all these areas of need to focus on a question that the HHS director considers high priority seems not scientific and not the way that science is done.”
Housed under the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy’s new $50-million Autism Data Science Initiative is looking to fund two- to three-year research projects that plumb large public and private datasets to find “possible contributors to the causes of autism” as well as conduct research on existing treatments.
With the deadline for his promised discovery fast approaching, Kennedy recently acknowledged that his initial six-month timeline was overly optimistic. He told Carlson he should have “some initial indicator answers” about the causes of autism by September, his original deadline, and promised unqualified answers within another six months.
While the NIH typically releases the names of the scientists on the committees that review grant applications and the criteria they use to review them, it has not done so in this case. Nor has the agency clarified what role NIH staff will have in awarding the grants, who will make the final selection, or what terms and conditions researchers must agree to if they receive funds. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who will make the final grant selection and why the agency has not yet made this information public, but a video NIH created for applicants of the funding acknowledges that reviews of the proposals “do not follow the traditional NIH review process.” According to the video, the process was “designed to ensure integrity, fairness and transparency.”
Hertz-Picciotto, who laments the fact that Kennedy is “shutting down good studies,” is among the researchers in her field who have decided to apply for the funding. “Some of his agenda is really ridiculous and very counterproductive,” she said. “But if something good can be done with this money, I’d like to be part of that.”
If her project is approved, she plans to hire McCanlies to consult on it.
McCanlies said she agreed to work on the project because she has complete confidence in her longtime colleague, if not the health secretary. “I don’t trust him at all,” she said.
McCanlies had never paid much attention to Kennedy — or to politics. Throughout the seven presidential administrations that governed while she had been at NIOSH, her work had been utterly uncontroversial. But weeks after his confirmation, she knew her job was in peril. She had deleted the first email she received from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. The tone was so strange and disrespectful, hinting that she might be punished if she didn’t respond by confirming her email address, that she assumed it was a phishing attempt. By the time she received a second, suggesting that she find a “higher productivity” job in the private sector, firings and budget cuts were rolling across federal agencies.
The 58-year-old, who has short, greying hair, hazel eyes and three graduate degrees, hadn’t been ready to leave NIOSH’s Health Effects Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, a place where she had mentored young colleagues, taught a lunchtime meditation class and helped conduct several yearslong research projects. The lab is also where she met Fred, her husband, another Ph.D. scientist who studied workplace chemical hazards. She reluctantly put in for early retirement just days before the entire lab was dissolved.
McCanlies spent her final days at NIOSH finishing her last paper, which explores the association between workplace chemicals and the severity of autism. Normally, she would have her supervisor sign off on her submission to a journal, but he had already lost his job. The rest of her colleagues were gone, too, and the lab’s hallways were empty as she gave the manuscript a final edit.
She felt proud of the study, which answered some of the questions she and Hertz-Picciotto had posed years ago. There were indeed links between exposures and the severity of autism. Parents’ exposure to plastics was “consistently and significantly associated” with lower cognitive scores in their children who had autism, increases in “aberrant behaviors” and deficits in basic life skills, the study found. The exposure was also linked to particular symptoms of autism, including social withdrawal, hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping and body rocking. Higher autism severity scores and weaker daily living skills were also linked with ethylene oxide. Last year, the EPA imposed stricter limits on the chemical, which is used as a sterilizer. But the agency is now reconsidering those restrictions, and, in July, Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from them.
The paper, which is now available as a preprint, recommended that regulatory agencies “consider increasing awareness of these hazards and make clear recommendations for implementing protective measures at the worksite.”
Having just watched so many occupational health experts forced to leave their jobs, McCanlies suspected their advice was unlikely to be heeded anytime soon.
As HHS and RFK Jr. continue to bumble their way towards making America less healthy, while saying they’re doing the opposite of course, measles cases are still on the rise. The rate of new cases appears to be slowing somewhat, assuming we think the data coming out of the CDC these days is accurate. Given the staff and budget cuts HHS has implemented, I think that is very much an open question.
In the meantime, Kennedy also committed about a month ago to “knowing the cause of autism” by September of this year. The claim would be absurd coming from anyone, given the research and science indicating that there are a number of factors likely at play rather than a single “cause,” but from noted anti-vaccine advocate Kennedy the claim takes on a more sinister tone. Kennedy has already walked back the ETA for his eureka on autism moment, but it seems overwhelmingly obvious where this is going.
Making matters worse, because the fish rots from the head down, Donald Trump recently remarked that the cause of autism must be from an external source. He, to the shock of exactly nobody, provided zero reasoning or evidence for this claim.
President Trump said Thursday that autism must not occur naturally, citing figures inflating the spike in autism and suggesting the administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission could provide answers.
“When you hear 10,000, it was 1 in 10,000, and now it’s 1 in 31 for autism, I think that’s just a terrible thing. It has to be something on the outside, has to be artificially induced, has to be,” Trump said at a MAHA Commission event. “And we will not allow our public health system to be captured by the very industries it’s supposed to oversee. So we’re demanding the answers, the public is demanding the answers and that’s why we’re here.”
Because this is Donald Trump, even his cited numbers are wrong. Autism spectrum diagnoses 25 years ago were in the 1 in 150 children range. Today they are 1 in 36. That is still a sizable jump and if you can’t be bothered to have a nuanced thought about it, it might freak you out. But medicine on new diseases changes, as does how we classify certain conditions. A ton of awareness and outreach has been done both with doctors and among the public when it comes to autism. With that education comes more diagnosed incidents as doctors and the public begin to recognize the symptoms for what they are.
But most medical professionals seem to agree that genetics and family history play a role in autism prevalence that ranges somewhere between being very important to being the primary cause. That would be directly contradictory to Trump’s claim that the disorder must be externally caused.
The main question now appears to be whether Kennedy is influencing Trump’s views on autism, or the other way around.
Ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation vote in the Senate, Trump also shared figures questioning the autism rate.
“20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 10,000. NOW IT’S 1 in 34. WOW! Something’s really wrong. We need BOBBY!!! Thank You! DJT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.
This isn’t some conversation happening in a vacuum. Policy decisions will be made based Trump’s and Kennedy’s misguided views on autism spectrum disorder. Neither of these men are doctors. One of them insisted that the American people shouldn’t take medical advice from him, despite his holding the highest office in the land when it comes to American health and healthcare.
Warning bells should have been going off in your head long before RFK Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic for several decades, was confirmed as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. We’re in the first few months of Trump’s second term, but already there are several health issues stemming from Kennedy’s efforts. There is a measles outbreak that appears to be growing by the day, leading to hundreds of infections and several deaths among the unvaccinated community, which Kennedy helped to foster. In the midst of that health emergency, Kennedy has also pushed alternative treatments that have made people sicker, generally children, all while he’s busy closing up treatment facilities designed to stamp out the outbreak.
But expanding the market for tiny caskets isn’t Kennedy’s main passion. That is reserved for blaming vaccines for the supposed uptick in the rate of autism diagnoses, a theory that has been debunked for several decades. The causes of autism have been studied for decades now, with the uptick in cases largely explained by a combination of genetic causes related the age of the parents and physical traits like birth weight along with wider awareness and testing for the condition. But despite all of that scientific effort that has gone on for years and years, RFK Jr. recently announced that HHS will have determined the cause of autism by September of this year.
The nation’s top health agency will undertake a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday.
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine critic who has pushed a discredited theory that routine childhood shots cause the developmental disability, said the effort will be completed by September and involve hundreds of scientists. He shared the plans with President Donald Trump during a televised Cabinet meeting.
We need not look any further into Kennedy’s plan to know this is bullshit. Determining the cause, or more likely causes, of something as widespread as diagnoses for the full spectrum of conditions is a massive undertaking. One that is certainly not going to be concluded in a matter of half of a year merely because Kennedy wills it so.
But it’s actually much worse than that, such that you should already be able to see where this is heading. Kennedy offered few details about his “study”, but we already know two things. First, the organizations that have been leading the charge on autisim advocay aren’t invited to the party.
Kennedy has offered no details on how his study will be different or what researchers will be involved. Leading autism organizations, such as the Autism Society of America, have not been included in discussions about the research, said ASA spokeswoman Kristyn Roth.
Roth said many agree that more research is needed to determine what causes autism, but Kennedy’s approach has raised alarms.
Now combine that with the man that Kennedy has already employed to “study” the cause of autism and you’ll see what’s going on here.
Kennedy has hired David Geier, a man who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the autism research effort. The hiring of Geier, who the state of Maryland found was practicing medicine on a child without a doctor’s license, was first reported by The Washington Post.
Geier, along with his father before him, have both a checkered past in medicine along with years of promoting a link between autism and vaccines. These are people that have already drawn their conclusions. I expect any study Geier does to point to that link as a conclusion. Expectations counter to that are downright silly. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see what is happening here.
The timeline alone should tell you how unserious this all is, in terms of a scientific approach to answering a very valid medical question: where does autism come from? People living on the spectrum are just that: people. They deserve our respect and our care, not to be treated as mere pawns for a crackpot’s hobbyhorse.
Just know, whatever supposed answers we get in September, this will not be the product of good science.
A couple of weeks back, we discussed the implosion of startup company Embodied and the resulting bricking of its $800 “emotional support” robots designed for children. Like many other stories about IoT-type products, the post focused on how these robots would cease functioning as designed once the backend support infrastructure for the shuttered business was shut down. As often happens with stories like this, there were several comments pointing out that the company could publish its source code and allow an open source community to pick up the slack here, so that at least these robots wouldn’t become $800 paperweights.
But what doesn’t typically happen in these stories is seeing a company actually make the effort to do exactly that. But that seems to be what Embodied is planning, with the company announcing an update and a plan to all the open source community to build its own backend software for the devices.
Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared a document via a LinkedIn blog post today saying that people who used to be part of Embodied’s technical team are developing a “potential” and open source way to keep Moxies running. The document reads:
“This initiative involves developing a local server application (‘OpenMoxie’) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers.”
The notice says that after releasing OpenMoxie, Embodied plans to release “all necessary code and documentation” for developers and users.
The company is also pushing a final update to the devices that will allow them to support the OpenMoxie setup.
Now, all of this certainly isn’t a perfect solution. If people miss getting the update, their robots will still end being bricks. There is no committment from anyone at all that the open-sourced code and OpenMoxie are going to be dutifully maintained. And who knows what the quality of OpenMoxie will be compared with what the company itself had been providing.
Still, this isn’t an ideal solution for parents who invested in an emotional support toy for their kid and may not have the know-how or time to keep it alive after Embodied closes. While Embodied is doing better than other firms that have bricked or otherwise changed smart device capabilities after release, it remains a disappointing and possibly illegal trend among tech companies pushing products only to alter their functionality or stop supporting their software after taking people’s money.
But at least Embodied is trying to do something about all of this. As the quote above notes, that’s a far cry from what has happened in plenty of other cases, where customers simply get cut off from the functionality of the thing they thought they bought, without any real concern from the companies doing the cutting.
As I said in the previous post, the better solution in the long run would be some sort of consumer protection laws. While we wait for that to probably never come to be, however, this is at least a good step in the right direction by the folks at Embodied.
Regular readers here will know we are no strangers to talking about Dungeons & Dragons or moral panics. Those two topics are often interrelated, given the moral panic history of the tabletop game itself, as well as how it should inform us in our reaction to more modern moral panics. After all, where once some of the public believed that allowing their children to play D&D would turn them into violent, Satan-worshipping death-zombies, that is precisely what the view of video games has been more recently. With D&D, the moral panic wave crested long ago, receding away to the modern acceptance, nay rising popularity of the game. Along with that have come studies showing that playing games like D&D are good for young writers, or have applications in therapy for children. And just like with D&D, we’re now finally starting to see the same view taken with video games, serving as treatment for conditions like ADHD, or to treat PTSD.
We should expect those new positive applications for video games to continue to be developed, as evidenced by how studies for how to use D&D in therapy are still coming out. In this specific case, a small study was done with those living with autism, who played through a weeks long campaign together and were interviewed about their experiences afterwards.
Over the last decade or so, researchers have turned their focus more heavily to the ways in which D&D and other TRPGs can help people with autism form healthy social connections, in part because the gaming environment offers clear rules around social interactions. According to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Autism, D&D helped boost players’ confidence with autism, giving them a strong sense of kinship or belonging, among other benefits.
“There are many myths and misconceptions about autism, with some of the biggest suggesting that those with it aren’t socially motivated, or don’t have any imagination,” said co-author Gray Atherton, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth. “Dungeons & Dragons goes against all that, centering around working together in a team, all of which takes place in a completely imaginary environment. Those taking part in our study saw the game as a breath of fresh air, a chance to take on a different persona and share experiences outside of an often challenging reality. That sense of escapism made them feel incredibly comfortable, and many of them said they were now trying to apply aspects of it in their daily lives.”
Once you get past the concern about children turning into goat-worshipping hell-beings, this is almost so obvious as to be silly. Conditions like autism, which can often carry with it social anxiety or social confusion, are just about perfectly suited therapeutically with a game like D&D. Why? Because the interactions within the game, social in nature though they may be, are far more prescriptive than in everyday life. There are expectations within the game as to how those interactions ought to go, which are helpfully often defined on paper. That way we’re not relying on unwritten social norms that some people with some conditions find confusing or difficult to act upon. And, because this is all one giant game of make believe, social interactions that don’t go well are in some ways disassociated from the player, with the consequences for them instead falling on the player’s fictional character.
TPRGs like D&D can serve as a social lubricant for autistic players, according to a year-long study published earlier this year co-authored by Atherton, because there is less uncertainty around how to behave in-game—unlike the plethora of unwritten social rules that make navigating social settings so anxiety-inducing. Such games immerse players in a fantastical world where they create their characters with unique backstories, strengths, and weaknesses and cooperate with others to complete campaigns.
Participants spoke repeatedly about the positive benefits they received from playing D&D, providing a friendly environment that helped them relax about social pressures. “When you’re interacting with people over D&D, you’re more likely to understand what’s going on,” one participant said in their study interview. “That’s because the method you’ll use to interact is written out. You can see what you’re meant to do. There’s an actual sort of reference sheet for some social interactions.” That, in turn, helped foster a sense of belonging and kinship with their fellow players.
And don’t doubt for a moment that some of what is learned and practiced in these game sessions can either be brought into real world interactions or, at least, create a more comfortable posture for those with autism to give those interactions a try.
But the real lesson here is that when the moral panic begins, we ought to cast very narrow eyes at it. On the other side of that panic might just be something very beneficial.
Are the eyes the windows to the soul? Probably not — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t darn good indicators of a whole lot of things. Scientists in a variety of fields are still uncovering new secrets within these little wet orbs, often with potentially important medical or psychological implications. Here are some of the latest discoveries made by watching the watchers:
The movie GATTACA came out back in 1997, but the technology to breed better people is just now starting to become more practical. We’ve been able (through in vitro fertilization) to select a desired baby gender for years, so selecting other traits doesn’t seem that far off — even though gene expression is a pretty complicated process. Here are just a few more projects that could lead to designing our kids’ genes with more fine tuning.
