RFK Jr. Discovers Second Cause Of Autism: Foreskin Deficiency
from the tip-off dept
It’s story time! I came home from the grocery store over this past weekend very proud. I rushed to tell my wife about how I was complimented in the check out line by the very nice woman behind me. She mentioned that she was impressed by how I “Tetris-ed” my groceries on the conveyor belt, carefully organizing my purchases not only in proper order so that they’re bagged together (drinks/alcohol, then frozen stuff, then refrigerated items, then warm storage items), but also so that there is no unused real estate on the belt itself. Hence the “Tetris” comment.
My wife’s response was: “Honey, your spectrum is showing.”
This isn’t to make fun of autism spectrum disorder, of course. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s an acknowledgement that I’m somewhere on that spectrum, as are many more of us than probably realize it. I’m an IT guy. This isn’t unexpected.
But I had no idea that one of the potential causes for my landing there was because my parents made the choice to have me circumcised after birth.
During a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Kennedy, a longtime proponent of the unfounded theory that vaccines cause autism, went on a tangent about the causes of autism.
Specifically, he talked about how he saw a TikTok video of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol.” Kennedy said that the woman took Tylenol “with a baby in her placenta,” even though the fetus develops in the uterus. In addition, Kennedy said that infant boys who are circumcised have double the rate of autism.
But Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who voted to confirm Kennedy both in the Senate Finance Committee and on the Senate floor, expressed confusion.
“That’s new,” he told The Independent after chuckling.
Chuckling? Kennedy waxing poetic about how an ancient ritual that’s been around for eons is suddenly causing a spike in autism rates over the past several decades isn’t funny. Spelling your name wrong with a useless “h” in it is funny, but this is something else. The bumblefuck who doesn’t have even the basics down about how in utero development works is running healthcare policy for the entire damned country and he just claimed that there is a link between autism rates and circumcision. The proper response to this is hearings, specifically impeachment hearings for Kennedy, not a guffaw.
Some people, at least, including a large majority of the voting public, don’t find any of this humorous.
Many Americans seem to not trust Trump and Kennedy’s claims. A poll from KFF found that just four percent of Americans believed their claims about Tylenol and autism were definitely true, while 30 percent said it was probably false and 35 percent said it was definitely false.
But Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), a member of the HELP Committee and a sharp critic of Kennedy, said Kennedy’s bizarre and unfounded claims are no laughing matter.
“We’re talking about whether or not parents can rely on the information provided by the Secretary of Health and Human Services,” she said. “ It’s really not funny. This whole thing is dangerous. People will get sick and die based on it. And I think it’s horrible.”
If you’re wondering, these claims are largely built upon a Danish study from 2015 that found that circumcised boys were more likely to be diagnosed with ASD compared with boys who had not been circumcised. And as you would expect, the methods and conclusions drawn by the study were heavily critiqued. It shows a correlation, but no causation. And, as is the case with ASD diagnoses generally, the real factor at play here appears to be contact with medical professionals versus those who have less of those contacts.
The 2015 study found that the risk of autism was higher among circumcised boys under age 5, but after age 5, the association disappeared. “If circumcision truly caused autism,” said Gounder, “that association should continue even after age 5. They’re likely picking up on the fact that kids undergoing circumcision in the health care system have greater contact with the health care system and have parents with higher levels of education and income — all of which are associated with being diagnosed with autism at a younger age than other kids. That association may disappear once kids start school, when teachers and counselors pick up on the symptoms.”
Folks, the timeline for how long it’s going to take to unwind the destruction of trust that Kennedy is currently sowing in our governmental medical institutions is going to be measured in decades. And please miss me with any claims that the COVID response or anything else that may have also caused similar distrust is in any way on par with what is currently going on at HHS. It’s not, and it’s not even close.
Filed Under: angela alsobrooks, autism, circumcision, health and human services, rfk jr., thom tillis
Comments on “RFK Jr. Discovers Second Cause Of Autism: Foreskin Deficiency”
Pity he doesn't know or have the contact details of anyone like that
If only there were, I dunno, medical experts of some sort that might have spent years or even decades teasing out details regarding autism, how it manifests, how to handle it to allow people with it to have fulfilling lives, and what factors might have an impact on people being born with it…
And this is the quality of Trump's people
You know what causes fucking stupid? Brain worms.
Re: You are being unfair
Please remember: the brain worm died without external intervention, probably by starvation or toxic thoughts. You are blaming the camel for the desert.
Re: Re:
If it was a zombie brain worm it would have starved to death.
For sure
Circumcision is mandatory for male Muslims and Jews and not for others. Wouldn’t some connection with autism have been spotted by now?
Many people say when RFK Jr was circumcised, they threw away the wrong bit.
Re: RFKJrs foreskin
He’s telegraphing antisemitism to the MAGAts.
Re: Re: Not Just Antisemitism
…or maybe it is antisemitism since, technically, all inhabitants of this particular region are Semites (descendents of Shem if you believe the old tales). But I point to the fact that Khitan, Muslim circumcision, is almost universally practiced. I guess the brain worm has broad enough tastes to hate multiple groups as the same time.
Re:
I mean it’s totally normal for a doctor to misread orders and perform a lobotomy instead of a circumcision.
Re: Re:
Maybe the doctors circumcised the brain worm by accident?
US government agencies used to be the "last word"
On the international stage, recommendations and regulations that were advanced by US government agencies (health, air safety, occupational safety, etc.) were generally accepted as being THE WAY to do things.
Many governments based everything from plumbing codes to financial regulations on what the US did, because the assumption was that the US government was in a position to do the necessary research and determine what approaches were best. So a lot of the world just kind of piggybacked off of the American systems, because they were trusted.
That’s the way they do it in the US, so it must be right.
Now, that confidence gone. And the clown show continues.
I don’t know how you regain the trust that was squandered here. It may not be possible.
Re: Trust Arrives on Foot and Leaves on Horseback
So we abroad will watch what happens in the US, and it is well possible that after 10 to 20 years of proper government the international reputation of US government agencies will be close to what they were a few years ago.
OTOH, seeing what the EU is doing and where the US has ben failing (privacy, environment) it is not guaranteed that other countries will keep copying regulations from the US, with a reasonable alternative available.
Re:
I don’t think we do. Not in my lifetime, anyway. We’ve completely squandered a massive amount of soft power and that takes ages to build.
I’m pretty sure we’re all on “The Spectrum.” We’ve just been shifting the lines back/forward as to where we stop/start the delineation between ‘yes, you are’ and ‘no, you’re not’ for some time now. It’s all about interpreting the results of testing, which many are never subjected to at all–though more nowadays than used to be.
As idiotic as this whole thing is, there might be a small silver lining – if people fall for it, they might refrain from mutilating their children’s genitals.
Cratering.
I’m not sure if there’s a typo in that sentence or not.
When Brainworm Bobby initially made that statement, my wife’s reaction was “How does that explain autism in women?” I’m reasonably sure that women weren’t even considered.
Re:
Simple, all female autistic people are trans!
Re: Re: Not too likely
Oversimplified:
Autists have problems connecting to other people. Trans people dislike the manner in which they are connecting to other people.
The intersection may not be empty, but it will not be particularly busy I’d guess.
It makes it clear that anything RFK could ever say is blatantly false. So by disregarding all his claims, in few years, we’ll get a pretty clear picture of what is true. We just have to be patient.
New gold standard
Well, Bobby Brainworm just saved the medical research community an absolute metric shit-ton of time and money. We can now throw away those expensive, complicated, time-consuming randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies and just watch TikTok!
I have a feeling that RFK’s ‘circumcision causes autism’ thing has something to do with antisemitism.
At the very least it’s probably related to dr Hans Asperger’s skewed statistics in diagnosing jewish children with autism so they could be deemed unworthy of life back when Nazi Germany was more focused on killing the disabled.
But this ‘circumcision causes autism’ thing reads like 4chan memebate antisemitism.
Makes sense
We know that the principal means of comprehending the world is between a man’s legs.
Autists are sometimes too thin-skinned, someimes too thick-skinned. Obviously that makes no sense unless there isn’t enough skin left for figuring out the thickness.
You just need to empty out your brain of all preconceptions to let those realizations sink in.
And that’s what Bobby Jr is good for: he does not contaminate his thoughts by contact with medical scientists and even had a brain worm actively clean out preconceptions.
I can’t wait for more nuggets of shaman wisdom from our [checks notes] head of the medical science department. And what a head it is, refusing to take input from the body.
The body has a fever? More cowbells.
So what you’re saying is… doctors cause autism? THE REAL SECRETS BIG MEDICINE DOESN’T YOU TO KNOW. :^)
Re:
And the corollary is that autism causes vaccines.
Nobody thinks more about little boy penises than Republicans. Nobody.
This new “revelation” raises another question, though:
If a mother takes acetaminophen during pregnancy and then has her baby circumcised, do the two cancel each other out? Or does it compound, giving the child super-autism?
I would like read that Kennedy woke up one morning with the severest case of phimosis ever recorded. His foreskin grew up his body and sealed itself tight over the top of his head.
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Regardless of whether MGM causes autism or not, every one who does it, every parent who “consents” to it (actually invalid as consent for anyone other than the person whose body is being touched or cut doesn’t apply, that’s what bodily autonomy and rape/sexual abuse laws mean) and every one who supports it should be put down like dogs, no exceptions for religious or medical, which never exists, as nobody in all of human history has died or even had problems from the normal, natural, healthy, and mind-blowing pleasurable foreskin. And the executions should be by burning alive slowly.