Robert F Kennedy the Lesser’s ongoing campaign to destroy the nation’s public health and endanger millions of children continues apace.

It’s disorienting to trace the origins of RFK the Lesser’s deadly effort to destroy public health to the mercenary bullshit of one man and a single study of a dozen children that ultimately was found fraudulent and was retracted. It is gobsmacking that the slimy crusade to depict autistic people as heavy-metal–addled monsters to be eradicated has now oozed its way into every aspect of preventing infectious disease in this country.

The mire has engulfed the CDC, whose website has now been altered, at Kennedy’s behest, to once again imply that childhood vaccines might cause autism (they do not, and if they did, it’s past time for the response to be, over and over, “so what?”).

It has engulfed infants at risk for hepatitis B infections, who may now be vulnerable to a disease that can end in an obliterated liver and early death, as Kennedy’s hand-selected panel of anti-vaccine quacks voted to remove it as a recommendation for newborns. The routine administration of this vaccine to newborns has been one of the country’s greatest success stories in preventing infectious disease, with a 99% decline in cases since its introduction into the schedule in 1991. The HepB vaccine has an excellent safety record, and the recommendation was a very US-specific one, based on many factors that apply only to our country—including a lack of prenatal screening for HepB, a lack of covered maternity leave so that infants enter care as young as age 6 weeks (and thus are at risk of exposure), and a lack of the kind of universal healthcare that would catch HepB infections in time to address them. The vaccine was the backstop against the lack of safety these US conditions entail, and Kennedy’s crowd has now yanked out the backstop. Again, all because a quarter of a century ago, a retracted, fraudulent study led to claims that vaccines cause autism.

And now Kennedy is taking aim at the rest of the vaccine schedule, which means he’s taking aim at more of our nation’s children, and planning to remove even more of the backstops that have allowed children in this country to survive childhood without the death and disability that diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, chicken pox, hepatitis B, polio, tetanus, pneumococcal pneumonia, and diphtheria cause. He’s been asked by the current occasional occupant of the White House to “fast track” a review of these vaccines to “bring them into alignment” with what other countries do. But once again, this country is not like other high-income countries, which don’t seem to be hell bent on doing everything possible to threaten the health of children.

News you can use

• A bleak intersection of how this nation treats autistic people and how it treats immigrants: The independent outfit The Barbed Wire reports that a teen with intellectual disability whose mother says he is also autistic was handed over to immigration authorities who kept him locked up for 48 days. The 15-year-old, who also is hearing impaired, had to undergo surgery while in custody, without his mother at his side. He was finally released on December 1.

• The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) has issued a couple of statements on the recent public health backslidings. One condemns the egregious misinformation emerging from the vaccine advisory meeting on HepB.

• ASAN’s other statement deserves its own entry because a lot of us in the autism community started looking around for pigs in flight when we saw who its signatories are. The statement is on the CDC’s ascientific website changes regarding vaccines and autism, which is not an unexpected reaction. What’s unexpected is the rare-as-a-white-rhino sighting of ASAN and Autism Speaks joining forces as signatories together on the statement. Indeed, they are only two of dozens signing the statement, which calls on the CDC “to revert the website to its previous version, commit to vaccine education initiatives around the country that emphasize the high-quality, scientific evidence that vaccines do not cause autism, and invest in research projects and initiatives that are responsive to the needs of autistic people and their families.”

• Relatedly, according to a press release, people in the United States are now more likely to follow guidance from medical associations than from the CDC. Way to go, people in the United States!

• genAI barfs up garbage all the time, but this autism graphic that was actually published in an actual scientific journal is a real dumpster fire. The journal is Scientific Reports, which I’ve always thought of as entertaining reading in the same way that the Weekly World News was entertaining, but this is beyond even their admittedly distant pale. Which completely nonexistent word is your favorite? I like “Totalbottl.”

• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act just turned 50. Here’s to upending the current trend in upending useful, necessary things and wishing the Act as many years as this nation needs to get its shit together in giving disabled people a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment possible.

People

• Autistic journalist Eric Garcia’s just out there making the White House media shit list and giving keynotes. He made the White House’s “Offenders Hall of Shame” (not linking that), which for regular people in a common-sense world would be a Hall of Fame, but we’re in the upside-down right now. Garcia, Washington bureau chief and senior Washington correspondent at the Independent and a columnist for MSNBC, gave a keynote at the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University, entitled “How Bad Ideas about Autism Hurt Autistic People.”

• An autistic perspective on anthropology? And we’re not even on Mars! Guy Davis is a student at Metropolitan State University Denver, where he will graduate soon with a degree in anthropology. Davis is an autistic parent of an autistic child, and at MSU Denver he has worked on a field project documenting the site where Japanese Americans were interned during World War in Colorado. His professors describe him as “deeply curious, empathetic, and collaborative” and say he brings “a fresh look to a problem that scholars have long explained through culture alone” because he “sees other factors that might be at work.”

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