The first issue of this newsletter shipped out on August 4, 2025. It didn’t take long – in fact, it took a week – before we had to face current events involving Robert F Kennedy the Lesser and write about his damaging claims and policy attempts. The first time we had to cover his bullshit, it was over reported plans to develop an “autism registry.” I wrote at the time:

This plan is especially of concern given Kennedy’s apparently unchanged perspective about people with disabilities over the years. From the Center for American Progress: Kennedy has said that ‘autism destroys families.’ He has supported putting people with mental health and substance use disabilities in labor camps called ‘wellness farms’ because he believed that there is an ‘over-reliance on medication and treatments.’ He said at his confirmation hearing that ‘a healthy person has a thousand dreams [while] a sick person has only one.’

Welp, here we are, one year later, and here we are, covering The Lesser RFK yet again. This time, the CDC, which falls under his purview as health secretary, has an apparent update to its vaccine page dated from July 22, 2026, that falsely asserts that “the statement ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim” because “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” [NB: the vaccine that started all of this, MMR, is not administered to infants.]

The Lesser shows his nonexistent scientific credentials here yet again, countenancing language that falls outside the practices of science. The practice of science is not about “proving a negative” (such as ruling out a “possibility”) but about formulating testable hypotheses and then testing them. If they are especially zeitgeisty, hypotheses are tested over and over and over again in as many ways as possible. If a hypothesized finding fails to emerge – as happened hundreds and hundreds of times with the various hypotheses tying vaccines to autism – then the hypothesis has failed to stand up to the test. Instead, the null hypothesis – that the hypothesized outcome does not occur – prevails.

A vaccines–autism hypothesis wasn’t considered much before the publication of one single case series involving a dozen children that later was shown to have been rooted in fraud and was completely retracted. A basic search on the key terms “autism” and “vaccines” in PubMed shows that before 1998, when that paper was published, vaccines had scarcely blipped the radar in a pairing with autism.

After that paper, researchers labored in a veritable industry around poking and jabbing at the minutest vaccine-related factors and any potential associations with a diagnosis of autism. They looked at all of the different childhood vaccines. They looked (and looked and looked and looked) at the preservative thimerosal (which was not even used in the MMR, the first vaccine subject to these claims). They looked (and looked and looked and looked) at aluminum (which boosts the immune response to the vaccine components and supports more robust immunity, the horror) and found – most recently last week – no association. They looked at everything they could think of, involving millions and millions of people all over the world, and found no associations.

Meanwhile, amidst this swirl of research, grifters with dollar signs in their eyes set up shop and hawked all manner of wild, unhinged “cures” for “vaccine-injured” autistic children, transferring loads of cash from panicked parents into their own pockets. Groups of them pulled together to shill on websites, hold woo-packed hate conferences, verbally attack autistic people and researchers engaged in authentic scientific studies, and generally behave with complete shamelessness while also making great bank from the people they targeted with their grift.

And it continues. Pretty much every newsletter I’ve written in the past year has covered the wretched revival of these malevolent agents as key players in the ongoing car crash that RFK the Lesser has orchestrated to replace our national public health.

He shows his ignorance about science and its ethical, intellectually honest practices with almost every word he says. That includes an immediately infamous meltdown he just had on CNN in a deeply unprofessional exchange with Dana Bash. And it includes the a-scientific statements made on the website of what was once a globally respected, premier national public health agency.

The practice of science doesn’t exist to prove something. It exists to test hypotheses in rigorous ways that produce evidence that supports or does not support the candidate hypothesis. There are lots of things that haven’t been “ruled out” as causative in autism, in large part because there wasn’t any reason to rule on them in the first place. And to reiterate: The only reason vaccines ever were “ruled in” was because of a fraudulent, retracted study that involved a dozen children and one man who turned out to be pretty good at drawing attention to himself. The combination of (1) autism framed as a horrorshow worse than death from infectious disease and (2) a self-aggrandizing showman indefatigably available for performative comment was catnip for the news media then and probably still would be today. Especially (2).

So vaccines did get the focus. For more than a quarter of a century. And unlike the infinite list of millions of other things unlinked to autism, vaccines have been subjected to intense global testing involving billions of dollars and millions of people and uncountable studies testing these hypotheses from every angle and coming up with zip.

The person who approved that language for the CDC website isn’t a scientist and doesn’t understand science. This hypothesis should have fallen into the special circle of hell where it belongs more than a decade ago. Instead, like the other malignant spirits in the antivaccine grifter circus, it has been resurrected and inflicted on our national public health yet again. As this year’s record annual number of US measles cases in this century shows, the damage will be immeasurable.

News you can use

• Autistic adults do not view early autism interventions favorably: When researchers ask autistic adults about them, these adults can recall being abused and mistreated. They understandably have "advocated for increased autism acceptance, not targeting unharmful autism traits but instead making the environment more accessible and educating the community around the child." Relatedly, some research has indicated that age of initiation is not linked to outcomes of interventions, and intensity may not be, either, as shown in a randomized trial of the Denver Early Start program (one of those “ABA-lite” NDBI interventions).

• As with gender-affirming care, neuroaffirming care can be a joyful and healthy way of validating a child’s way of being. Autistic parents with insights into the importance of this affirmative approach may take things a step further and develop environments that are best fit for an autistic child based on their own experiences. But neuroaffirmation grounded in “Western, Global-Northern frameworks … may not translate seamlessly across cultural and linguistic contexts” according to a study of how caregivers from different backgrounds experience life with an autistic child in England. One of the authors’ conclusions is that:

  … neuroaffirmation risks becoming exclusionary if used as a linguistic or ideological gatekeeping tool [and that there is a] need for culturally responsive, decolonial approaches to neuroaffirmation that preserve its core values while accommodating diverse ways of knowing, communicating, and seeking support.

• We had the World Cup and a lot of grown men rolling around dramatically on the pitch and occasionally behaving whinily. For serious field play, we also have the Genuine Cup, a global soccer competition held at Rice University in Houston, where athletes from 53 countries gather to compete with others who share a common experience of being autistic or having intellectual disability. The Cup ended this year on August 1.

• If you have the money, this neuroinclusive product guide lists some things to buy for creating a neuroinclusive environment for autistic people. Even if you don’t have the money, the ideas outlined in the guide also are worth considering for setting up such spaces.

• A medical records–based study has shown that autistic patients are less likely to receive cancer screening in a timely way, including for cervical, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer.

• A study comparing how autistic and non-autistics teens respond to the voices of peers suggests that autistic teens are less likely to tune in to peer voices and more likely to become even more attuned to their mother’s voice. No word on the voices of other parents.

• The Autism Society has a new resource in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers: Beyond Acceptance: Autism Inclusion and Equity—A Guide for Educators, Parents, and Students.

• A zillion news stories lately have promised to share some little secret to remaining healthy and happy with aging, and the little secret almost always turns out to be “maintain social connections.” For autistic people, though, research on being autistic and getting older is comparatively sparse. Perhaps surprising only people who think that no autistic person is interested in human connection, researchers have conducted a study linking social connectedness to shaping quality of life for autistic people. They write: “Tailored, lifespan-focused support is needed to promote sustained social connection and foster well-being” for autistic adults.

• ASAN has an upcoming webinar on parenting, which we are super excited to highlight and hope you’re super excited to attend.

People

• Tuna Tunca is an autistic swimmer from Turkey. This summer, in the third stage of a marathon swimming challenge known as the Ocean’s 7, he completed a tough crossing of a notorious sea channel connecting Northern Ireland and Scotland. Reuters reports that he had to endure “14-degree Celsius water [about 57 degrees Fahrenheit], strong tidal currents, cold weather and large numbers of jellyfish.” Tunca’s mother noticed her son’s interest in water when he was a toddler just recently diagnosed with autism and following that lead, encouraged him to take up swimming.

• The Transmitter has produced a five-part podcast on the life and experiences of autistic researcher Tempest McDonald, who rocked the establishment with work suggesting that the National Institutes of Health discriminates against autistic researchers. Her own life story and that of her autistic family members across three generations is unpacked across the five episodes, as well. All episodes are available in transcript form. There are a lot of elements here that spoke to me as I read them, including her experience with hyperthyroidism and a connective tissue condition and her use of a “war dial” as a metaphor for the heightened guardedness and threat scanning that people with trauma in their background can experience. [A CW: A representative from Autism Speaks is one of the (many) people interviewed.]

Thanks for reading, and here’s to sustained social connection and well-being.

Got something autism-related to share with us? Send it along to [email protected].

Got a comment? We’d love to hear from you, so drop us a line below. Please note that comments are moderated per TPGA guidelines.