• The COOT-WH apparently has latched on to the idea that his legacy should be as the president who “cured autism” and that “scaling back” vaccines is the way to lock in that legacy. A related executive order is reportedly in the works and expected to be published this week. The COOT-WH’s legacy will be a lot of things, many of them related to eugenics, and trying to destroy public health to erase autistic people based on debunked grifter ideas is definitely one of them.
• Uta Frith, who is still yammering on in an apparent effort to remain relevant, this time in the form of a commentary published in an academic journal. Many thanks to the UK’s National Autistic Society for their response to yet another salvo from the avatar of bad ideas about autism. Frith’s claims not only do a disservice to autistic people for reasons we’ve addressed previously but they also dismiss the thorough work diagnosticians do and all the hoops autistic people must clear for a diagnosis. As the NAS notes:

Diagnosis involves a specialist team of clinicians who must all agree that a person meets a specific set of medical criteria. These criteria only change following a lengthy process which involves careful review of all the latest research and thinking. The process from start to finish of going through an autism diagnostic process can be long and intense, and the wait can take many years.

• RFK the Lesser and Mehmet Oz, aka the Beavis and Butthead of our national health service leadership. TGPA’s own Shannon Rosa is quoted in this Guardian coverage about the administration’s abuse of power against states it perceived as insufficiently in thrall to their politics. Amid B&B’s baseless accusations of fraud by in-home family care workers, Rosa notes:

For many families, she said, the program is a lifeline, allowing them to provide care themselves or hire a caregiver for part of the day. If they lose that, families will be plunged into economic precarity, with caregivers forced to take on additional jobs while their disabled and ill family members go without care. “Without this, people become homeless. They lose their income. They lose their stability. Whatever tiny safety net they had is gone,” Rosa said. “It’s just cruel.”

As a law professor notes in the piece, “… federal officials haven’t specified what exactly is fraudulent … They’re just suspending the funds, and then shifting over to the states the burden to come in and prove that they’ve done everything possible to eliminate what the federal government said is fraud, but they haven’t shown much by way of proof of that.” Another expert told the Guardian that home-based services cost less than institutional care.

News you can use

• From our editors: Here is an excellent conversation with researcher Vikram Jaswal about research into successful AAC users and the need for even more research despite the reactionary responses from some clinician organizations. The full transcript is available here.
• Circumcision is not linked to a child’s later autism diagnosis, whether the link was assessed “by parent report of medical professional diagnosis or validated instruments measuring autism-related traits and behavior.”
• A Black autistic sociologist at Cambridge has resigned after various accusations of plagiarism and reported inaccuracies in a book describing his life experiences. As a (former?) academic, I am not going to defend behaviors of which he is accused because if the claims are true, these behaviors are not acceptable. But I will say this as a (former?) academic: a whole lot of white male academics with no declared disabilities have done these things and more, confirmed infractions that are no different from and often are worse (criminally!) than those Jason Arday is accused of committing. But for some strange reason, the media coverage of these bad actors over the years has been, at most, a blip. I can list a dozen of these dudes off the top of my head, but a search on these names shows limited coverage of a pretty staid variety, mostly at inside-academic-baseball outlets. Meanwhile, Arday is the target of so much gleeful, pseudosalacious coverage from the usual suspects that should he find himself needing it, he is already living rent-free in the heads of many journalists and editors. The Telegraph alone has committed thousands and thousands of words to this single academic, as have some trash tabloids, the outlet’s not-so-strange bedfellows. This entire situation started with accusations from disingenuous racists and eugenicists and persists relentlessly in the public sphere thanks to journalists and editors who mysteriously find some of the same aspects salient. As Ann Memmott notes in a LinkedIn post, their work speaks to a pretty committed audience.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to not being a racist, ableist, eugenicist prig.

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