An obscure government advisory group helps steer hundreds of millions of taxpayer research dollars. RFK Jr. has handed it over to the least reputable people in the field.
It's helpful that you point out that ASD affects up to 3% of children. Now ask yourself how much you've heard about prevention and treatment. Search Pubmed. It's weirdly sparse and there's basically nothing on prevention. It's really bizarre when looked at compared to the decades long focus on breast cancer and HIV-AIDs prevention and treatment. I'm very grateful that RFK has raised the focus on ASD. Will he make mistakes? No doubt. But at least mainstream journalists and others are at talking more about it and hopefully the research dollars follow.
You "prevent" autism the same way you "prevent" Downs syndrome, which is to just try to be the sort of parents who seem statistically unlikely to have it. But it's hard to double-blind being 40 years old as a dad.
Oh, you can also "prevent" Downs syndrome through abortion. I wonder if they'll come up with a neonatal test for autism so it can be "prevented" that way, too.
> I'm very grateful that RFK has raised the focus on ASD. Will he make mistakes? No doubt
I'm very grateful that Andrew Wakefield has raised the focus on ASD. Will he make mistakes? No doubt
> But at least mainstream journalists and others are at talking more about it and
Guess what happened to NIH funding for autism under RFK?
Go on, take a guess. We can wait.
...
Did you guess "he cut the funding so that there was $31 million less funding in Jan-Mar of 2025 versus Jan-Mar of 2024"? That was amazingly precise, good job.
I looked at part of the PhD thesis of one of his appointees...it was bad:
https://thescamdoctor.substack.com/p/toby-rogers-phd-thesis-is-wrong-about?r=6hgshq
The msm hitjob slop of RFK is among the most sloppy
Do words mean anything any more?
It's helpful that you point out that ASD affects up to 3% of children. Now ask yourself how much you've heard about prevention and treatment. Search Pubmed. It's weirdly sparse and there's basically nothing on prevention. It's really bizarre when looked at compared to the decades long focus on breast cancer and HIV-AIDs prevention and treatment. I'm very grateful that RFK has raised the focus on ASD. Will he make mistakes? No doubt. But at least mainstream journalists and others are at talking more about it and hopefully the research dollars follow.
You "prevent" autism the same way you "prevent" Downs syndrome, which is to just try to be the sort of parents who seem statistically unlikely to have it. But it's hard to double-blind being 40 years old as a dad.
Oh, you can also "prevent" Downs syndrome through abortion. I wonder if they'll come up with a neonatal test for autism so it can be "prevented" that way, too.
> I'm very grateful that RFK has raised the focus on ASD. Will he make mistakes? No doubt
I'm very grateful that Andrew Wakefield has raised the focus on ASD. Will he make mistakes? No doubt
> But at least mainstream journalists and others are at talking more about it and
People were talking about autism just fine for decades before this. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=autism&year_start=1980&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false It's not the case that no one has ever thought "hey maybe we should do something about this?" until now.
The NIH is the biggest funder,
2016: $232 million
2019: $296 million
2023: $306 million
Guess what happened to NIH funding for autism under RFK?
Go on, take a guess. We can wait.
...
Did you guess "he cut the funding so that there was $31 million less funding in Jan-Mar of 2025 versus Jan-Mar of 2024"? That was amazingly precise, good job.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/trump-administration-cut-autism-related-research-by-26-so-far-2025-2025-05-16/
Did you also guess that 50 autism-related studies that were underway had their funding cut, mid-program?
https://njtoday.news/2025/12/29/rfk-jr-vowed-to-find-the-cause-of-autism-then-shut-down-research-trying-to-do-that/
If you actually want research dollars into autism, you should be cursing RFK's name every time it is uttered.