Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.
In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.
“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.
“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”
So taxpayers dollars will be syphoned away from government programs that can actually help people in trouble, and will instead be spent on some dangerous bullshit orchestrated by Captain Brainworm and his paranoid dipshit lackeys.
Marvelous. 🙄
While they make money off the diversion.
the link has already been disproven. It would be interesting to see if these idiots can pass a first grade science class.
And (indirectly) on financial breaks for the mega rich and other paranoid investigations into govt agencies, all while shooting US debt through the roof so fast a large fraction will go to paying interest to… more rich people. Indefinitely. Even after Trump.
How’s that sound?
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I would MUCH rather my THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS in Tax Refunds be used for THIS then for ME!
“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”
Yeah cause no one who’s been diagnosed with ASD can look at their parents or aunts, uncles and grandparents and say “wow that’s where it comes”
My mum collects felt mice, gets overwhelmed extremely easily and has pretty obvious autistic meltdowns. My dad has clear ASD social interaction issues, will bore you for hours about his special interests. My brother also demonstrates signs. My grandad had a entire room dedicated to his train set and more books and videos about trains than I could count.
But, no I’m the first person with autism in my family. Clearly it’s vaccines and not genetic.
Self, brother and daughter.
I’m a techno-janitor (IT geek).
My daughter is… Odd. I’m a fun way. Cheerful girl.
My brother is a principal scientist and working on physics in biological systems… Literally working to save the world.
Pretty sure my mother was to some degree. We’re all different types but there’s definitely commonality.
Only knew the man a few years but pretty sure my great grandfather was on the spectrum.
It’s almost like society just ignored or shunned the details.
“That’s just weird ol Tim” etc…
Pretty sure Einstein and a few other super nerds would be classed today as well.
Screw RFK with a rusty hacksaw.
Can confirm, my whole family, from both sides is fucked up as well. I could clearly see ADHD and ASD signs in many of my family members, some of them born in the 20s. But yeah, it’s probably the vaccines as well!
Oh cool, so when are they getting to microplastics and coal pollutants? You know, the things that are actually confirmed already to fuck you up?
So vaccines cause autism, now let’s find evidence for that
RFK junioi in a nutshell, and also an anti scientific (and as such, an anti realism) standpoint
Idk why I’m wasting my time, but
” go back 25 years, autism was almost non-exist." Yea, we just started these vaccine things 25 years ago… Fucking morons.
I assume you’re being sarcastic but I have to check, you don’t actually think we only started vaccines 25 years ago, right?
Yes I was being sarcastic. I’m not sure when the first vaccine was made, but I’d guess at least 100 years ago.
Depending on how you measure, it’s more than 200+ years.
You might think, “What’s the harm? They will waste some money and some time, but they won’t find a link because their premise is flawed. We know there isn’t a link between autism and vaccines, so they’re just going to spin their wheels, right?”
Ask yourself, do you think Trump and RFK Jr would ever admit they were wrong? That they didn’t find the evidence to support their theories? Trump used a sharpie to change a hurricane map because he mistakenly included the wrong state. They will find a link between vaccines and autism. A link we already know doesn’t exist. A link that one doctor fabricated and then almost immediately was debunked fifty years ago. And these jackasses are going to fabricate some more fake evidence to send the crazies further off the cliff.
Evidence? EVIDENCE? They don’t need evidence.
House panel concludes that COVID-19 pandemic came from a lab leak
The committee’s 520-page report, released on 2 December, offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case
I can’t believe we went through covid to have officials write up bullshit like this. More false agendas.
Yeah it’s pretty easy to do really bad science and get whatever result you want. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
People who got vaccines sometimes got autism. People without vaccines sometimes get autism.
RFK: We can conclusively say that vaccines cause autism since people who’ve had vaccines have developed autism!
You don’t “get” autism like it’s a cold, you are autistic and sometimes you get diagnosed, and sometimes you don’t. We as a society have more educated people in places like schools to help identify kids way more than when Trump was having his dad pay for his dumbass to make it through school. It’s just like his COVID solution of, if you don’t test the numbers go down.
And why does nobody in the media push back on these jackasses to show their work? You make claims about millions of people you better have receipts, but of course these two intellectually-challenged white guys with money just get their every word quoted and published without any push back.
I know that, but that’s not how these antivax people see it. They think you can get it.
The thing about the “vaccines = autism” conspiracy theories is that we have them because of a conspiracy theory. Or more just a conspiracy.
Andrew Wakefield, the one who became prominent for publishing the idea in the medical community, pushed out his shoddy study because he wanted to replace the MMR vaccine with his own vaccine.
So plenty of people think that vaccines cause autism because they believed someone who (believed someone who believed someone who […]) wanted to sell a different vaccine.
Someone who wants to believe won’t be convinced. But I have seen this bit of info cause “vaccine skeptics” to take pause.
I’m not from the US but it’s gotten to the point where reading this kind of news I just give an involuntary slightly manic chuckle followed by an “…ah fuck”.
Every single The Guardian post I’ve seen today has been some rage bait with a “, Trump says” on the end of it. Stop promoting the guardian.
Massive studies in Europe have already shown an inverse correlation exists, though.
More of an inverse causation, but the helpfulness of certain autistic traits in scientific fields does mean that in a sense, autism causes vaccines.
“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”
And I won’t stop until everyone is autistic
The results of their research are going to show that there is no connection, and they’re going to say “ah, I guess we were wrong”. Right? RIGHT?!
The results of their research will definitely show there IS a connection. Keep in mind, their camp includes such doctors as the one who believes women’s reproductive health issues are caused by having sex with demons in your sleep.
They’ll absolutely find researchers who will give them whatever ‘data’ and ‘findings’ they want.
“They tainted our research! The deep state is well entrenched! “
Republicans would rather you be dead than autistic.
Nope.
They want to go back to it not being labeled, and no social assistance.
Lots of Republican parents refuse to get kids tested because they believe “the label follows them forever”.
They want to deny reality because reality makes them uncomfortable
It requires a lot of magical thinking to be this asinine, it’s almost impressive.
Alright, I went back a few decades and they’re currently making a movie with a character named Biff based on Trump who takes power and turns the world into a gaudy hellscape.
