Kennedy promises to find environmental causes of autism | Hacker News Reader

Kennedy promises to find environmental causes of autism

politico.com

Ugh. If I believed for a second this was a good faith effort to actually do so, I'd support it. Our previous next door neighbors’ kid was nonverbal and the parents told us a lot about their very challenging life. They made the best of a bad situation, and loved their kid dearly, but it was rough all around. This wasn't autism in the sense of “high paid tech worker without social graces”, but “if something happens to us, will our child die before help comes?”. If that were treatable, let’s do it.

I do not believe for a second that this is a good faith effort.

What do you believe is his secret agenda?

Fully hypothetical: It would be ironic if they ended up finding a relationship between autism and the overall stress, mysery, and dopamine hamster wheels that are causing the assortment of other mental health isssues.

Because I have a feeling they want to find an "environmental cause" only if it's not the one that is the driving engine of the economy.

It could very well be that toddlers that were prone to autistic behaviour were socialised out of it due to more social interaction historically. It could also be that the same chemical that kills bees is responsible for malformed brains. I applaud all research avenues.

If I lost the car keys, I don’t promise my partner to find them in the kitchen.

Clearly, RFK is either confidently stupid, or confident he can eventually produce and put something vaguely resembling a key in the kitchen in the alloted timeframe.

I would be surprised if they don't already have the document drafted up and are just... engineering the results they want to justify the conclusion.

He's going to blame vaccines.

Because he’s a dumbass lol.

I'm reminded of the comment by a republican adviser, during the second bush presidency, critiquing an interviewer by saying ~ "you're too reality based, we're making reality". The odd thing about this claim that autism is rising, diagnoses sure, but don't any of the adults old enough to remember, remember all the people who we just labelled as strange. I've got a feeling we've got rising numbers of people diagnosed with autism and a corresponding reduction in people labelled and ostracised as non-specific 'strange'

If the increase is due to better diagnostics, then we should see a plateau after a period of time.

A few years ago, I remember hearing reactionary podcasters panicking about trans identity propagating by "social contagion" {their phrase}. The word "contagion" sets up an awful frame around this. I think instead you could come at this from an angle that recognises that there is a kind of social and internalised Overton window, a set of ideas that people are willing to express, or even allow themselves to think. As we increasingly see people living good full lives expressing and owning aspects of themselves that had once been heavily stigmatised - there may be a dynamic beyond just better diagnosis - there may be an uptick of people willing to be more honest about an aspect of themselves that they may otherwise have sought to hide or suppress, others might have been able to avoid even self-awareness. If that is the case - just as there will never be a person who matches the reference human genome - there may be no upper limit to the fraction of people who find some aspect of themselves that extends outside the venn diagram circle of neurotypical.

Quite - it's not as though sexual identity has always been a strict binary between male and female. Other cultures have explicitly recognised different gender identities for ages which makes me think that it's part of the Western Christian cultural identity to only recognise two genders. e.g. Thai culture has a number of different recognised sexual identities and of course, India has the Hijra.

To my mind, people who are anti-trans identities are simply trying to exert control over others rather than having a generous nature and accepting that different people are different.

Trump claimed he could stop the Ukraine war in a day. He wasn't either of those things. Ok, possibly the first, but he knew he could get away with it. In politics you don't have to do what you promise. It's true now more than ever.

Same.

As an autistic person: please no.

But I guess that's just a part of the war on science this administration is waging. Getting rid of the population overrepresented in sciences will get them there fast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Shudders

That was one figure I haven't yet remembered when making analogies to describe what's going on.

But it's so apt. And Lysenko was successful.

AFAIK, there are several reasons for the increase in autism diagnosis, but a few key ones people forgot about...

1. DSM IV, the old way, had a separate diagnosis for many autism related disorders. Think Asperger's, pdd-nos, etc. When DSM V was released, many separate diagnosis were umbrella'd in to autism spectrum disorder. The old disorders simply disappeared and are not made any more.

2. Getting an Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis opens up a huge amount of insurance and educational leeway. You go from qualifying for general therapy to intensive support therapy, classes, and more. At school, with the diagnosis, you get expanded help for kids that are really struggling. So there is a strong will created by parents and educators to try to get that diagnosis. When you are struggling, this extra support can really help everyone, the kids, teachers, and parents.

These two points alone may account for a lot of the increases we are seeing. I don't know why they are never mentioned by media and the skeptics.

"Kennedy also claimed most autism cases are severe before citing a statistic from the report that said 25 percent of children with autism are nonverbal. HHS did not respond to a question as to whether the 25 percent statistic accounts for all severe cases."

The tricky thing about a (probably misleading) statistic like that is 0% of the autistic people I know are nonverbal, but I suppose if I know them in any real capacity, they have to be verbal. Anyway, this freakout about autism seems overblown to me. Can any RFK championers explain this one to me?

> this freakout about autism seems overblown to me.

That's the point. It's a distraction with no possible verifiable result. His supporters will see this on the news and say: "Wow, Kennedy is finally really doing something about that scary Autism stuff, he's great!"

At some point he can just misrepresent some existing research and blame microplastics (or something else) for autism and proudly talk about this in the media.

There was a CDC report recently that defined "profound autism" as "nonverbal, were minimally verbal, or had an intelligence quotient <50".

They found roughly 25% of kids diagnosed by age 8 fitted this category.

This category seems to be growing, but not as fast as autism disgnosis generally.

The obvious statistical issue here is that to have received a diagnosis by age 8 you need to be showing more severe symptoms.

This shows up in the fact that these kids are "more likely to be female, from racial and ethnic minority groups, of low socioeconomic status" compared with kids with autism generally because the ability to get diagnosed for milder forms is harder for those groups (more mildly autistic girls seem to mask their social symptoms better than boys, which has historically led to them being undercounted and unrepresented in the common stereotype).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00333549231163551

> He promised to look at all possibilities “agnostically” and “follow the science no matter what it says.”

Great talk! Let’s check in on the walk in a year.

I feel like it's important to share the full quote here, since it seems various news sites are doing an excellent job of trying to sanewash his full statements. [1] [2]

> Kennedy said "these are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."

Frankly if I said what I really thought of RFK Jr I'd likely be flagged instantly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaNhUvJyWUo

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/16/nx...

Kennedy already knows the answer, this is just a pretense to justify his unscientific views. No real scientific research on a topic like this can be done on that insane timeline (until September). And of course he put a well-known crank in charge of that study.

They'll blame vaccines, and maybe some other random environmental factors that fit their existing worldview.

Finding the environment causes of RFK might be better...

Could it be microplastic pollution? There's certainly a lot of it about and they get into mothers' milk and human brains.

Not surprised. The whole point of this administration is to flood all channels with disinformation and make people distrust everyone. That's the whole point of anti-intellectualism and anti-establishment. Increase paranoia and distrust, isolate and prepare for war, while giving money to the "strong leader" who will lead them.

This man role plays as an idiot but for years he openly spoke of his belief that there isn't enough room for everyone on this planet.

I'm concerned that this may be the core value of many in this administration.

They act like climate change deniers and vaccine deniers etc but I don't think they're quite the kind of idiots they pretend to be. They're very ignorant yes... but in a sick, cunning way that the media fails to appreciate or take seriously.

From the BBC coverage:

> Kennedy has also alarmed some over his hiring of David Geier, who has been described by some as a conspiracy theorist, to research vaccines and autism, and on Thursday Democrats in the US House of Representatives wrote to HHS "to express our urgent concern" over the selection of "a biased and discredited individual".

> Geier is a leading vaccine sceptic who was fined by the state of Maryland for practicing medicine without a medical degree or licence and prescribing dangerous treatments to autistic children.

I think it was this guy, or his dad who was also a kook doctor, that was giving puberty blockers to autistic kids without their parents' knowledge or consent, which is a wild coincidence given other recent culture war controversies about that medication.

Didn't he say vaccines cause autism?

For the sake of argument, let’s say Trump won on the issue of the economy and “fixing it” to work for the work class who has largely been ignored politically by congress.

That is a one issue voter, and at least the folks I’ve seen around here focus on the economics, so it’s relevant for our interests to focus on that.

This. This is the problem with the one issue vote. Trump is, being charitable, not very good at running a business, let alone a country, and so his choices to run the various federal agencies that make up the government will invariably be bad. We’ve already seen the effects of this “management philosophy”, and will continue to see the effects in the form of actual harm to the folks that live in the United States (and harm to folks around the world, but one thing at a time).

The myopia of the voter, whether it’s here on HN or elsewhere, causes this harm. I don’t know how to fix this issue, because a one issue voter is notoriously difficult to reason with, but it’s what we are facing, whether that issue is the economy, abortion, or trans-fearmongering.

  We’ve already seen the effects of this “management philosophy”

In only 3 months in office :) peak efficiency.

RFK Jr is a crank, misinformation peddler, and conspiracy theorist as well-documented and referenced on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr .

So this needs a big pinch of salt. Especially as the "vaccines cause autism" crowd is a base of his.

> "One of the things that I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that the autism prevalence increases — the relentless increases — are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria,”

If I remember rightly, doesn't this explain the effect at least partly? The question is how much of an effect is there after this is taken into account. I'm guessing we don't have a solid answer to that - if RFK's funding leads to one then that's a silver lining I guess. Nevertheless, is it a leap to go from there to environmental effects like vaccines and toxins? What if it's the amount of screen time, social media, or changes to education that are causing autism?

> Kennedy also claimed most autism cases are severe before citing a statistic from the report that said 25 percent of children with autism are nonverbal.

As the article notes, it's a sleight of hand to conflate "nonverbal" with severe. Presumably there are nonverbal people without autism. Moreover, does the cited study account for selection bias in autism severity?

In my lifetime a high functioning person with autism has gone from Asperger’s to PDD-NOS to ASD to Level 1 (some support needed) ASD. The levels are quite new. It used to be that only those with the most disability would be diagnosed. Now there’s a much larger amount who are on the spectrum - it’s insanely prevalent and has been, generationally. I know tons of autistic ppl whose parents are autistic and not diagnosed - their kids know because they’re diagnosed, and the “quirks” of the family are often just autistic traits.

Jeez, what an asshole for trying to figure out a major problem, amirite? What is this place? If you took his name off it, hopefully at least some of you would recognize that this is something we want people trying to do.

I think people want better understanding of autism and better ways to treat severe cases of it, but many people aren’t convinced this guy should lead that effort.

He speaks about it with worrying naivety, and has spoken about treating other problems with very unorthodox methods.

In short, it worries people for kids with autism. This man is not a doctor. He doesn’t understand autism. He can do a lot of harm.

> Jeez, what an asshole for trying to figure out a major problem, amirite?

Maybe people are treating RFK Jr. as an "asshole" for reasons other than "trying to figure out a major problem" (which is arguably not what he will do).

> What is this place? If you took his name off it, hopefully at least some of you would recognize that this is something we want people trying to do.

When it comes to a public figure who has spoken (lied [1][2]) for years about autism and vaccines, you can't accept the person's stated goals in isolation from their historical words and present beliefs. It's also naive to ignore the wider impacts of anti-vax rhetoric, including where Kennedy is not involved. For example [3]:

> Tommey then turned to the MMR vaccine, asking if the mother still felt that it was a dangerous vaccine after her daughter's death from the disease, prefacing the question by claiming to have seen a lot of "injury" from the vaccine. "Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles?" she asked.

> "Yes, absolutely; we would absolutely not take the MMR. The measles wasn't that bad, and they got over it pretty quickly," the mother replied, speaking again of her four living children.

> "So," Tommey continued, "when you see the fearmongering in the press, which is what we want to stop, that is why we want to get the truth out, what do you say to the parents who are rushing out, panicking, to get the MMR for their 6-month-old baby because they think that that child is going to die of measles because of what happened to your daughter?"

> Through a translator, who spoke low German, the parents' primary language, her response was that she would still say, "Don't do the shots. There [are] doctors that can help with measles. [Measles is] not as bad as they're making it out to be."

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/scicheck-what-rfk-jr-gets-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.#Anti-vac...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/anti-vaccine-group-fo...

Lancet retracted the MMR-Autism article 15 years ago, but only after it did 12 years of damage by being out there.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/

Guess where the Dr. who wrote it worked? (hint, they had a competing, non-multivalent vaccine)

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