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A number of otherwise skeptical senators took at face value the pledge by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Senate hearings in January to “follow the science” on issues related to the causes of disease in the U.S., helping him receive confirmation as secretary of Health and Human Services.
As he demonstrated last week at his very first news conference as the government’s top health care official, he was blowing smoke.
The topic was what he described as an “alarming ... epidemic” of autism, supposedly documented by a new report by the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
His advice was to ignore what decades of scientific research have established as contributors to the reported increase in autism prevalence. These include genetic factors; the ever-broadening definition of autism itself, now known as autism spectrum disorder, or ASD; and vastly improved screening programs nationwide.
The inescapable conclusion is that Kennedy’s HHS is in the grip of a pseudoscience revolution in which misinformation and disinformation are ascendant. The cost to scientific research generally and to households caring for those with chronic conditions such as ASD is incalculable.
Kennedy’s words left much of the autism community aghast. At both his news conference and an accompanying HHS news release, “Kennedy repeated false claims that autism was a ‘preventable’ ‘epidemic’” and that the CDC report’s findings “could not be explained by improved access to screening,” stated the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. ASAN accused Kennedy of having “cherry-picked” data and having misinterpreted basic science.