“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. They’ll 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.”

As I listened to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. make these remarks, I immediately began to cry. My tears soon turned into loud, sustained screams of rage. How could this person, the head of the nation’s public health organizations, be so clueless about neurodiversity?

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Kennedy’s statement not only exposed his utter ignorance but, perhaps more importantly, showed all of us his bigotry toward people with autism. It also demonstrated his contempt for the medical researchers who have investigated the roots of autism.

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Kennedy referred to a new CDC report showing that autism diagnoses have increased, affecting approximately 1 in every thirty-one 8-year-olds in the United States in 2022. Kennedy then announced a directive that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would examine “environmental exposures,” which he claimed were most likely contributing factors to the rise in cases.

Medical professionals, on the other hand, assert that this surge is primarily due to increased public awareness and diagnosis techniques. It also includes the expansion of medical definitions encompassing a wider and broader classification of the autism spectrum.

Kennedy opposes this explanation, calling it “indefensible.” He has claimed several times with absolutely no valid evidence that autism is caused by injecting infants and children with vaccines meant to prevent many childhood illnesses, such as measles and mumps.

His blanket statement about people with autism alerts us that he does not understand that autism is a spectrum disorder. This indicates that the condition and symptoms vary from person to person. While some people may need continual support for daily activities, others can function just fine independently. Others function somewhere in between.

Two of my beloved cousins, for example, are very high-functioning. One completed his four-year college degree a few years ago. Recently, he earned his master’s degree in library sciences, and he is now learning to drive a car so he can investigate job offers outside his area of residence. He will soon take the test for his driver’s license.

My other cousin earned his four-year college degree in computer science. He works as a computer science professional. He lives with his girlfriend in their own apartment. He even built his own computer from scratch, which he named after his hero and role model, Alan Turing.

Neither of my cousins is an enigma; they are individuals with different personalities, as are all others on the autism spectrum.  

Kennedy is an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist. Since he took over the Department of Health and Human Services, cases of once-defeated childhood illnesses like measles have begun spreading again throughout the nation. Virtually all of those infected were not previously vaccinated.

Though Kennedy has voiced some good ideas regarding children’s health issues, like eliminating processed foods from their diets and attempting to reduce childhood obesity, his insistence on spreading false and dangerous conspiracy theories and his lack of background in the field of public health should have automatically disqualified him from stepping into his critical role.

He has been at the forefront of the anti-vaccine movement and is a popular speaker to parents who are fighting their school districts to lift vaccine requirements.

Without any reliable scientific evidence, he has falsely asserted that vaccines in children can cause autism. A wide consensus of several expert health organizations, including the CDC and the World Health Organization, found no credible link between vaccines and autism.

Kennedy has said that HIV does not cause AIDS, that wireless 5G cellular network technology can cause brain damage and other ailments, that prescription antidepressant drugs cause mass shootings, and that unapproved and potentially lethal use of treatments like ivermectin can cure COVID-19.

I wish these life-saving vaccines that Kennedy and the anti-vax movement warn us against had been available much earlier. If they had been around when I was a child, I would not have suffered so much extreme pain,along with loss of schooling and socialization with my peers.  Most importantly, I would not have been at risk for developing disabling conditions or dying as a result of these childhood illnesses.

Science now can eliminate most of the major viral infections that have plagued humanity for millennia. Unfortunately, fear, misinformation, and the vast array of conspiracy theories stand in the way of this objective.

But right now, the only criterion for Secretary of Health and Human Services and for all of the cabinet secretaries in the current administration is complete and total loyalty to the president.  

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