Mad (not a) scientist

Donald Trump is insane, as it appears some of the plutocrats who gloated over his election win are now realizing. I particularly commend the first few comments on the linked post, which are obviously correct. But I want to turn our attention to the equally insane person he has installed, with the Republican co-conspirators in the senate, as secretary of HHS. 

CNN  —  The US Department of Health and Human Services has launched a “massive testing and research effort” involving hundreds of scientists worldwide that will determine “what has caused the autism epidemic” by September, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday. But experts expressed doubt that the research would be done in good faith, given Kennedy’s history of linking autism and vaccines despite strong evidence that the two are not connected.

“We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world,” he told President Donald Trump in a Cabinet meeting. “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”

Obviously, NIH already funds research into autism, including epidemiological studies to try to identify risk factors. CDC is also already, right now, conducting the Study to Explore Early Development (SEED) , a large-scale epidemiological study to identify risk factors. What we know so far is that there appears to have a strong genetic component -- it tends to occur in siblings -- and that having older parents, and complications of birth, are also risk factors. 

 

Also, there probably is no epidemic of autism at all. While the diagnosed prevalence has increased over the years, that's probably because the definition of autism spectrum disorder has become more inclusive, and because of greatly increased efforts to diagnose it. Since a diagnosis qualifies people for (quite expensive) special education services, parents have an incentive to get one. 

 

Either way, regardless of whether the true prevalence has increased, one thing we do know with absolute certainty is that it has nothing to do with vaccination. However, Kennedy does not want to find the cause(s) of autism, he wants to prove that it is caused by vaccines. Philosophers struggle with what is called the "demarcation problem." How do we distinguish between science and pseudo-science? It can be difficult in some cases but one way you can definitely distinguish is if the purported scientist has already decided what the answer is and is just determined to prove it. 

 

I guess we could call it Columbo science. Lieutenant Columbo, for those of you too young to know, would always instantly intuit who the murder was (the audience was already in on it), so his challenge was not to solve the whodunit, but to prove it. In the TV show, he was always right, but that's not how the real world works. One of the best-known pitfalls of scientific research, a frequent cause of faulty conclusions, is observer bias -- if the investigator wants to get a certain answer, there are myriad ways, not necessarily involving conscious fraud, to mis-measure, mis-record, and mis-interpret your data. I expect Kennedy will get the answer he wants, if he pays enough for it, and cherry picks results. But it will be a kind of lie.