I don't know why I keep telling you . . .

. . . that Robert Kennedy Jr. is completely full of shit, but it does bear repeating. He has promised that this month -- yes, September 2025 -- he has going to announce that he has confirmed "the cause of autism." We can all guess what that will turn out to be, based on his past pronouncements and the cast of fellow lunatics he has hired to make the determination.

 

Allison Parshall in Scientific American provides a good, concise review of what we do and don't know about autism and its causes, and no, there isn't just one. In fact, she saves the most important information for last but I'll give it to you up front. There is no such thing as autism. The word is a label for people who have certain traits in common but who vary enormously in the degree to which they manifest these traits, and whether they have other traits that are sometimes associated with the label. They may indisputably have disabilities that impair their performance in school, social relationships, and employability. Some have profound disabilities and cannot perform basic activities of daily living, others have mild disabilities that they can overcome, and others don't consider themselves to be disabled at all but just unusual.

 

It happens to be true of many of the diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, aka DSM, the Bible of psychiatric/psychological diagnosis, that they probably do not in fact represent a single condition with the same etiology, i.e. causation. Once we know the etiology, the condition leaves the realm of psychiatry and enters the realm of neurology. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression -- these probably aren't actually single diseases at all, with a single identifiable cause. The same goes for autism.

 

In order to study autism, it is necessary to classify people as having it or not having it, whether we like it or not. When researchers do that, they find it runs in families -- there is clearly a genetic component. But it's only about 50% "heritable," and there isn't any single gene that determines it, but many interacting genes. Furthermore, not everyone who has the same genetic pattern develops autism. Genes put people at higher risk, but there are environmental factors that interact with the genetic endowment to produce the condition. One environmental factor that has been definitively ruled out is vaccination.  Large scale studies of hundreds of thousands of children, in the U.S. and Denmark, have proved that there is no association at all between vaccination and autism. We know that.

 

Until RFK came along and started eliminating their funding, many investigators were trying to learn more about the causes of the multiple conditions called autism. There are some known associations, although it's hard to sort out causes from confounders. For example, there is an association with taking acetaminophen during pregnancy, but it may be that mothers who have fevers and aches are more likely to take it, so it's not the pills themselves that are the problem. And obviously we can't experiment on people to find out. There are potential strategies for sorting all this out better, but it's going to take time and adequate funding for legitimate scientists, of which the people Kennedy has charged with the problem are not examples. 

 

There are so many outrages right now it's impossible to keep track of them, but this is so egregious and so morally depraved, as well as idiotic, that I just can't leave it alone. Making RFK the secretary of health and human services was a disgraceful, shameful, evil act, senator.