Mark your calendar for September, exact date to be determined.
Sometime that month, there is going to be a historic press conference, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the boob whom the squatter currently occupying the White House picked to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
As Kennedy put it: “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.” In response, the squatter crowed:
There will be no bigger news conference than that, if you can come up with that answer, where you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot, but something’s causing it.
It’s true that autism rates in children have risen from one in 150 in the year 2000 to one in thirty-one in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Kennedy’s wild goose chase and the squatter’s cheering from the sidelines just goes to show what fools they both are—not just about autism but disability, too.
The Autism Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) calls Kennedy’s claim “untrue, impossible, and ableist,” saying HHS clearly “intends to produce rigged and fraudulent research that supports Kennedy and Trump’s pre-existing beliefs in a connection between autism and vaccines.”
ASAN is referring to public statements that Kennedy has made professing his belief that vaccines can cause autism. On the group’s website, a statement reads:
In spite of decades of replicable research proving that this is not true, some people, like Kennedy, continue to perpetuate the myth. These lies do very real harm to the autistic community . . . . By working to prevent childhood vaccination, he effectively communicates the message that living as an autistic person is a worse fate than dying of measles or pertussis.
Like others who are knowledgeable about this issue, ASAN is not surprised to see the diagnosis rate for autism increase, citing “better recognition and diagnosis of autism across the United States.”
But ASAN objects to more than just Kennedy’s efforts to pinpoint some other reason for the increase in autism diagnoses. As the group said in a recent web post:
It is disgusting that Secretary Kennedy is calling for efforts he believes will reduce the amount of autistic people who exist, whether through a ‘cure’ or ‘prevention.’ Our existence is not a ‘cataclysm,’ as he called autism.
Rather, the group continued,
autistic and other disabled people belong in our society. To claim otherwise, and to speak as though our existence is some kind of calamity that must be eliminated, is a form of eugenics.
I remember that, back in my younger days, autistic people were lumped into the category of “retarded.” That’s the lazy diagnostic Siberia to which certain disabled people were banished so that they could more easily be written off as hopeless and denied resources that would allow them to be included.
Since then, our collective view of what autism is and the value of autistic people has evolved greatly. What looks to Kennedy and the squatter like an alarming increase in the occurrence of autism is probably just a more accurate understanding of the prevalence of autism.
It’s just another example of how the squatter and his henchmen are trying to drag us all in reverse.
Mike Ervine is a Disability rights activist and writer, “expressing pain through sarcasm since 2010.”