US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filled an autism committee with friends, associates, and former colleagues who believe that autism is caused by vaccines. Autism advocates are now worried the group could pave the way for dangerous pseudoscientific treatments going mainstream.
Last week, Kennedy announced an entirely new line-up for the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that recommends what types of autism research the government should fund and provides guidance on the services the autism community requires. The group is typically composed of experts in the area of autism research, along with policy experts and autistic people advocating for their own community.
In a statement announcing the new panel, which includes no previous members, Kennedy claimed that he has appointed “the most qualified experts—leaders with decades of experience studying, researching, and treating autism.” But health experts and autism advocates strongly disagree, and a review of the new members of the group suggests that Kennedy appointed members of the anti-vaccine community who claim vaccines cause autism—despite there being no evidence to prove such a claim.
Among those appointed last week was Daniel Rossignol, a doctor who was sued for alleged fraud after prescribing a 7-year-old autistic child a debunked and dangerous treatments. Tracy Slepcevic, an appointee who Kennedy calls a “dear friend,” offers exposure to a wide range of bogus autism cures at her annual Autism Health Summit, including one that involves the injection of animal stem cells into children. Another appointee, Toby Rogers, has claimed that “no thinking person vaccinates” and that vaccine makers are “poisoning children.” Rogers is a fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research and has also called vaccines “one of the greatest crimes in human history.” He has written articles for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy that has linked autism to vaccines.
Other appointees are no different: John Gilmore founded the Autism Action Network and has said that his autistic son is “vaccine injured.” Gilmore is also the founder of the New York chapter of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense group. Ginger Taylor, the former director of the Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice, has publicly claimed that many autism cases involve “vaccine causation.” Elizabeth Mumper has written for Children’s Health Defense and is a senior fellow with the Independent Medical Alliance, a group formerly known as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance that has promoted ivermectin as a treatment for COVID.
Mumper tells WIRED that her decades of work as a pediatrician and in the field of autism qualified her to be a member of the IACC. She also denied being anti-vaccine, pointing out that she has “given thousands of vaccinations in my career.”
None of the other new members of the IACC contacted by WIRED responded to requests for comment.
Just a few years ago, this may have sounded like the all-star line-up of a conspiracy conference. Today, these appointments appear routine, and just the latest example of how Kennedy has sought to remake America’s public health administration.
Kennedy’s decision, according to public health experts and autism advocates, will lead to fewer resources for people with autism and their families, and also embolden those promoting pseudoscientific treatments that can threaten the lives of autistic people.
“Once again, [Kennedy] proves that he is one of the world’s most extreme and dangerous conspiracy theorists who loves stacking his committees with anti-science, anti-public health kooks,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health and public policy at Duke University, tells WIRED. “The research evidence is clear that vaccines do not cause autism.” To Yamey, “it looks like RFK Jr.’s new committee has been tasked to muddy the waters and cast doubt on that evidence. RFK Jr. has spent the past year doing all he can to dismantle public health and roll back vaccination, and this new committee is more of the same.”
The Department of Health and Human Services says claims that members of the panel were selected to advance predetermined conclusions was unfounded and misleading. “After more than two decades of rising autism rates, families deserve more than reports and meetings, they deserve measurable progress, and this diverse committee was appointed to help deliver it,” Andrew Nixon, director of communication at the Department of Health and Human Services tells WIRED.
Some of these appointees have promoted bogus claims about vaccines as well as dangerous so-called cures that put people’s lives at risk. Rossignol, a family doctor who runs autism clinics in Florida, Arizona, and California, was sued in 2010 by the parent of a 7-year-old child after he and another doctor allegedly subjected the child to 37 rounds of chelation therapy, which “works” by removing heavy metals from the body. The therapy has been widely debunked. “There’s no scientific evidence that … chelation therapies … help people with ASD, and they may be dangerous,” the National Institutes of Health warns on its website. The attorney representing the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed the case in 2014.
Rossignol is also a former president of the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs, a group that has suggested that vaccines cause autism.
Slepcevic is a former Air Force veteran who organizes the Autism Health Summit, an annual gathering for the who’s who of the anti-vaccine community, where pseudoscientific “cures” for autism are promoted. Kennedy recorded a video that was played at last year’s event. Mike Chan, a doctor who claims that he can cure autism and down syndrome by injecting children with stem cells from sheep or rabbits, is one of the speakers for this year’s event, which is scheduled to take place in April in San Diego.
It is unclear what specific criteria Kennedy used in assembling the 21-member panel, and even those he did choose seem to be confused. “I don’t know how I was selected to be chair, to be perfectly honest,” Sylvia Fogel, a psychiatrist from Boston, told the New York Times. Fogel recently appeared on a podcast where she discussed “the dramatic surge in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the US.”
Multiple autism advocacy groups have strongly condemned Kennedy’s appointments.
“The new IACC is overwhelmingly made up of anti-vaccine advocates and peddlers of dangerous quack autism ‘treatments,’” the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a rights group run by and for autistic people, wrote in a statement on its website. “At a time when the autistic community desperately needs quality research that could genuinely improve our lives, we fear that this IACC will direct research funding towards known dead ends and influence federal activities away from policies that would best serve the autistic community.”
Kennedy has already overhauled the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a normally independent group which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine usage. Just like the autism committee, Kennedy has stacked ACIP with figures who share his vaccine-skeptic worldview. The decisions combined could lead to disastrous outcomes, experts say.
“Secretary Kennedy is essentially creating an ideological echo chamber,” Kayla Hancock, a program director from public health advocacy group Protect Our Care, said in a statement on the group’s website.
For some advocates, the appointments have instilled a deep sense of dread about what is going to happen in the future if debunked treatments like chelation therapy and stem cell injections are promoted as actual science.
“We’ve fought so hard to protect our community but they want to experiment on us,” Fiona O’Leary, an autism activist who has spent years fighting the spread of baseless treatments for autism, tells WIRED. “We are guinea pigs. When you are autistic, like me, and a mother to autistic children, I see this is a way to end us. That’s what it is.”
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