Know thy limits
It never seems to occur to Kennedy that he doesn’t know as much about it as the professionals do. Why is that? The rest of us don’t prance around thinking we know all about electrical engineering and dark matter and how to fly planes, we understand that there are professionals and experts who have taken the time to learn a subject or skill and we can’t be professionals and experts without doing the same thing.
He thinks he knows better why rates of autism have risen. Why does he think that?
In remarks laced with scientific inaccuracies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that autism was preventable while directly contradicting researchers within his own agency on a primary driver behind rising rates of the condition in young children.
Mr. Kennedy made his comments at a news conference, responding to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that rates of autism had increased to one in 31 among 8-year-olds, continuing a long-running trend.
Blaming environmental risk factors for the uptick, he accused the media and the public of succumbing to a “myth of epidemic denial” when it came to autism. He also called research into the genetic factors that scientists say play a vital role in whether a child will develop autism “a dead end.”
How would he know? He’s not a scientist. How would he know better than scientists who work in the field? How does he manage to think he knows better?
Dr. Eric Fombonne, who is a longtime autism researcher and professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University, called Mr. Kennedy’s claim “ridiculous.”
“Autism is not an infectious disease. So there aren’t preventive measures that we can take,” said Dr. Joshua Anbar, an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University who helped collect data for the C.D.C. report.
…
Researchers said there is no one reason autism rates have risen, but that increased screening was likely a large factor.
“The more you look for it, the more you find,” said Dr. Maureen Durkin, a professor of population health sciences and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has long studied autism. Dr. Durkin is one of the authors of the C.D.C. report.
Mr. Kennedy repeatedly dismissed the idea that screenings had driven the uptick as a “canard” and chastised “epidemic deniers” for focusing on genetics instead of environmental factors.
Why did he do that? How does he think he knows better?
Narcissism is a dangerous drug.
Also, why would it rise as vaccination rates go down? If that’s your thesis then you’d expect the opposite.
It is true, however that terrorists only need to know a little bit about how to fly planes in order to crash them into buildings; Kennedy doesn’t need to know much about medecine in order to crash the health system. Once you’re past the gatekeepers and in control, you can pretty much do what you want. They would all claim to be doing what they’re doing for some higher, noble purpose, only Kennedy will probably end up killing even more people than the September 11th suicide murderers did. (Though he’ll have a tough time matching Trump’s Covid death toll. I’m sure’s going to give it the old college try. But who knows, maybeBad Kennedy
wants to be mentioned in the same breath as Lysenko.)
What about you with the measles outbreak, you murderous asshole? And (as it has been pointed out before) even if vaccines did cause autism, the diseases they’ve helped control or eradicate are much worse because THEY KILL CHILDREN. Or, to put it another way, the known side effects of childhood vaccines include adulthood and old age.
Kennedy could well qualify here in Australia as a first class, grade A ratbag.
Though it is hard to diagnose the long-dead from biographical information only, both Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton were apparently on the autism spectrum. So that puts me in good company, because I believe that I am too; though never professionally diagnosed as such. But my 21-years-old grandson has been so diagnosed.
Aside: I might write to Donald Trump and ask him if he reckons it could be cured with an injection of disinfctant, as he recommended for Covid.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-newton-showed-signs-of-autism/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Personally I think it’s instructive to compare the rates of autism over time to the rates of intellectual disability (what used to be called “retardation”). As one goes up, the other goes down, and a lot of it’s because now diagnosis is better. Autism is recognized as having different presentations, especially in girls.
As Piglet suggests, a large part of the rise in diagnoses is due to autistic girls finally being recognised as such, and not being mislabelled with something else. From my own experience (diagnosed around the age of fifty) and that of many of my friends (getting a diagnosis in their thirties and forties) the actual prevalence really hasn’t changed noticeably.
Besides, my obviously autistic grandfather only received one vaccine – smallpox – and that’s the only vaccine everyone in my family born after 1979 didn’t get. And he was born before the word autism was even invented.
Omar, I don’t think RFK Jr qualifies as a ratbag. Germaine Greer is a ratbag and she gets it mostly right while mightily ignoring the morally upright. I think “drongo with delusions of grandeur” might be better but even that’s been a bit kind. I don’t think the Australian vernacular is up to the task of describing people like him (let alone Trump).
It seems longer, but RFK jr had only been secretary of health for a couple of measly months.
Francis: OK. A compromise.RFK = A ratbag of the drongo class. Trump = A deluded egotistical ratbag drongo of the Germainic line. NB:;a nod there to Germaine Greer and also to Drumpf’s German heritage.
Sieg heil.!!!.