Autistic people, parents and autism advocates are expressing concerns about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that the health agency will uncover what causes autism in a few months.
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy told President Donald Trump during a televised Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
“There was a time that I think I would have grabbed those words that just came out of his mouth, and I would have held them to my heart,” said Vanessa Ridgeway, a mother in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
But Kennedy’s history of pushing a discredited theory that routine childhood vaccines cause the developmental disability has her worried.
“I’m concerned that there’s gonna be a lot of disappointment,” Ridgeway said.
Her 20-year-old son, Tory Ridgeway, was diagnosed with autism at 4 years old.
He’s now on the honor roll and studying aerospace engineering at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University.
An advocate in the autism community, Tory Ridgeway said he’s skeptical of Kennedy’s research plan and worries it could lead to more misinformation.
Kennedy has hired David Geier to lead the autism research effort. Geier has repeatedly claimed that vaccines cause autism — a link that’s already been fully debunked.
“When it comes to our kids, we need to do right by them, and we need to make sure we have all of our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed before we come to the conclusion that the vaccines that have prevented outbreaks of measles and smallpox for decades now are somehow all of a sudden bad,” Tory Ridgeway said.
Geier and his father, geneticist Dr. Mark Geier, were a pair of researchers known for their poorly designed and retracted studies using government safety data that have long-fueled widespread misinformation about vaccines, NBC News reported.
The Geiers conducted research from a makeshift laboratory in their suburban Maryland basement and promoted an unproven treatment for autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and included injections of Lupron, a drug used for prostate cancer and early puberty, NBC News reported. The drug can cause bone damage, heart issues and seizures in children.
A 2011 Maryland Board of Physicians investigation found the Geiers violated standards of care and said they misled parents into thinking they signed up for an approved autism therapy.
David Geier’s involvement in the HHS research is part of why many in the autism community are concerned.
“Scientific inquiries must be led by credible experts and must involve those who rely on the evidence and understand the complexities of autism and not have preconceived ideas of what they want to determine,” Christopher Banks, president and CEO of the Autism Society of America.
While no single unifying cause for autism has been discovered, scientists have found a variety of genetic and environmental factors that can increase someone’s risk of having autism, including having an autistic sibling, being born before 26 weeks, having older parents and maternal exposure to some medications, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy said the research effort will involve hundreds of scientists from around the world.
It comes as HHS recently lost a quarter of its staff, through layoffs and forced early retirements.
The Department of Health and Human Services gave the following statement to News4:
“With autism rates rising at an alarming pace, uncovering its etiology is a national imperative. Millions of American families are urgently seeking answers, and the NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic—employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
from Local – NBC4 Washington https://ift.tt/d0XiyUG
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