A former top federal vaccine official spoke on the danger of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. giving “false hope” to people as the Health and Human Services secretary recently promised to identify the “cause” of autism by September.
“There are people, probably, who are hearing me now who know that I cared for leukemia patients for a significant number of years. Giving people false hope is something you should never do… Giving them false hope is wrong,” Dr. Peter Marks, former head of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer quickly? I don’t see any possible way.”
Marks, who helped lead the effort to rapidly develop a Covid-19 vaccine, stepped down late last month after he was told he had to either resign or be fired, sources told The Wall Street Journal.
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks wrote in a scathing resignation letter. Kennedy has cut large swaths of the nation’s federal employees dedicated to researching and tracking health conditions such as cancer, sexual violence, abortion, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections.
Kennedy last week said that through a “massive testing and research effort,” HHS will identify the cause of autism. Kennedy is a longtime proponent of the debunked, baseless theory that childhood vaccines are linked to autism.
Trump has perpetuated the kind of autism misinformation Kennedy has been peddling — ideas that are not backed by scientific evidence. In fact, there is consensus in the scientific community that vaccines do not cause autism. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states on its website: “Many studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and [autism spectrum disorder (ASD)]. To date, the studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD.”
“There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this,” Trump told Kennedy during a broadcasted Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “If you can come up with that answer, where you stop taking something, eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it.”
Kennedy has tapped Dr. David Geier, a longtime proponent of the autism vaccine myth, to lead the effort investigating the cause of autism. In 2011, officials in Maryland discovered Geier was practicing medicine without a license, according to The Associated Press.
Autism is “a developmental disability that affects how we experience the world around us,” writes the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). Individuals with autism may think, process sensations, move, communicate, socialize, and/or function in daily life differently than people without autism. Diagnoses of the condition have risen in recent years, but the CDC said that is “likely due to a combination of factors including diagnostic practices and access to services in communities.” While an autism diagnosis used to be reserved only for the most severe cases, in more recent years, clinicians have been diagnosing milder cases as well.
Some studies have found links between autism and genetics as well as some risk factors such as air pollution, prenatal conditions and exposure to pesticides as well as older parents and low birth weight, per the National Institutes of Health. But Kennedy said, without citing evidence, that autism is “not caused by genes,” but by “an environmental toxin.”
“There’s no scientific evidence ruling out genetics” as a cause of autism, Marks said.
“There is data that had been published that say that genetics may contribute to autism,” he continued. “There are, obviously, data that… suggest that perhaps environmental factors may. But one has to be incredibly careful, incredibly careful about making associations between environmental factors and autism.”
Autism usually appears around age two, the same age at which children are given certain childhood vaccinations, which could explain why some believe there is a link, even if scientific evidence does not back that claim.
“Autism is an incredibly complicated issue,” Marks said. “So, we have the issue of diagnosis bias. We don’t know how many of those cases are true, how much of this is true growth of autism, how much of this is just that we now have diagnostic criteria and we diagnose it more often.”
Autism non-profits have come out against Kennedy’s misinformation and his highly dubious promise to uncover a cause.
“RFK Jr.’s comment is a clear signal that HHS intends to produce rigged and fraudulent research that supports Kennedy and Trump’s pre-existing beliefs in a connection between autism and vaccines,” ASAN said in a statement. “ASAN has previously condemned RFK Jr.’s anti-science worldview and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, which have resulted in multiple deaths.”
Kennedy “made it clear that he is not listening to the many studies that have shown genes associated with autism. He only wants to demonstrate that it is caused by ‘exposures’ — by which he means childhood vaccines,” ASAN continued.
The Autism Society of America called Kennedy’s plan “harmful, misleading, and unrealistic.”
Autism “is neither a chronic illness nor a contagion,” the organization said in a statement.
“There is a deep concern that we are going backward and evaluating debunked theories,” ASA spokesperson Kristyn Roth told The Associated Press.
