This is personal to me, as I am a pro-vaccine autistic person. Anyone who reads my diatribes will get that I am happily high-functioning, but that does not mean I don’t stim, have severe social issues, drug and alcohol dependencies, employment issues, and had suicidal ideation in my younger years.

RFKjr has reinvigorated the vaccine causing autism lie. It is easily dismissed, via numerous studies, retractions of studies he highlights, and the very clear and obvious increase in what qualifies as a diagnosis.

If Kennedy wanted to go purely down the correlation is causation path, even that fails. The uptick in autism diagnosis massively outnumbers any increase in vaccine application. In fact vaccines are probably down since COVID yet autism keeps rising.

Yet, the more I look into to, the more I want to applaud his placing importance on the rise of autism and a search for answers. If the experts can look beyond vaccines, they might actually come up with a cause.

My parents are autistic, my brother is, my niece is, some of my children are, my best friend is, I hang out with a lot autistic people. We are all fine, non-obvious, “functioning” people.
I have never known a non-verbal, rocking in the corner, drooling autistic person, but they make up 25% of those diagnosed which is a significant number of people, and a growing number. We don’t see them because they are not a part of society. Increased or improved diagnosis does not account for their numbers. They have always clearly had something wrong with them.

The mystery is why the numbers are increasing. It isn’t vaccines, or anything else environmental, that we know of. It is massively genetic, and that could be the simple answer  – more people are inheriting it, especially if autistic people match up romantically. Even so, the increase is still too much, so I would suggest (easy to to do when you are the savant type) that nature is selecting autism. That this is a type of evolution. Unfortunately this will not be provable, but perhaps could be offered up by experts as an explanation where no others exist.

In summary – it is easy to dismiss Kennedy, who is a dangerous fear-mongering dickhead, and think that the vaccine argument being wrong is the end of the story. It is not, autism is on the rise, and a lot of people (and their families) are suffering.