RFK Jr.'s anti-vaxx views also reinforce damaging autism stereotypes, advocates say

"These are people who would rather have their kids get vaccine-preventable diseases and potentially die than do something that they think erroneously risks their kids becoming autistic. That's a pretty bleak view of autism." RFK Jr. has never retracted his views or apologized for his incorrect statement that thimerosal in childhood vaccines can be linked to a rise in autism.

RFK Jr. "Presents himself as an advocate for the disenfranchised following in the footsteps of his late father, but his lies about vaccines have the effect of reinforcing the oldest and most damaging stereotypes of the people that he claims to be defending." "The main problem that autistic people and their families face is the lack of support and resources across the life span, but Kennedy condemns the 'crippling' cost of providing disabled students with access to education, using an ableist slur to complain about resources that were fought-for by generations of disabled people and their families," Silberman pointed out.

"You can see that these are people who would rather have their kids get vaccine-preventable diseases and potentially die than do something that they think erroneously risks their kids becoming autistic. That's a pretty bleak view of autism." Silberman's and Gross' views were confirmed by an academic who has devoted her career to studying autism.

Mitzi Waltz is a docent/researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and formerly a senior lecturer in autism studies at the United Kingdom's Autism Centre of Sheffield Hallam University.

The entire conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism can be traced back to 1998, when a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a study in the medical journal The Lancet claiming that children who were given the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine developed autism.

Even anti-vaxxers who do not know RFK Jr.'s name almost certainly have been influenced by his work: A 2021 study by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that two-thirds of the vaccine misinformation on social media comes from just twelve people, including RFK Jr. Yet despite these setbacks, legitimate autism rights activists and scientists continue to learn more about how autism actually works.

"There is no 'autism gene' but instead a pattern of well over 100 genetic differences that can, in different patterns and in response to different environmental stressors, cause autism. Many of these differences are shared with our primate relatives and have been part of the human genome since the very beginning, so they are almost certainly functional, not 'errors.'" Instead, autism is a result of normal human variation.

This summary was generated by Smmry