Aripiprazole

iStock, BeritK The Health and Human Services Secretary said that he will find and eliminate the cause of autism by September, an idea that suggests how little he knows about the condition. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he is marshaling the force of his agency to discover the link between vaccines and autism. He suggested that this new research project could be completed by September, a lightning quick turn-around for any research project. He offered no other details on what exactly he and HHS will do. Of course he does not need to wait even as long as September. The link between autism and vaccines has been investigated time , and time , and time , and time again. Whether it’s the vaccines themselves or thimerosal, a preservative that used to be used in vaccines but no longer is, there is no link between vaccines and autism. The rising rate of autism diagnoses—ostensibly part of the reason for Kennedy’s concern—is universally agreed to be the result of increased awareness of the condition. Autism can be a difficult thing to manage, and if the pharmaceutical industry could find a way to monetize it—with a pill, a shot, anything—there is no doubt that it would. The truth is that there are no drug treatments specific for autism. All of the most common drugs given to people with the condition are behavioral drugs—like the classic antipsychotic Haldol, a drug that works quite a bit like a tranquilizer, or common anti-depressants like Zoloft or Prozac. Atypical antipsychotics like risperidone and aripiprazole are also used. There are no drugs that have ever been developed and approved solely for autism, and the industry is nowhere close to achieving that. Even if an autistic person—or any person anywhere, for that matter—never paid taxes or wrote a poem, that doesn’t make them fodder for Kennedy’s wild political hallucinations. The most commonly cited source of autism behaviors is genetic, usually pointing at genes involved in the synapse and with dopamine, which can be related to autism’s classic traits of social deficits and repetitive behavior. But these are not “symptoms”—everyone with autism is different. Kennedy might as well be on the hunt for why neighbors are sometimes jerks or people on the bus can be unusual. Kennedy’s thoughts about what could “cause” autism are also extremely retrograde. It’s barely worth repeating that vaccines are largely safe and that Andrew Wakefield’s paper connecting the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to autism and setting off anti-vaccine hysteria was completely fraudulent . Recent studies have found that autism cases are more or less evenly distributed around the world, meaning there is likely no such thing as an “environmental cause” of autism: not toxins, not pollution and definitely not vaccines. The comments that Kennedy makes about autism are troubling, to put it in the most polite way possible. It is clear to me that at the very least he has crude and outdated ideas about how science works, and at worst he sees autism as a heinous plague to be eradicated, rather than just a different, uncommon set of behaviors that tend to butt up against common social norms, which isn’t much of a pathology. Look at how Kennedy describes people with autism in an April 15 press conference: “These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” None of that is true! People with autism live full and rich lives—they marry, have children, hold jobs, play sports and write poetry. Nothing about autism prevents any of those things, and it’s insulting to those people and their family members that the head of America’s health agencies sees autistic people this way. And even if an autistic person—or any person anywhere, for that matter—never paid taxes or wrote a poem, that doesn’t make them fodder for Kennedy’s wild political hallucinations. Like anyone else, they deserve dignity. It is frightening that the most powerful politician at the head of the country’s health agency is so given to conspiracy theories that have been debunked over and over and is so willing to use a vulnerable population of people as a political prop. The country needs a health official who actually cares about the people his policies affect—I don’t think Kennedy is that man. But there are ways to help people on the spectrum and their families, and they are much more prosaic than Kennedy seems to think. They are things like access to care, assessments, and various types of therapy like Applied Behavior Analysis under Medicaid. We could also fund more teacher’s aids to support students with autism in the school system. Instead, Kennedy and President Trump are drastically shrinking the National Institutes of Health—one of the nation’s centers for autism research, while attempting to totally destroy the Department of Education. Take a step back and it’s clear: The administration does not want to help these families at all. They are just more grist for the conspiracy mill.