hhs vows to find the cause of autism by September?

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Einstein/Nazi-backlash-and-coming-to-America
One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published in 1931. When asked to comment on this denunciation of relativity by so many scientists, Einstein replied that to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.

A consensus of hundreds of scientists in just a few months is just politics, just like this book.

The attendees of the second-annual Autism Health Summit had already sat through hours of presentations about treatments that promise miracles to help heal the condition — water filters and electromagnetic gadgets, supplements, stem cell treatments only available in Europe, and fecal transplants here in the U.S.

Of all the speakers at the conference, the one who got the biggest round of applause wasn’t even in the room.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former fixture at this kind of gathering, addressed the audience in a short, prerecorded video — not as the anti-vaccine lawyer and activist as he had so many times before, but as a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, the secretary of Health and Human Services.

And from that seat of power, Kennedy affirmed he was still their man, praising summit organizers Tracey and Steve Slepcevic as “dear friends” who had “given their lives in service to the autistic and their families."

“Your issue is no longer on the fringe,” he said, finishing with a promise of a future “where autism is once again, very rare, where families with autism are well supported, where people on the spectrum are valued for the unique gifts they have to offer in our society.”

These types of gatherings are on the rise. While they may advertise different themes, there’s a shared belief system among them: a rejection of mainstream science, skepticism about the government and loud complaints that the powerful are hiding something from the everyday American.

With Kennedy now in Washington, and the president himself suggesting there’s merit to those claims, the gatherings are becoming less fringe and more politically relevant.

The conference room at the Town and Country hotel was already abuzz with Kennedy’s latest bombshell. While rattling off his department’s early endeavors at a televised Cabinet meeting last week — they included getting “bad chemicals” out of food and “good food” into school lunches — he stated plainly that he would, in five months, discover the cause of autism.

“By September,” he had said to the president, “we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. And we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”

“That would be so big,” Trump replied.

And it would — if it weren’t so unlikely. Kennedy later told Fox News that National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya had only just begun soliciting proposals from scientists around the world, and HHS hasn’t said more about the timeline. Even if they handed out grants immediately, it would give them barely more than a season to solve a puzzle that has preoccupied researchers for over 80 years.

Since Austrian-American psychiatrist Dr. Leo Kanner first gave it a name in 1943, doctors, scientists, parents, and people with autism have sought answers to the complex set of conditions that vary widely in presentation and severity. About 1 out of 36 children has been identified as having an autism spectrum disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Research points to genetics as the primary factor, likely in combination with certain environmental and developmental influences that scientists are still researching.

But the extensively studied and disproven theory that vaccines are to blame for autism has been embraced by parents and groups like those at the summit. The condition generally emerges during childhood, around when routine immunizations are administered. To this group, it’s no coincidence.

Science isn’t built to prove a universal negative. Every variable cannot be tested in every circumstance across all time. So it is that despite large, peer-reviewed studies in the U.S., Japan, Denmark, and elsewhere showing no causal link between vaccines and autism, it’s never been proven to the satisfaction of the anti-vaccine community.

The question has also been litigated, and claims have fallen short against the overwhelming evidence presented by doctors and scientists. Still, because there’s always a sliver of possibility — however remote — that something could be true somewhere, somehow, the theory persists.

Before his autism announcement, Kennedy’s short tenure as HHS secretary had already stirred condemnation among public health experts who said that his anti-vaccine views undermined trust in science.

Author James Terence Fisher, who has an autistic son, said in an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Kennedy’s rise to power had “re-traumatized” many autism families and warned that the administration could make people like his son “guinea pigs for experiments and treatments based on conspiratorial and money-making theories that have frequently led to abusive and ineffective treatments.”

It’s happened before, he wrote. Andrew Wakefield, the British former physician whose retracted 1998 study in The Lancet helped launch the modern anti-vaccine movement, used “invasive and demeaning techniques,” Fischer wrote, adding that Wakefield had paid children at his own child’s birthday party for blood samples.

Kennedy's faithful bristled when he recently recommended that children in Texas get vaccinated to protect against measles, after an outbreak there sickened hundreds and killed at least two. To them, the guidance was a betrayal of a movement he helped create.

But with Kennedy's promise to root out and eliminate by this fall the specific environmental causes of autism — whether in food, water or, as Trump suggested at the Cabinet meeting, “the shots”— Kennedy offered a return to the foundational myth of the modern anti-vaccine movement.

The crowd at the Autism Health Summit heard him loud and clear, and now they were on their feet.

The three-day summit didn’t have an option for press coverage on its website, so I paid the $395 for a ticket using my name and work email. I wore my name badge and introduced myself as a journalist, handing out my business card to everyone I spoke with. Photos and videos were permitted, and the event was livestreamed to remote attendees.

Advertised as a “journey to wellness,” the Autism Health Summit was one of several anti-vaccine-adjacent events to take place in recent weeks. The Summit for Truth & Wellness was held at the end of March in Rochester, New York. Drs. Pierre Kory and Mary Talley Bowden, both known for prescribing Ivermectin for Covid-19 and long Covid despite a lack of evidence, shared a stage with the writer and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf and Mary Holland, president of the Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy once chaired.

Earlier this month, a hotel in Atlanta hosted Honest Medicine: Redefining Health, a conference organized by the Independent Medical Alliance — formerly the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a group whose doctors prescribe anti-viral medications that go against medical consensus. Some of their doctors have been disciplined by medical boards for spreading misinformation.

There used to be just one such marquee gathering. AutismOne, held annually by a nonprofit of the same name in a Chicago hotel near the airport, was the flagship convention for self-described Autism Moms and Dads. But with the growth of other anti-vaccine groups that thrived during the pandemic — including Kennedy’s own Children’s Health Defense — and the ease of online organizing, AutismOne’s funding dried up. It quietly dissolved in January.

Into that void stepped Tracy Slepcevic, an Air Force veteran and author of the book "Warrior Mom" (not to be confused with former anti-vaccine spokeswoman Jenny McCarthy’s "Mother Warriors"). Slepcevic supported Kennedy’s failed run for president in 2024 and registered Autism Health Inc. as a nonprofit last year. She currently coaches other parents on how to “heal” their autistic kids.

She said she tried hyperbaric oxygen, special diets, stem cell therapy and “everything but the kitchen sink” to “heal” her now-adult son’s autism, which she believes was caused by vaccines.

Slepcevic told the crowd that she spent all the money she had, even short-selling her house to pay for the treatments.

“If anyone says, ‘I can’t afford it,’ I’m not going to feel sorry for you,” Slepcevic said from the stage.

After a song performed by movement stalwarts Geoff and Simone Sewell, Slepcevic called up a couple to the stage — her new clients, she explained.

The father told the crowd that after just two weeks of following Slepcevic’s advice restricting dairy and cutting out apple juice, their 6-year-old son had seemed to improve.

He spoke of how they had been lost and hopeless and sad. They were depressed, just like many in the crowd, he suspected. But now, they were optimistic.

They were going to do whatever it takes, he said.

They were going to be warrior parents.

Outside the ballroom were the vendors, about 50 tables packed together, all offering the same message: healing was possible — for a price.

Each table pushed a product or service promising some pathway to wellness. There were water filters — one to detoxify, another to “alkalize”— and a nearly $6,000 electromagnetic gadget that claimed to improve circulation.

Contraptions emitted infrared light or pulsed electromagnetic fields. Supplement kits promised to flush out mold, heavy metals and microplastics. Vibrating plates were pitched as neurological reset tools. And there were countless devices — necklaces, patches, laptop shields, pet collars and full-body blankets — meant to block 5G, electromagnetic fields and radiation, including the Wi-Fi all around us.

Alongside the gadgets were services, too — nutritionists offering on-the-spot consultations, sessions in a hyperbaric chamber and one vendor advertising something described as a “blood oil change.”

One mom attending with her husband was still taking it all in. It was their first autism conference, suggested by a chiropractor who was treating their 14-year-old autistic son three times a week.

“Some of this is easy to understand. Other stuff? I’m like, ‘What are they talking about?’” said the 40-year-old woman from Escondido, California, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity to protect her son's privacy.

“There’s a lot of technical terms, medical terms, brain diagrams. I’m like, ‘Just tell me what I need.’”

Other parents were more practiced. A woman in her 60s from Laguna Beach told me she had healed her daughter in the 2000s with trips to Greece for stem cell transplants. She’d come to the summit to learn whether anything new was out there; her daughter was feeling better from an all-carnivore diet but still had bad days. (Scientific evidence is lacking to support the theory that an all-meat diet benefits people with autism.)

There were roughly two dozen sessions over two days. Some were meant as inspiration, to show parents what was possible. Among the first speakers was Collin Carley, a 28-year-old in a neat black suit who spoke about his journey from a toddler diagnosed with autism who threw tantrums, obsessed over trains and insisted on blowing on every dandelion.

Carley recounted years of intensive therapies, with “one biomedical plan after the other.” He got IV infusions and chelation treatments, where pills, sprays or injections are used to “get the metals out” of the body. He described a childhood stripped of normalcy, a “40-hour workweek” of treatments and regimens.

He said it had worked. He now swims and surfs, holds a blue belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and has worked jobs from deckhand to pizza delivery driver.

Women in the audience whispered to each other, “Wow.”

But it’s also the kind of life enjoyed by many on the autism spectrum who never received the biomedical interventions that Carley did.

The first day’s headliner was Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who now works for a supplement and telehealth company selling alternative treatments and vaccine “detoxes." He ran through a list of risk factors he said warranted further study: gene mutations, premature birth, parental age, immune system dysfunction and vaccine reactions.

He also talked strategy, offering a language shift in the anti-vaccine community, away from suggesting that vaccines “cause” autism. It would be more palatable to the masses, he argued, if everyone started saying vaccines were a “risk factor” for autism.

He defended Wakefield, comparing him to Ignaz Semmelweis, the 19th-century Hungarian doctor who was institutionalized after suggesting handwashing could prevent infection.

And McCullough dared to cast doubt on Kennedy’s ability to deliver on his promise by September.

“It’s too short of a time to actually do any research study,” he said.

The crowd groaned.

I sat near the front of the room to hear the final speaker, anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, former communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign and CEO of the movement’s newest offshoot, Make America Healthy Again — MAHA, which Bigtree has turned into a nonprofit, a super PAC and an LLC (a limited liability company).

Two women at the table asked me if I had an autistic child. I said that I did, but that wasn’t why I was there and gave them my business card.

They told me about their children. One woman, with white hair and a bedazzled “Kennedy for President” water bottle, spoke about her 26-year-old son who loved swimming and needed round-the-clock care. The pandemic and California’s “tyrannical” lockdowns, she said, had been devastating — interrupting his routines, closing beaches and cutting off his services.

Another described her now-adult son’s febrile seizures, which she said had started just days after a diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis shot and landed him in the children’s hospital.

When the women politely but pointedly asked what I thought about it all, I paused for a minute to think. The conference seemed designed to prey on the fear of autism and the love we all feel for our kids. I told them I hadn’t seen convincing evidence presented during the summit that would shake my belief in the mainstream science around autism.

Bigtree, meanwhile, was going way past his allotted time to the crowd’s delight, recounting his long career in anti-vaccine activism and his intersection with Kennedy’s. He described watching Kennedy's swearing-in from the Oval Office, where he’d been invited as one of a handful of close advisers.

While Bigtree played the clip of Kennedy’s September promise — the third time I’d heard it that weekend — one of the two women I'd been chatting with stood up to leave, touched me on the shoulder and handed me a handwritten note:

“Brandy, I’m glad I got to meet you. I respect people on all sides of the issue. I don’t claim to have all the answers. Maybe there are multiple causes of autism. I hope your article goes well, and that you just consider, for a brief space in time—what if there is a chance—even a small chance—that they are right?”

Bigtree, from the stage, continued, now with the flair of a revival preacher. “It’ll be cataclysmic,” he said of the answers he said Kennedy would deliver in September. “For some there will be gnashing of teeth, there’ll be great fear and terror, there’ll be concern, there’ll be lack of trust, there’ll be pain — but there will finally be truth.”

He wanted parents to know they had a hero fighting for them in Washington

“Robert Kennedy Jr., who stood with you and hugged you and has been here with you this whole time, now has the most powerful position in health in the world,” he told the room.

“God … is … good.”

His speech signaled the end of the summit. The crowd shuffled out into the foyer for a reception.

A snaking line formed for photos with Bigtree.

The inventor of a sensory play tent for kids with autism danced alone to Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.”

People sipped cocktails from plastic cups and visited, talked and chased their kids around.

Nobody seemed ready to gol