Trump president win impact on healthcare and autism

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I'm not sure if this has been posted elsewhere, but a favourite pet conspiracy theory of Donald Trump has been given the green light to be given multiple millions of dollars of funding from the CDC.

March 7 - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, despite extensive scientific research that has disproven or failed to find evidence of such links.

Trump, in an address to Congress this week, cited the rise in autism among children.
"So, we're going to find out what it is, and there’s nobody better than Bobby and all of the people that are working with you,” Trump said, referring to RFK. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose role includes authority over the CDC, has long sowed doubt over the safety of the combined vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). In a cabinet meeting last week, Kennedy initially downplayed news that a school-aged child had died of measles in Texas, the first such death in a decade, calling such outbreaks ordinary and failing to mention the role of vaccination to prevent measles.
https://www.reu-ers.com/business/health ... 025-03-07/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is planning to devote research dollars to the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism – legitimizing stigma not only around vaccines, but around autism itself.

Matthew Shallenberger, father to an 11-year-old autistic son in Tennessee, says this myth is harmful because “it treats autism as some dreadful disease to avoid at all costs”.

Parents in the Texas community where an unvaccinated child died of measles last month, have continued to resist vaccines in the name of vague potential harms, including autism.

Shallenberger finds this bewildering: “I would much rather my son be alive, healthy and autistic than dead from a preventable childhood illness. It’s not even a decision, really. There is only one choice for me: vaccinate my kids.”

Parents including Shallenberger are in the odd position of defending their decision to vaccinate – even though there is no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism.

Lynne Peskoe-Yang, a 34-year-old Massachusetts-based journalist with autism, says the myth’s persistence illustrates something disturbing about how the world sees autistic people – that because they are different, they must be contaminated somehow.

“It fits really well into other kinds of beliefs about health that really boil down to morals more than science,” Peskoe-Yang said.

Kate Abarca, a retired occupational therapist in South Carolina, says that learning to understand her son’s autism was immensely rewarding. Caring for him made her a better therapist, and advocating for him helped her overcome her shyness. Now 35, her son Benjamin Beals is beloved in his community. He lives in a semi-independent facility and is known for his karaoke performances.

Abarca realized early that her son’s difficulties stemmed from her own inability to understand his needs. When he was an infant, she says he screamed constantly and would kick and bite her when she was trying to care for him.

“ I came to recognize his actions as self-defense against me providing caregiving that he perceived as an assault,” she said.

Jonathan Knapp, 71, a podcaster in Indiana known by the stage name Johnny Profane, agrees that some of the difficulties associated with autism are more manageable if you understand their cause.

“Any child will start screaming in a supermarket given the right stimuli,” he said. Knapp, along with others contacted for this story, suspects that anti-vaxxers see autism as a combination of exaggerated stereotypes stemming from misunderstood behaviors.

Knapp was diagnosed with autism at 63. While the diagnosis is still stigmatized, Knapp says that understanding why he felt different his whole life has been a blessing.

Emir Lopez, a 32-year-old working in IT in Massachusetts, also sees his autism diagnosis as a gift. Lopez said when he was diagnosed as a child, his parents hid it. He connected the dots himself studying psychology in college. When his mother confirmed he had autism, Lopez realized there actually was “nothing wrong” with him. He was “normal” – just autistic.

Hearing parents fret over vaccines causing autism “just makes me so angry”, says Lopez, adding: “Autistic people, we’re very logical, so that blows my mind even more.” Lopez remembers a particularly upsetting instance when his father’s former girlfriend told him he might not have autism had he not been vaccinated.

Eventually, Lopez became so fed up with the stigma he decided to disclose his autism on social media with the joke “vaccines are just computer updates for me”.

A 37-year-old autistic sound engineer said he finds misinformation so disturbing he loses sleep over it, adding that anti-vaxxers are not “entitled” to “their own set of facts”. He echoed Lopez’s sentiment that this cognitive dissonance can be especially distressing for autistic people: “It saps your energy away. You lose your appetite and your body temperature changes. It’s a drastically physical thing.”.

Knapp, too, said he’s lost days replaying social media conversations with anti-vaxxers over and over in his head.

While Lopez is troubled by misunderstandings over autism, he says he’s most concerned over declining vaccination rates.

“People need to vaccinate. This is life or death. People are dying. Babies are dying!”

Science Or Censorship? AAP Comes Out Against CDC’s Vaccine-Autism Study

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to hand over multiple sets of vaccine safety data to a discredited researcher with a history of spreading misinformation that vaccines cause autism, according to two sources familiar with the plan. Both learned about the matter during recent meetings at the CDC but were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

David Geier, who shows up in the Department of Health and Human Services’ directory as a “senior data analyst,” will reportedly analyze the data. Geier has repeatedly claimed that vaccines cause autism — a link that’s already been fully debunked.

“If this individual is involved, then it draws into immediate question the validity of any analysis that comes out of this work,” said a former CDC official who was told of the plan before recently leaving the agency.

Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director, called Geier a “deeply irresponsible choice” to lead this effort as he has “no medical degree and a long history of pushing discredited theories about vaccines and autism.”

“Families affected by autism deserve credible research efforts that explore legitimate potential preventable causes of and treatments for autism,” Besser said in a statement. “They are not helped when our tax dollars and research funds are wasted on rehashing a question that has already been answered.”

Geier’s hiring was first reported Tuesday evening by The Washington Post. It was unclear Wednesday whether the plans had since changed. Neither HHS nor Geier responded to requests for comment.

David Geier and his father, Maryland geneticist Dr. Mark Geier, were a pair of researchers known for their poorly designed and retracted studies using government safety data that have long-fueled widespread misinformation about vaccines.

According to an account in the 2005 book “Evidence of Harm,” then-congressman Dave Weldon — whose nomination for CDC director was abruptly withdrawn two weeks ago — intervened to help the Geiers access the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a CDC-housed dataset containing patient health records. This raw data is available to researchers, but isn’t public because of concerns over privacy, misrepresentation of data, and manpower.

The Geiers claimed at an Institute of Medicine panel in 2004 that the CDC data showed vaccines were linked to autism, a claim that was refuted by scientists at the meeting and in scores of published studies since. At the same IOM meeting, a scientist explained how the Geiers’ findings had failed to factor for age — children with more vaccines only appeared to have higher rates of autism because they were older and had more time to be diagnosed. (Children on average are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder around age 5.)

The Geiers conducted research from a makeshift laboratory in their carpeted wood-paneled suburban Maryland basement; published several studies, many of which were retracted; and promoted an unproven treatment for autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and included injections of Lupron, a drug used for prostate cancer and early puberty. In children, it’s only approved for precocious puberty and comes with side effects including bone damage, heart issues and seizures. They diagnosed kids with precocious puberty without proper tests and misled parents into thinking they were signing up for an approved autism therapy. A 2011 Maryland Board of Physicians investigation found that the Geiers violated standards of care.

Mark Geier, who theorized that autism resulted from an interaction between mercury and testosterone, was stripped of his medical license by Maryland regulators in 2012. Maryland regulators also disciplined David Geier for practicing medicine without a license.

In addition to research and running a clinic with his father treating autistic children, David Geier owned and operated a company called MedCon, a consulting firm that helped people with vaccine injury claims get compensation.