Stupidity uber alles
By 
I belong to an internet community of Michigan football fans, which has become sufficiently infected by the Woke Mind Virus ™ and Cultural Marxism ™ that all out of the closet Trumpers have been purged, except for one human crash test dummy who shows up fairly regularly to get treated like a warthog who has stumbled into a pack of hungry lions (do not check out the YouTube video).
At least a couple of community members have autistic children, and reading their comments in the wake of Bobby Wife Murderer Failson’s eugenics scheme to create a national autism registry fills me with incandescent rage:
Didn’t think we’d get here, but RFK is forcing my hand.
It always felt like hyperbole. My son is almost 5 and still not speaking. We are actively exploring Visa options. I don’t have any easy inroads. I am not ready to stick around to send him to a camp. This sucks. Mind blowing conservatives seem fine with a government database of all medical records.
Another father responds:
A truly shitty time. I am out of words for how awful these shitheads are. Just absolutely furious all the time. I know you will keep working and supporting so nothing to add there. Our boy didn’t speak until about four and a half. Sometimes the kids who struggle more early end up with better overall outcomes.
Here is my son, about to graduate high school with honors. Finishing up his first internship (yes, for autistic kids but he is a good worker and student). He wants to try the dorms. We are optimistic he can really turn a corner in his early 20s and be sitting pretty with a college degree. And now this fucking shit will set back autism support because dear leader says so. Anyone who supports MAGA is a fucking asshole. Hard stop.
This second commenter is an immigration lawyer who is doing asylum hearings all the time so you can imagine what his life is like right now, or maybe not.
The stupidest and most degenerate of all the Kennedys — talk about leaping a bar set somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy — has promised that HHS is going to determine definitively exactly what causes autism, by September. That tens of thousands of superbly trained researchers have spent decades on this question without managing to achieve this feat means nothing to Secretary Nepo Baby Conspiracy Nut, because he’s fanatically devoted to the stupid person’s central life axiom, which is that the most apparently complicated questions actshully have very simple answers if you just use Common Sense. And Common Sense tells us that essentially all disease is a product of food dyes, chemtrails, Wi-Fi radiation, and the international globalist conspiracy of cosmopolitan financiers if you know what I mean and I think you do.
So of course it makes perfect sense that Kennedy would appoint somebody like this to lead the effort to discover The Truth About Autism by September (whether that’s the beginning or the end of the month is not clear):
David Geier, a man without a medical degree who once was disciplined by the Maryland State Board of Physicians for practicing medicine without a license, reportedly will lead a new HHS study to identify whether a relationship between vaccines and autism exists.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long promoted a link between vaccines and autism, despite volumes of data showing the two are not associated.
The news of the HHS study comes as measles cases total nearly 330 in Texas and outbreaks have been reported in numerous other states, while Kennedy has downplayed the role of vaccination.
David Geier and his father Mark Geier, MD, are known for several discredited studies claiming that thimerosal, a preservative containing low levels of ethylmercury used in some vaccines, increased the risk of autism. (Thimerosal has been reduced or eliminated from vaccines for decades, and all vaccines recommended for children 6 and younger are available in formulations that do not contain thimerosal.)
“The studies were poorly done; they were full of confounding variables,” Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MedPage Today.
One study used data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned clinicians about the study, saying it contained “numerous conceptual and scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements,” and failed to show a connection between thimerosal and autism.
Another evaluated the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink to study diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP) vaccines and autism. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) said it was “characterized by serious methodological flaws and their analytic methods were nontransparent making their results uninterpretable.”
David and Mark Geier also “promoted bogus and potentially dangerous therapies for autism,” Offit observed, combining leuprorelin (Lupron), a synthetic hormone that suppresses testosterone production, with chelation.
“It basically was chemical castration to delay puberty and chelation therapy to rid your body of the heavy metals that presumably were causing your autism,” Offit said. “For that, the Maryland Department of Health censured David Geier for practicing medicine without a license.”
David Geier never held a license to practice any health occupation, according to the Maryland state board He has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Maryland and was “on staff” at his father’s clinical practice, known as the Genetic Centers of America. Mark Geier lost his medical license in Marylandand other states.
So why was David Geier chosen to lead a new HHS study?
“It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism even though they don’t,” noted Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds autism research. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to validate it. That’s not how science is done,” Singer wrote in an email to MedPage Today
I don’t want to rush to any conclusions, but all those op-eds immediately after the election from public health types who argued that hey maybe we can work with RFK Jr, on stuff because he thinks that potato chips are bad may not have been particularly well thought out.
. . . commenter Lori notes a Cat 5 hurricane on someone’s wedding day:
So puberty blockers are child abuse if they’re administered by medical specialists with full parental consent as part of gender affirming care for trans kids, but great if they’re part of some woo scheme administered by crackpot grifters to supposedly “fix” autistic kids.