Health secretary issues ignorant remarks about autism

USA Today

01-05-2025

Health secretary issues ignorant remarks about autism | MARK HUGHES COBB
With the ongoing D.C. clown show, every accusation is a confession.
And make no mistake, what rfkjr (he doesn't deserve caps, not like worthies such as uncle JFK and father RFK) said about people on the autism spectrum was an ugly, blatant attack. Ignorant, malevolent, and of course, utterly wrong.
What he's confessing, knowingly or not — My guess weighs "not": He knows less than Jon Snow — is that he has no idea how hoo-mans work, what a marvelous range of abilities we can and do live fulfilling lives with.
Elizabeth McClellan, a poet, attorney and educator, who also happens to be autistic:
"It's completely dehumanizing. He didn't lead with 'poet.' He led with they'll never pay taxes, they'll never have a job. It's just 'useless eaters' rhetoric. And then he fluffs it up with, they'll never write a poem. They'll never play baseball.
"He is using the straight-up eugenicist playbook. People who can't go to the toilet by themselves are still people. People who can't write a poem are still people. I doubt [Kennedy] can write a poem, but he's still a person."
I doubt the second half of that sentence, but I'm on a spectrum spanning outraged to incensed.
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Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, not caused by vaccines. A fact: Everyone who drinks water will die, but correlation is not causation.
Vaccination has been around since the 16th century, inoculations against smallpox. Such practices may run even further back, to the 10th century, aka when things were rotten; aka when Vikings raided northern France and what's now Scotland, being driven back at least once by historical Macbeth; aka the Chinese using gunpowder in battle, and also, much to the delight of Hollywood and Henry V, fire arrows; aka agricultural developments such as field systems and heavy plows; aka collapsing Aztecs and rising Toltecs; aka Mississippian culture booming around these parts; aka Medieval Times, and not the entertainment franchise.
Vaccination is receiving a small dose of an affliction. Our built-in systems step up to fight. Bodies can learn and remember, unlike most in D.C. It's not unlike muscle-building, flexibility or aerobic capacity, which we empower by stressing the body, so it builds back stronger.
If and when a similar strain visits, your immune system's combat ready. It's the grizzled sarge who'll lead you through hell and back, probably in one piece, versus Gomer Pyle.
Don't be Gomer.
We have better tools to diagnose nowadays, so naturally numbers of those on the spectrum ― traits range widely, with differing needs and severity ― are growing. Some of my adult pals are now aware of something they'd long suspected. Others now read symptoms and think, hey:
Unusually sensitive to light, sound or touch? Fixations with obsessive focus? Demanding, finicky eater? Disturbed by breaks in routine?
That's just a few, and just part of what I know as somewhat outside the norm about me.
This honking buffoon could have learned about special needs by asking, or reading about, his late aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister to JFK, RFK, Sen. Teddy, Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, Patricia, Kathleen, Joseph Jr. and Rosemary.
You know, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Founder of Special Olympics.
After starting Camp Shriver in 1963, at her Potomac, Maryland, home, as a place for people with intellectual and physical disabilities, she used her clout as head of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation to begin changing wayward and damaging perceptions held by the public.
It was she who wrote that startling reveal in the Saturday Evening Post about sister Rosemary, who suffered mood swings, seizures, and learning difficulties. Doctors in the 1940s prescribed barbarism ― lobotomy ― leaving her incapacitated.
Here in Tuscaloosa, we know the name Peter Bryce, first superintendent of what opened in 1861 as Alabama Insane Hospital, later Bryce Hospital, now mostly absorbed by the University of Alabama, as health treatments have improved so vastly there wasn't need for such a facility. Bryce championed innovations, first discouraging and later abandoning physical restraints, urging healthy physical activity and insisting on courage, kindness and respect for all.
Bryce knew, in 1861, better than the sitting secretary of health and human services. Has there ever been a more Orwellian appointment than that of this sad, sick conspiracy theorist, golden proof genetic lines don't assure stability?
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Another layer of irony: His history of startling actions and pronouncements suggest he is actually physically and mentally challenged. Those 14 years as a heroin addict, the guzzling of raw milk, the, as he said, "... worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died"? Those are clues.
He suffers spasmodic dysphonia, causing his voice to quaver. Dropped a roadkill bear carcass in Central Park, because he feared it might spoil before he could carve it up for meat. Strapped a whale's head to the top of the family minivan for a five-hour drive home. His daughter Kathleen, in a 2012 Town and Country story, recounted: "every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car" that they'd traveled with "... plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out ...." Others along the highway were horrified, she said, "but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us."
Now I'm no doctor but, here's a key point: Neither is rfkjr. Only one of us is in a position to harm others, through blithering ignorance, blithe mouth-bleats of disinformation, and acts of active abuse such as ... wait, this can't be right ... shutting down access to a suicide hotline? In February, that national 988 number logged 2,100 calls.
Why this? Why cut a literal lifeline, unless you actively seek to harm?
Scary as clowns can be, they've got nothing on this circus, headmaster of which is traveling, having invited himself, into town, begging applause for crushing lives.
Lily Tomlin in "The Search for Signs of Intelligent LIfe in the Universe," "No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."
Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at [e-mail].