Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s nomination for HHS Secretary was advanced out of committee to the full Senate on Tuesday. Watching his Senate confirmation hearing, last week, was very enlightening in several ways, but not in the ways that I had hoped. Many of the Senators took him to task over his previous statements about the connection between vaccines and autism. Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him, “Will you reassure mothers — unequivocally and without qualification — that the measles and hepatitis B vaccines do not cause autism?” Senator Bernie Sanders followed that by asking, “The evidence is there. Vaccines do not cause autism. Do you agree with that?” Senator Bill Cassidy who is a physician, offered evidence in the hearing that childhood vaccines don’t cause autism. Afterward, even the New York Post piled on claiming that there are “mountains of scientific evidence refuting any such connection” between vaccines and autism. So, we are not allowed to ask questions about the safety of vaccines. Just roll up our sleeves and shut up.
What do we know that is true? Well, we know that there has been a dramatic increase in the incidence of autism in children over the last 25 years. In the year 2000, 1 in 150 children was diagnosed with autism. Today, that number is 1 in 36. In 2025, the CDC recommends 12 vaccines and 34 doses in children before the age of 6 years old; in 2000, the CDC only recommended 7 vaccines and 19 doses. Not only are there more vaccines and doses, but there has been a significant increase in the percentage of children getting the CDC’s recommended protocol of vaccines. It is a correlation that as we increased the number of vaccines we put into children; we have seen a dramatic increase in the incidence of autism in children. Now, I know everyone is screaming ‘correlation is not causation’, and that is absolutely correct – correlation is not causation. Correlation in and of itself proves absolutely nothing. And there have been hundreds of studies done demonstrating that vaccines do not cause autism to which the Senators who receive millions of dollars from Big Pharma continually referenced throughout RFK Jr’s hearing.
But I find it curious, almost alarming, that there have been hundreds of studies done, and tens of millions of dollars spent, proving that vaccines do not cause autism, but very few studies researching the actual cause of autism. There is a disturbing lack of curiosity to discover the reason behind the dramatic increase in childhood autism over the last 25 years, just a big effort to prove that vaccines are not the cause of this dramatic increase in autism. That is very surprising from the medical community.
It reminds me of O.J. Simpson spending millions of dollars on a dream team of lawyers to gain an acquittal in his murder trial of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, and after he was acquitted, vowing to spend every day the rest of his life finding out who the real murderer was, but then actually he spent his days on the golf course. Like OJ, the pharmaceutical companies were determined to “prove” they are not guilty, and they do not really care about discovering what is guilty. And that speaks volumes. Until we discover the actual reason behind the increase in autism, nothing should be off the table.
I am not saying that vaccines do not work. Most vaccines work to prevent disease and have saved many children’s lives. But there may be side effects that they do not want to admit because if they did admit that vaccines do in fact cause autism, then the vaccines makers would be on the hook for the enormous added expense to parents who are raising an autistic child. Two things can be right at the same time, vaccines work very well, but there are some side effects from 34 doses of vaccines injected into a developing human body before the age of 6. We don’t want our children to get the measles or hepatitis B, but we also do not want our children to be autistic either. It is not only about the vaccines.
The medical industry may have already done the calculation for us and concluded that even if there are negative side effects to many of these vaccines, those side effects occur rare enough that introducing these vaccines to children do much more good than harm – a much greater number serious and even deadly diseases are prevented by the vaccines than the amount of harm they may cause. So, the medical community is willing to lie to us for our own good. We saw that type of noble lying by Dr. Fauci and others throughout the pandemic. How can anyone forget, “you’re not taking the vaccine to protect yourself, you are taking the vaccines to protect your neighbor.”
The science is never settled and there are no bad medical questions. And if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they are either lying or hiding something. Vaccines do work. They have saved many people’s lives. But there may be side effects to some of the vaccines that the medical community and Big Pharma do not want to talk about because they do not want to take on the expense and they also fear being honest about the side effects so could cause some people to choose not to get the vaccines which they believe is much worse than getting the vaccines and risking the potential less harmful side effects.
The problem is that in our society that type of nuanced discussion rarely takes place. We are usually given two choices – vaccines are one hundred percent effective and safe, and RFK Jr is a complete wacko, or RFK Jr is a courageous hero and vaccines are poison. Sometimes, there is truth on both sides of a discussion. But there is rarely ever an in between offered, and the disturbing part is that the truth usually lies in between, in the nuances and in subtleties of the discussion – the places that we rarely go, the places that our intense desire to be right all the time prevents us from going. If our medical community has come to a place where it is wrong to ask questions, that we just have to blindly “believe the science” and take the word of Big Pharma, then it really won’t matter who becomes the HHS secretary because Big Pharma and dogmatic science will run everything, anyway.
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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.