Dr Peter Marks, forced to resign by Trump administration, sees no ‘possible way’ to determine cause by September

The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, should not offer “false hope” to families by boasting he can figure out what causes autism as soon as September, says the physician who resigned as the nation’s top vaccine official amid what he called anti-vaccination misinformation from the Trump administration cabinet member.

In an interview during which he alluded to his help helming Operation Warp Speed – the initiative that took only about nine months to develop, manufacture and distribute the vaccines protecting the public from Covid-19 – Dr Peter Marks warned that autism “is an incredibly complicated issue”.

“If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly? I don’t see any possible way,” Marks said on CBS’s Face the Nation in a pre-recorded discussion airing Sunday.

  • gamer@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    4 days ago

    This is going to end poorly. They’re going to come to some conclusion not supported by evidence, and people are going to believe it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they claimed parents with “too much empathy” were what caused autism in their children, to try and win more people over to the MAGA hate cult before the midterms. Or maybe it’ll be “fathers with low testosterone” to try and recruit people to military service.

    It doesn’t matter how stupid, dangerous, and obviously wrong/unscientific it is. People are going to believe it “just to be safe”. There is absolutely no possible scenario in which RFK or the Trump admin admit they were wrong about this.

  • Broadfern@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    4 days ago

    I mean, parts of being autistic can suck but ffs it’s not a death sentence.

    So sick and tired of the eugenicist POS narrative that it’s this horrible defect and not predominantly just a heritable neurotype that’s part of the normal variance of human existence. Unfortunately capitalist, and especially US society is built to punish difference but that doesn’t make us the problem.