Autism is not a disease; it’s a condition

To appoint a fanatic who is neither a doctor nor a scientist as head of a country’s public health is ignorant, stupid and intentional. The closest precedent would be when Josef Stalin appointed Trofim Lysenko to lead the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1940, giving Lysenko domain over Soviet agriculture.

Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics, preferring his own pseudoscience. He did this to curry favor with his dictator.

Smooching Stalin, Lysenko claimed that acquired characteristics can be inherited: i.e., if you learn to play the French horn, your children are likely to be born with such a talent.

This is nonsense, of course, but it propounded Stalin’s claim that he could build a “new Soviet man,” and that such puppets’ traits would be passed along to their children.

Serious Soviet scientists who disagreed were branded “enemies of the state” and could be, and were, sentenced to prison or death.

Lysenkoism set back Soviet science and agriculture for two generations, leading directly to famine that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union, and millions more in Chairman Mao’s China, in its Great Famine of 1959-61.

Following in these bloody footsteps, Bobby Kennedy Jr., in his ignorant, publicity-seeking bellows, claims that vaccines have created an epidemic of autism, which he calls a “preventable disease” that is “somehow linked” to vaccines.

Kennedy “has talked about autistic people with a mixture of disgust and complete ignorance,” according to The Guardian and others.

Kennedy claims that autism “destroys” families. He claims that today’s autistic children “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Actually, a young man named Tarik El-Abour signed a deal with the Kansas City Royals in 2018 and plays in their farm system. He is autistic.

Booby Kennedy’s rants about autism are vicious, arrogant, stupid and ignorant. I can prove it. And I will.

Autism was not recognized as a “spectrum disorder” until 1994, in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. To claim, as Booby Kennedy does, that there has been an “epidemic” of autism since 1994 is as idiotic as it would be to blame Louis Pasteur for infecting the world with germs and bacteria by publishing his “germ theory” of disease in 1861.

The fact that the DSM-IV and American Psychiatric Association defined autism as a mental spectrum disorder, and classified it as such in 1994, does not mean that autism has increased in the past 30 years. It means that before then, there was no such diagnosis.  No one could be diagnosed as “on the spectrum” in 1993 because there was no such spectrum.

Let me speak for myself for a moment. I taught English and music in public high schools for nine years, before I escaped that gauntlet. I’ve had autistic students. I knew that something was going on in there that I didn’t understand, but let me tell you, some of those autistic kids were brilliant. One wrote science fiction stories in the tiniest handwriting you can imagine. I bought a big old magnifying glass to read his stories, which were astounding.

You don’t have to believe me. Read anything by Temple Grandin, a professor at Colorado State University and a leading authority on autism. Read the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, who visited her for a long article in the Dec. 27, 1993 New Yorker, reprinted in his book “An Anthropologist on Mars.”

I will trust Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, and my old high school student on everything before I’d trust Booby Kennedy Junior on anything. Bobby Junior’s ignorant rants have done immeasurable harm to public health, and personal harm, with malice prepense,  to thousands of families. And their tender, brilliant kids.

And this deluded, ignorant, vituperative man is our guardian of public health?

No, no. Bad and criminal as Nero and Caligula were, at least they didn’t lie about what they were doing.

Finally, a personal note, from one Bobby to another: Booby, if you know anything about science or medicine, you might stop plopping your leathery face under a sunlamp every day, lest you be killed by skin cancer.

But hey, if you think it makes you look good to chicks, who am I to try to restrict your freedom of choice?