Betraying Autism: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Cult of Credulity
When superstition infects public health, moral collapse dresses itself as science—and the vulnerable are its first sacrifice.
There is a line between governance and grievance, between medicine and myth. A healthy society defends it. A decaying one erases it.
In April 2025, under the auspices of public health, the United States began erasing it with surgical precision—and catastrophic indifference.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced plans to create a national registry for autism diagnoses by aggregating private health records from pharmacy chains, genomic databases, wearable devices, and insurance claims.
Pitched publicly as a benign advance in autism and chronic disease research, the proposal immediately triggered alarms. No clear guidelines were provided on consent, data protection, or independent oversight. In a nation already hemorrhaging public trust, the idea of harvesting sensitive medical data under an administration allergic to scientific rigor was not merely reckless—it was predatory.
Within days, a Department of Health and Human Services official contradicted Kennedy’s announcement, insisting that no new autism registry was being created—merely that “existing datasets” were being “linked” to support research.
Snopes, in an independent fact-check, confirmed the ambiguity: there was no direct verification from the NIH supporting the existence of a new autism registry.
Such contradictions are not clerical errors. In a public health environment already corroded by conspiracy theories and manufactured distrust, ambiguity is not a misstep—it is an accelerant.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long and notorious history of promoting discredited theories linking vaccines to autism is a matter of public record—a catechism of credulity repeated long after evidence refuted it. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus, Kennedy has spent decades mistaking correlation for causation—a betrayal of intellectual integrity, and an unforgivable one in public health.
Worse still, Kennedy appointed David Geier—a data analyst previously sanctioned for practicing medicine without a license—to oversee federal research into the supposed vaccine-autism connection.
The absurdity is total: a man forbidden from practicing medicine is now entrusted to shape it.
Meanwhile, epidemiological studies—conducted across decades, continents, and demographics—show that the rise in autism diagnoses reflects better recognition and expanded diagnostic criteria, not environmental triggers or vaccine injury.
This is not the pursuit of truth. It is the canonization of error.
The medical records, genomic sequences, and biometric outputs Kennedy proposes to aggregate are not sterile datapoints. They are the intimate coordinates of human lives—unique, vulnerable, and irretrievable.
Seizing this information without explicit, informed consent is not merely unethical. It is a violation of the moral contract between citizen and state—a contract intended, in its most fundamental form, to protect against precisely this kind of institutional predation.
And history speaks plainly: what begins as research becomes surveillance. What begins as protection mutates into control. Bureaucratic appetites, once awakened, do not subside; they metastasize.
The same cold machinery that once justified the Tuskegee experiments has simply changed its letterhead. It has not changed its nature.
Every contradiction, every obfuscation, every public dalliance with pseudoscience exacts a price measured not in abstractions, but in delayed diagnoses, compromised treatments, and widened chasms between the people and the institutions sworn to serve them.
Autism advocacy groups and privacy organizations have sounded the alarm with righteous urgency—an urgency born not of hysteria, but of hard historical memory: a national registry would not merely trample civil liberties.
What kind of society guards its guns more fiercely than its children’s dignity?
In the end, the casualty is not public health alone. It is the very idea that governance can be grounded in reason rather than grievance, in evidence rather than fear.
The difference between a government rooted in science and one enthralled by superstition is not academic. It is existential. It is the difference between saving lives—and sacrificing them on the altar of ideology.
When the Secretary of Health and Human Services cannot distinguish evidence from hallucination—when national health policy is steered not by empirical humility but by personal mythology—the damage is not speculative. It is immediate. It is real. It is fatal.
A national autism registry, born from the haze of bad science and worse ethics, is not a neutral initiative. It is a declaration: that the cult of credulity has conquered the corridors of power, and that the line between medicine and myth, between compassion and cruelty, has collapsed.
If the United States is to retain any claim to rational governance, it must begin by demanding the simplest of virtues from its leaders: the courage to tell the truth—and the competence to recognize it.
There is no vaccine against a government that mistakes its fantasies for facts.
There is only vigilance—and, when vigilance falters, resistance becomes a moral imperative.
RFK JR claims are preposterous. He poses such a huge threat to public health.
Hi, would it okay to share this article with a private Facebook group, or would that compromise the privacy of both the FB group and Substack? After all, Big Brother is watching.