of the tip off dept
It’s story time! Last weekend I came home from the supermarket very proud. I rushed to tell my wife how I was complimented at the checkout by the nice woman behind me. She said she was impressed with the way I “Tetris-ed” my groceries on the conveyor belt, carefully arranging my purchases not only in the correct order so that they were bagged together (drinks/alcohol, then frozen items, then refrigerated items, then warm storage items), but also so that there was no unused real estate on the belt itself. Hence the comment “Tetris”.
My wife’s response was, “Honey, your spectrum is showing.”
This is obviously not meant to mock autism spectrum disorder. On the contrary even. It’s an acknowledgment that I’m somewhere on that spectrum, like many more of us than probably realize. I’m an IT guy. This is not unexpected.
But I had no idea that one of the possible causes of my landing there was that my parents had made the choice to have me circumcised after birth.
During a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Kennedy, a longtime proponent of the unsubstantiated theory that vaccines cause autism, addressed the causes of autism.
He specifically talked about how he saw a TikTok video of a pregnant woman “guzzling Tylenol.” Kennedy said the woman took Tylenol “with a baby in her placenta,” even though the fetus is developing in the womb. Additionally, Kennedy said circumcised boys have double the rate of autism.
But Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who voted for Kennedy’s nomination in both the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate, expressed confusion.
“That’s new,” he told The Independent, chuckling.
Grinning? Kennedy waxing poetic about how an ancient ritual that has been around for centuries is suddenly causing a spike in autism rates in recent decades is not funny. Misspelling your name with a useless “h” in it is funny, but this is different. The idiot who doesn’t even have the basic knowledge of how development in the womb works is running the health care policy for the whole damn country and all he did was claim that there is a link between autism rates and circumcision. The right answer to this is hearings, especially hearings on Kennedy’s impeachment, not laughter.
Some people, including a large majority of the voting public, don’t find any of this humorous.
Many Americans do not seem to trust Trump and Kennedy’s claims. A KFF poll found that only four percent of Americans believed their claims about Tylenol and autism were absolutely true, while 30 percent said it was probably false and 35 percent said it was definitely false.
But Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), a member of the HELP Committee and a sharp critic of Kennedy, said Kennedy’s bizarre and baseless claims are no laughing matter.
“We’re talking about whether or not parents can rely on the information from the Secretary of Health and Human Services,” she said. “It’s really not funny. This whole thing is dangerous. People are going to get sick and die from this. And I think it’s terrible.”
In case you’re wondering, these claims are largely based on: Danish study from 2015 which showed that circumcised boys were more likely to be diagnosed with ASD than boys who were not circumcised. And as you might expect, the study’s methods and conclusions were heavily criticized. It shows a correlation, but not causation. And, as is the case with ASD diagnoses in general, the real factor at play here appears to be contact with medical professionals, versus those who have fewer of those contacts.
The 2015 study found that the risk of autism was higher among circumcised boys under age 5, but after age 5 the association disappeared. “If circumcision really causes autism,” Gounder said, “that association should persist even after age 5. They are likely picking up on the fact that children who undergo circumcision in health care facilities have more health care contact and have parents with higher levels of education and income — all of which are associated with being diagnosed with autism at an earlier age than other children. That association may disappear once children start school, when teachers and supervisors pick up the symptoms.”
Folks, the timeline for how long it will take to undo the destruction of trust that Kennedy is currently sowing in our government medical institutions will be measured in decades. And please miss me on any claims that the COVID response or anything else that may have also created similar distrust is in any way comparable to what is currently going on at HHS. It’s not, and it’s not even close.
Filed Under: Angela Alsobrooks, autism, circumcision, healthcare and social services, rfk jr., thom tillis
#RFK #discovers #autism #lack #foreskin