RFK Jr giving families ‘false hope’ on autism, says outgoing US vaccine official

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.

Marks also told host Margaret Brennan: “There are people, probably, who are hearing me now who know that I cared for leukemia patients for a significant number of years. Giving people false hope is something you should never do.

“You can be incredibly supportive of people, but giving them false hope is wrong.”

Marks’s comments on the topic stemmed from Kennedy’s recent announcement that the Trump administration had launched “a massive testing and research effort” about autism through the National Institutes of Health.

“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy subsequently said.

Marks, in his conversation with Brennan, cited past research that established that the broad spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions referred to as autism involve genetic and environmental factors. He said the higher number of autism cases that have been reported over the years almost certainly results from improved diagnosis rather than an increase in prevalence.

Nonetheless, appearing on the Trump administration-friendly Fox News network, Kennedy asserted that increasing autism rates were the product of “an environmental toxin”. He said vaccines were one of the factors the administration would explore, though more than two dozen studies have refuted claims that they may be a possible cause for autism.

Marks countered: “I will not accept as a cause of autism … any of the … vaccines we use because we’ve studied them in so many millions of children.”

He had served as the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official since 2016 before his resignation took effect on 5 April. His resignation letter took verbal aim at Kennedy, who by then had spent years sowing doubt about the efficacy and safety of vaccines that protect communities from preventable diseases.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” said Marks’s resignation letter, which he reportedly turned in when given the choice to either do so or be fired by the Trump administration.

“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security.”

Two days before Marks’s departure, an eight-year-old girl from the rural west Texas community of Seminole died with measles. It was the second measles-related death involving a child from Seminole in about five weeks after a six-year-old girl died in February.

An adult in Lea county, New Mexico, died with measles between the times the two girls from Seminole died. None of the three was vaccinated against measles, and they were the first people in the US to die from the highly contagious respiratory disease since 2015.

Measles had been declared eliminated from the US in 2000. But the disease has recently been spreading in communities that are skeptical of vaccines and therefore under-vaccinated.

Kennedy has failed to give a full-throated endorsement of the extremely effective, safe measles vaccine – even after traveling to Seminole to visit the families of the girls who died from the illness. He recently told CBS that “people should get the measles vaccine” – but that, in his opinion, “the government should not be mandating those”.

Meanwhile, Kennedy has sought to spotlight unconventional practitioners who have eschewed the measles vaccine in favor of vitamins and cod-liver oil.

Marks for his part has blamed the measles deaths in the US on Kennedy and his staff.

“This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks told the Associated Press after the second pediatric measles fatality in Seminole. “These kids should get vaccinated – that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”

Kennedy on Friday went to the FDA’s headquarters in Maryland and, without mentioning the Trump administration’s elimination of 3,500 jobs there, reportedly urged workers to resist being a part of the “deep state” – meaning the shadow government that Donald Trump’s administration conspiratorially claims has worked to thwart the president.

Multiple media accounts say Kennedy’s remarks were quickly leaked to the press, and some FDA employees walked out before he was finished speaking.