Left Brain/Right Brain

Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact. States have a financial incentive to underserve disabled students. Special education is expensive, and every support costs money. The Department of Education exists, in part, as a federal watchdog to ensure that states live up to their obligations under the law. And these are kids who 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.

When I was young, people like my kid were institutionalized. Access to community, either in their residence or their daily activities, was limited. Which is a nice way of saying, a lot of people never saw the outside of an institution. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to think that after I am gone, the state will warehouse my kid. My kid is a human with rights and dignity. It looks like the Trump administration would like to take us a step closer to the bad old days.

NIH autism research funding has collapsed since Mr. Kennedy became HHS Secretary. I wrote about this in my open letter to the IACC. Then I got curious: are the cuts limited to autism, or is this happening across NIH? The answer: it’s everywhere, and it’s worse than I expected. Below is a graph I made after using NIH RePORTER. I checked the number and funding amount of new grants from NIH. Note that I pro-rated the 2026 information since the fiscal year goes until Sept 30.

Secretary Kennedy has cut back on autism research, and you can act. You should act. You must act. Here are data from NIH Reporter on new NIH autism grants by fiscal year. I pro-rated the results from 2026, since the fiscal year ends in September. This graph shows only those grants which are new in each fiscal year, not those which are funding ongoing projects. New grants are down 60% from 2025. Funding is down 80%. I am going to ask you to read that again. An 80% drop in funding for new research grants.

Yes, this is a different topic than typical for this blog. But, let’s consider a simple and obvious lie by our president: the As is typical for this president, this project involves multiple lies. Here are but two. First, the White House would not be changed itself. Just added to. As noted in a recent PBS (yay, PBS. You guys rock) article: The president and his chief spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said over the summer that the White House itself would remain intact as the ballroom was going up.

How does one recapture trust in the public health system? I can tell you one way to make it worse. Put Mark Baxill to work at the CDC. Mr. Blaxill is a long time anti-vaccine activist who has done a lot of harm promoting the “vaccines cause autism” lie. We on this blog have been countering Mr. Blaxill’s misinformation for about two decades now. According to Alt CDC, Mr. Blaxill now is in the Office of the Director. Once again: this is not The Onion. This is not April Fool’s day.

The same people who might value your efforts with Operation Warp Speed will also be able to do the simple math in their heads that says Mr. Kennedy’s approach is going to kill people. Mr. Trump, there is a lot of chatter about you wanting the Nobel Peace Prize. OK, I know you’ve publicly stated you don’t want it, but just in case that’s just you being modest, let’s assume you actually do.

We pay for the CDC. It isn’t there to support Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. It’s there to generate good information that Mr. Kennedy can use or, sadly, not use. He can’t ask them to sign off on dangerous vaccine policy and then cry “restore trust” to excuse firing the trusted experts who are, in his own words, world-leading experts who drive the science that serves us all. Robert Kennedy (aka RFK Jr.) is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services*.

I will state this straight out–I believe the anti vaccine movement has put good people at risk for decades with their rhetoric. And I also believe Mr. Kennedy has contributed a great deal to this climate of hate. How much or how directly he may have influenced the gunman who opened fire at the CDC recently, I cannot say. But I can say that I believe Mr. Kennedy, who has used terms like “corrupt”, “criminal” and “poison children” when discussing a CDC researcher, should apologize for his language.

No one. And that tells us this isn’t about “gold standard science” or anything else. Mr. Kennedy just wanted to remove a major source of vaccination in the world. He had the power, so he used it. What’s this all about, Matt? Here’s the background: Gavi is an international vaccine alliance. The United States is part of the alliance and contributed $400m last year.