I logged into the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) meeting yesterday. The committee voted to adopt a new strategic plan for federal autism research — the first full update in more than three years. It's asking the government to nearly double its autism spending, from $390 million a year to $747 million. The single biggest slice of new money — $45 million — goes to something called "immune and inflammatory" research.
The single biggest slice of new money — $45 million — goes to something called "immune and inflammatory" research.
The word "vaccine" doesn't appear anywhere in that budget line. It doesn't need to.
Vaccines work by triggering an immune response. A study asking whether vaccination is connected to autism fits inside "immune and inflammatory" research as easily as a study on prenatal infection or gut bacteria does.
And the people deciding which studies get funded under that heading include committee members who told the room that they believe their own children were injured by vaccines.
This is the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, or IACC — a federal panel that advises RFK Jr.—the Secretary of Health and Human Services—on autism policy and shapes where hundreds of millions of research dollars go.
In January, Secretary Kennedy replaced the committee's membership. The new roster dropped established groups like the Simons Foundation and Autism Speaks. Several new members have public histories of blaming vaccines for their children's autism.
Here's some of what I heard.
The budget category is vague. That's the point.
The plan itself is careful about how it words this. "We are agnostic on triggers," one committee member explained, "because we don't want to close the door for any potential trigger, and that would include things like glutamate, or aspartame, or a vaccination, or an infection, or a febrile event, or anesthesia." Vaccination isn't named as a cause. It's one item on a list of "potential triggers" the plan says it won't rule out.
The people deciding which studies get funded include committee members who told the room that they believe their own children were injured by vaccines.
That's not necessarily dishonest. Real, independently grounded immune research on autism already exists and predates this committee by decades: maternal immune activation during pregnancy, PANS and PANDAS (autoimmune conditions usually linked to strep infections, not vaccines), microglial activation, cytokine dysregulation. None of that requires believing vaccines cause autism.
But the width of the category is also the point. "Immune and inflammatory" is broad enough to fund a vaccine-mechanism study without ever writing the word "vaccine" on a slide. A maternal immune response to a vaccine is still a maternal immune response. A cytokine reaction following vaccination is still a cytokine reaction. Nothing in the budget, it seems, forces anyone to say which one they mean.
The people deciding where the money goes aren’t neutral.
That ambiguity would matter less if the people directing the money were neutral on the question. They're not, at least not all of them.
Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a pediatrician and one of the 21 new members Kennedy appointed, told the committee about a patient of hers — a 15-month-old boy she vaccinated with MMR in 1999. "I watched the horror as he regressed into autism," she said. "It was my lived experience that changed the trajectory of my life. I can't believe that I'm here, like 27 years later, and we still have parents that are being told that regression is real. It honestly infuriates me."
Mumper's official bio lists her as a senior fellow of the Independent Medical Alliance. That's the renamed Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, the group that pushed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as COVID treatments and campaigned publicly for Kennedy's confirmation as HHS Secretary.
In April, the group was named an official liaison to the CDC's vaccine advisory committee, the panel that shapes national vaccine recommendations. The same political network now has a hand in both rooms.
Another member, Ginger Taylor, put it more bluntly: "I've always said for the last 10 years, one million moms are not wrong. One million moms are not wrong." She went on to describe her own son's regression after a round of infant vaccinations in 1997: "He screamed for 48 hours. He was never the same child."
Taylor is the former director of the Maine Center for Vaccine Choice. Days before this meeting, bioethicist Arthur Caplan publicly accused her of spreading misinformation online about two measles deaths in Pennsylvania. She now sits on the committee deciding how the government studies what causes autism.
Her official HHS bio doesn't mention vaccines either. It describes her as focused on "informed consent" and "access to healthcare services for children with complex medical conditions" — the same kind of careful vagueness running through the plan's own budget language.
Recently, Bioethicist Arthur Caplan publicly accused IACC member Ginger Taylor of spreading misinformation about two measles deaths in Pennsylvania.
Nobody on this committee is hiding what they think. I don’t think I've ever heard the word “regression” mentioned so frequently. What's less visible is how that belief in regression will translate into which specific studies get greenlit under a budget category that never has to name vaccines.
The vote passed anyway — even after real scientists pushed back.
To be fair to the room: this wasn't one-sided. Real scientific pushback did happen, from inside Kennedy's own reconstituted committee.
Dr. Amy Bany Adams, the acting director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and a federal member of the committee, raised a more specific problem: nobody agrees yet what "regression" actually means. "We don't have clear diagnostic criteria, and we don't have any kind of consensus criteria or recommendations in this space," she said. Her point wasn't that the research shouldn't happen — she said she appreciated the plan's own framing of itself as a "hypothesis generator."
Her point was about order of operations: fund studies of a phenomenon nobody has agreed how to define, and you won't be able to trust or compare what those studies find. "We have to start with a shared definition in order for research to move forward," she said — a scientist's way of saying the field is being asked to run before it can walk.
Another member raised a sharper historical point, tracing the “regression” term back to its origin: "If you go back to Leo Kanner's 1943 paper of 11 patients, only one was described as regression, and that regression was not nearly as profoundly described as what we just witnessed... it raises the question about whether the disease landscape may have changed." That's a real question worth sitting with — is today's "regression" the same thing Kanner saw, just more common, or a different phenomenon being described with an old word?
One committee member, identified in the recording only as "Brian," grew frustrated with the room: "Why would anybody ever hesitate? I'm asking for complete honesty in pushing this through... What opposition would be to serving this community?"
It was in direct response to that pressure that Deirdra Assey, the Department of Justice's federal representative on the committee, raised her own caution: "I don't know that it is necessarily hesitancy to support the recommendation... there's a potential that we may be delving into a broader focus than this committee."
So this wasn't a committee marching in lockstep. It was a committee where real scientists raised real objections in real time — and the objections didn't change the outcome.
No other outlet reported the vaccine angle. We were in the room (sort of).
Disability Scoop covered Thursday's vote too. Their story is worth reading, and it's not wrong — it's just a different story. It covers the $747 million funding ask, a new focus on "profound autism," and a real transparency problem: more than a dozen autism organizations, including Autism Speaks and the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, complained that most of the 5,000-plus public comments on the plan weren't posted until the day before the vote. One advocate, Judith Ursitti, pointed out the plan is missing citations, making its research claims hard to check.
Nowhere in that story does the word "vaccine" appear.
That's not necessarily a mistake. It might mean their sourcing didn't include the room's testimony, or it was an editorial choice to cover the governance story instead of the ideological one. But it means there's a real gap between what happened in that meeting and what most people are going to read about it. I sat in the room. This is what I heard.
Nothing changes for our kids today. But this is bigger than one budget line.
Opportunity cost. Every dollar spent re-litigating a question that's already been answered is a dollar not spent on things that demonstrably help people who have autism now — service delivery backlogs, employment supports, housing, the diagnostic workforce shortage. Even Disability Scoop's own coverage flagged this: the Autism Society's own policy director said the plan doesn't "sufficiently prioritize what the federal government can realistically accomplish." Nearly doubling the budget doesn't fix that if the growth is weighted toward chasing a cause that's already been ruled out, instead of funding care for people who need it today.
This isn't neutral policymaking — it's one man's belief, funded by taxpayers. Trump has publicly promoted the vaccine-autism theory for years. He directed Kennedy to overhaul this committee. Kennedy did, replacing established science organizations with vaccine skeptics. That committee just voted to nearly double federal autism spending, with its largest category vague enough to fund the exact theory the president has personally pushed. That's not "the government objectively decided to study something." That's a chain of command, dressed up as a strategic plan.
This has a body count attached, not just a budget. Ginger Taylor was publicly accused of spreading misinformation about two people who died of measles — a vaccine-preventable disease — in the same week she sat on this committee. Funding federal research that lends institutional credibility to a debunked link doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens while vaccine hesitancy is already killing people.
Watch where this goes. It's not abstract anymore.