What Happened at RFK's Autism Panel August 27

I logged into the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) meeting, held at the NIMH Neuroscience Center in Rockville, Maryland.

Here’s a brief outline of what I heard, if you’ve only got a couple minutes:

Its biggest funding category never says "vaccines" — and doesn't need to.

Several committee members carry deeply personal stories about their own children — and now also decide where the research money goes.

Real questions were raised inside the room about how to study this rigorously. The outcome didn't change.

Nothing changes for our kids today. But this is bigger than one budget line.

Real research gaps exist. The question is who's trusted to fill them.

Not everything in the room was about causation — a look at the meeting's most useful, least political finding.

A companion explainer on the man who reshaped this committee, and where his own beliefs come from.

And here’s the much longer version, if you’ve got 15 minutes:

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 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, gut bacteria, or how genes shape immune function 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 accusing vaccines for their children's autism. 

Here's some of what I heard.

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.

That's not necessarily dishonest. 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.

To be fair, studying a gap isn't wrong on its face. MMR and thimerosal — the two things originally accused of causing autism — have been studied about as thoroughly as anything in modern medicine, and both came back clear.

But several other childhood vaccines, given in a baby's first six months, were never part of that original accusation and were never individually studied for it either. If careful science filled that gap and came back clean, that would be a good outcome — it would close a door that anti-vaccine groups have been prying at for years.

So the problem here isn't "researching vaccines." It's who gets to design and run that research, and whether the process is built to find an answer or to arrive at one it already has.

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. At the committee's first meeting in April, chair Dr. Sylvia Fogel described the committee's own job this way: to "take the lived experience and urgent concerns of the community and translate them into policy for HHS to consider."

That's a notably different mandate than the one Congress mandated — by law, IACC exists to produce an evidence-based research plan, not to translate personal conviction directly into policy. On Thursday, unsurprisingly, that gap showed up in the room.

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 isn’t 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, Mumper’s 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.

A third member, John Gilmore, runs an advocacy group called the Autism Action Network — founded, by his own account, after his infant son was "vaccine injured." After the vote, he posted a summary on Facebook that said his organization "would have preferred explicit language specifying research on vaccines as a cause of autism, but the plan features language that would allow for research on subjects that could include vaccines."

Nobody had to ask him what the vague wording was for. He told his own followers.

The plan passed 26 to 13, with no recorded votes against it — only support, or abstention.

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.

This matters more than it would for an ordinary disagreement, because the man who appointed this committee — Kennedy, who will ultimately decide what to do with its recommendations — has a documented history of misrepresenting research to reach a predetermined conclusion.

Kennedy isn't a committee member himself, but his 2005 Rolling Stone article blaming thimerosal for autism relied on a preliminary government analysis — and neglected to mention that the same scientist's completed study, published later, found no link at all.

The president of the Institute of Medicine, the body that Kennedy’s article accused of a cover-up, said at the time that Kennedy had used a fabricated quote. In 2021, Kennedy's own organization, the Children’s Health Defense, published a claim that a malaria vaccine trial killed 151 African infants — built by attributing every death in the entire study, including from malnutrition and drowning, to the vaccine, regardless of which group a child was in. None of that proves this specific research will be compromised.

It's a documented pattern from the person now running the agency that oversees it, and it's a reasonable basis for wanting real, independent scrutiny of whatever comes out of this budget line — not just trust that the process will be fair because the category sounds neutral.

The vote passed — even after 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.

Opportunity cost. Every dollar spent chasing a theory this committee's own members already believe is true 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 proving a predetermined conclusion, instead of funding care for people who need it today.

Studying gaps isn't wrong on its face. MMR and thimerosal — the two things originally accused of causing autism — have been studied about thoroughly, and both came back clear. But several other childhood vaccines were never part of that original accusation and were never individually studied for it either. If science filled that gap and came back clean, that would be a good outcome — it would close a door that anti-vaccine groups have been prying at for years.

The "immune/inflammatory" and "mitochondrial/metabolic" categories also cover a lot of ground that has nothing to do with vaccines. One committee member, responding directly to a concern that the plan sidelines genetics, pushed back: "We strongly recommend continued genetics research," they said, adding that the real opportunity is in precision science — "how are genes impacting the immune function? What about mitochondrial function? What about the redox capacity?"

That seems like a legitimate, mainstream research question. Genetic variation shaping how a person's immune system responds to anything — an infection, a food, a vaccine — is real science, actively studied for reasons that have nothing to do with the vaccine debate.

A public commenter pushed the genetics point further, noting that a specific genetic cause can currently be identified in only about 20% of autism cases — "what about the other 80%?" she asked.

IACC's own historical funding data backs up the public commenter’s broader concern: a 2010 IACC portfolio report found genetic research alone received 63% of the committee's "causes" funding category, compared to just 5% for pure environmental research — though that gap has narrowed somewhat in more recent years.

Notably, the new $270 million FY2028 portfolio breaks funding into 11 named categories, and genetics isn't one of them — which is what prompted the committee member's on-the-record defense that the plan "does not remove investigation into genetics."

So the problem here isn't "researching vaccines," or "researching genetics and immunity." It's that the people holding this budget have already told us what they believe the answer is. That's who's designing this research, not whether the questions themselves are worth asking.

This isn't neutral policymaking — it's one man's belief, funded by taxpayers.

Trump has publicly promoted the vaccine-autism theory for years, since before his first presidency. 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. So, this doesn't seem like "the government objectively decided to study something." This comes from the top.

There's a name for this pattern. Researchers call it "advocacy science" — work that has the outward form of research but exists to justify a conclusion someone already holds, rather than to genuinely test it.

It's the same structure tobacco companies used funding lung cancer research in the 1960s, and the sugar industry used steering heart-disease studies in the 1970s. The tell is always the same: watch whether the people running the process would actually accept a result that contradicts what they already believe. Real science can. This process hasn't been asked to yet.

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.

If you believe your own child's autism is connected to a vaccine, this should worry you too. A process built to avoid saying the word "vaccine" out loud is not a process built to actually prove or disprove what you already suspect. Vague categories don't produce real answers. They just produce plausible deniability for whoever's holding the budget.

Not everything in this meeting was about vaccines and regression, of course. Dr. Scott Michael Robertson, a Department of Labor policy advisor and an autistic adult himself, used his time to highlight REYAAS, a study on employment outcomes for autistic young adults.

"This is the largest survey of employment of people on the autism spectrum in the history of America," he told the committee, describing a sample of more than 3,000 people spanning "the full wide range of tapestry you would find on autism" — including people with intellectual disabilities, limited verbal ability, and complex co-occurring conditions, not just the higher-functioning slice of the spectrum that often dominates these conversations.

For parents watching their own kids approach the "cliff" of adult services at 22, where job coaching and vocational support often fall away, the study won't fix that cliff by itself — findings still have to translate into actual funded programs. But it's real evidence, not anecdote, for parents and advocates to eventually push for something better.

The project runs a public webinar on September 16. It started years before this committee's overhaul and has nothing to do with the fight over causation — a reminder that not everyone in the room is fighting the same battle.

He believes vaccines cause autism. He's held this belief publicly for over 20 years, across multiple specific theories, and has said so as recently as this year: "I do believe that autism does come from vaccines."

Kennedy published an article called "Deadly Immunity," co-run by Rolling Stone and Salon. It claimed a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal caused an autism epidemic, and that health agencies conspired with drug companies to cover it up.

No. It contained serious, documented errors:

Rolling Stone quietly deleted it from its website. Salon initially just posted corrections, then fully retracted it in 2011, writing: "The best reader service is to delete the piece entirely."

He rejected it. He's claimed Salon "caved to pressure from the pharmaceutical industry." Salon's own editor directly denied this, saying they caved "to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences." Kennedy's own organization still hosts the original article today, presented as suppressed truth rather than a retracted, error-filled piece.

No — he changed targets. Thimerosal was phased out of childhood vaccines by 2001 anyway, out of caution. Once it stopped being a viable villain, Kennedy shifted to blaming aluminum instead, calling it "almost as bad." Aluminum salts have been safely used in vaccines for more than 70 years, according to the CDC.

Yes. On August 10, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing HHS to develop "additional alternative adjuvants to aluminum and conduct comparative safety and efficacy studies" — the same substance Kennedy called "almost as bad" as thimerosal back in 2021. (Trump is also packing the second circuit court that decides our kids’ futures.)

The order gives HHS 90 days to present a plan for how to pursue this, not to produce or prove a replacement exists — a distinction worth keeping straight, since "90 days to find a replacement" and "90 days to submit a plan for how they might eventually try" aren't the same claim.

And then there’s this: a large study already exists on exactly this question. A 2025 Danish cohort study looked at aluminum-containing vaccines and found no increased risk of autism or other disorders.

But other scientists have pushed back on that study. They noticed something odd: for more than a dozen conditions, the data showed kids who got more aluminum in their vaccines were somehow less likely to have those conditions — including autism.

One critic called that pattern hard to believe, since aluminum isn't some miracle substance that protects kids from a dozen unrelated problems at once.

That can be a sign that something went wrong with how the study was set up. The journal that published the study even issued a correction, saying the original write-up overstated how clear-cut the results were.

So this isn't settled the way MMR is. There's less research here, and what exists is still being argued over.

Still, that's what makes the executive order worth watching. A study already looked at whether aluminum causes autism and said no — the opposite of what Kennedy believes.

But that same study also found aluminum seemed to protect kids from more than a dozen unrelated conditions, which is what made other scientists suspicious of the whole thing. That's a reason to want a better study. It's not really a reason to think the "no link to autism" finding is wrong.

The order treats it as if the question is still wide open, when what's actually in question is whether this one study was done well — not whether aluminum causes autism.

It's a pattern. In 2021, his organization published a piece blaming a Gates Foundation malaria vaccine trial for 151 infant deaths in Africa. In reality, no deaths were linked to the vaccine. The claim was built by adding up every bad outcome — including deaths from malnutrition, drowning, and HIV — across both the vaccinated group and the placebo group, and attributing all of it to the vaccine.

Children's Health Defense, one of the largest anti-vaccine organizations in the country. He founded it in 2015 (originally called the World Mercury Project) and led it until 2023, when he left to run for president. Meta banned the organization from Facebook and Instagram for repeated medical misinformation violations.

Yes, by his own financial disclosures. He has made millions of dollars connected to anti-vaccine advocacy, including through lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and by referring people to lawyers for vaccine-injury claims.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, confirmed in 2025. This gives him direct authority over the CDC, the FDA, and federal autism research policy — the most powerful position on this exact question that he has ever held.

Yes, significantly. In January 2026, he replaced the membership of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), the federal panel that sets autism research priorities, appointing several people with public histories of blaming vaccines for their own children's autism.

In November 2025, the CDC quietly rewrote its "Autism and Vaccines" webpage. It still technically says "Vaccines do not cause Autism" — Kennedy promised a senator he wouldn't remove that sentence — but a footnote now calls that same claim "not evidence-based."

The vaccines specifically accused of a link — MMR and thimerosal — have been studied about as thoroughly as anything in modern medicine. A Danish study followed over 650,000 children; a more recent one followed over a million. Neither found any connection to autism. A 2009 review of 20 separate epidemiological studies reached the same conclusion. This is not a live scientific debate among researchers. It's a closed question that has been reopened politically, not scientifically.

A few different things are going on at once, and they get blended together:

They've moved the target. Most of today's push isn't really about MMR or thimerosal anymore. It's shifted to vaccines that were never specifically studied for autism in the first place — DTaP, Hepatitis B, Hib, and others given in a baby's first six months. These weren't part of the original 1998 scare, so nobody built a dedicated study ruling them out. That's a real, narrow gap. The move is treating "this specific thing was never studied" as if it means "something is being hidden" — when the more likely explanation is that nobody accused these vaccines of anything until recently, so nobody had a reason to study them.

Personal experience feels like proof. Autism symptoms typically become noticeable around 12 to 18 months — almost exactly when a baby receives several rounds of vaccines. A parent who watches their child change right after a shot is describing something real that happened to them. The timing overlap is genuinely common. But two things happening close together in time isn't the same as one causing the other, and large-scale studies exist precisely because individual timing can mislead even careful, honest observers.

Distrust of the institutions runs deeper than distrust of any one study. For people already convinced that the CDC, pharmaceutical companies, and mainstream medicine are protecting their own interests, no single study — no matter how large — will settle the question. The 2020 ICAN court stipulation, discussed elsewhere in this document, gets used this way: a narrow, real admission gets treated as proof the entire body of vaccine safety research is compromised.

There's now real political power behind the belief. For decades, people who believed this were on the outside of federal health policy. That changed in 2025. A committee stacked with people who already hold this belief isn't neutral ground weighing new evidence — it's people who spent years advocating for this position now sitting in the seats that control research funding. Advocacy and open-minded inquiry can look similar from the outside; they're not the same thing.

And in at least one case, there's money involved. As covered above, Kennedy has personally profited from vaccine-injury litigation and referrals. That doesn't mean everyone pushing for this research is financially motivated — most parents making these arguments clearly are not — but it is a real, documented factor for the person now running HHS.

Yes — just not the vaccine question. What actually causes autism, and what makes some children more vulnerable to it, remains a real and legitimate open question worth serious research investment. That's a different question from "do vaccines cause it," and conflating the two is part of how this issue keeps getting reopened despite the settled evidence.

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