Why is this 70 year old guy so obsessed with something he knows nothing about? Why name Tylenol the “cause” of autism when he obviously wants to say its vaccines?
I get that the underlying goal of MAHA is eugenics, but I just don’t get why or this angle. I haven’t come across much really talking about it. Everything is focused on the fact that its obviously ridiculous that Tylenol (or anything) causes autism, but what is the obession with finding this nonexistent cause?
Its his special interest.
that reminds me of that clip where he says when started doing heroin he could finally sit still and concentrate. It is possible he was self medicating for undiagnosed adhd or audhd.I dont think he’s covered by anything in the dsm.
Now presenting the DSM 6 - RFK edition
The solution for ADHD is powerful stimulants, though. I don’t have any experience with heroin but wouldn’t it be counterproductive?
Replying here to answer both questions.
I was an opiate addict for over a decade. I definitely have undiagnosed ADHD and I believe I am autistic as well, but only based on vibes I guess.
Opiates do something to my brain… I just feel like me. Or I feel how I should feel? I’m social able and outgoing and fun.
Since getting sober from opiates, I’ve often wondered what it is exactly they do for my brain that’s missing. Clearly something is missing.
And these effects did, quite often, include better focus. I worked so much better if I was a little high.
There is of course a fine line between fixing your brain so it works right and going on a trip to the Land of Nod. That obviously makes you pretty ineffective at everything. And it will come eventually lol
It’s driven by scared parents being asked to put needles in their kids and not having enough education to trust it. On top of that you have the extreme edge cases where parents of autistic children attribute the autism to those things, who earnestly and sincerely campaign against it because they genuinely believe they’re protecting other parents and their kids.
Politicians and right wing agitators latch onto it because it’s fucking easy to use emotional hysteria with no basis in facts. The others that latch on are conspiracy theorists and cranks.
Because the root of it is ultimately scared parents you have an infinitely replenishing issue base that will always affect a very large and important portion of the population. They use it as the starting point of a right wing pipeline.
I remember when the “vaccines cause autism” thing started picking up steam over 20 years ago. There wasn’t as much known or understood about neurodivergence. I understand the reason for the fear at that time, because there was so much that there wasn’t an answer for.
But why is all of this still so central to all these cranks? Now if you’re concerned about autism you can read about it. You can learn about all the things we know now that we didn’t when the hysteria began.
I know the answer is because they’re cranks. I know the answer is that americans will never educate themselves when they could just have a moral panic instead.
You’re right about frightened parents creating this inexauhstable supply to keep the hysteria going. I think that’s the best answer as to why this persists. But I can’t seem to ever stop feeling baffled. That this 25 year long hysteria continues in the face of how much our understanding of neurodiversity has grown is something that just deeply effects me.
a lot of people don’t really use the internet to research something so much as to find validation for their biases, if not just straight up entertainment.
you can still run into people who think seatbelt laws are bad because im an accident, you need to get out of the car quickly before it catches fire.
granted, they are rarer now than they were 30 years ago, and everybody in their IRL orbit for sure knows they are a complete dolt, but all the research, data and science in the world hasn’t done anything to dislodge the turds between their ears.
you need to get out of a car quickly before it catches fire.
I dunno I think I’d prefer taking a few extra seconds and risk some mild burns over exiting a car through the front windshield at 60 mph, buy maybe that’s because I’m a liberal.
the trick is to close your eyes when you are launched through th glass and then tuck and roll when you hit the ground.
also, the windshields are all made of safety glass now, so like its nbd to be launched face forst through one.
in particular, Wakefield published his bullshit study because he had a financial interest in a competitor to the MMR vaccine at the time.
Perfectly put.
it seems to be one of the unifying issues of all the cranks. it’s been around the longest and it was one of the first i heard IRL from a wild-eyed weirdo.
i think it’s the tentpole crank issue that all the cranks rally around.
My mom gave me a shit ton of quack supplements when I got diagnosed. It’s a pretty common vector for conservative weirdos.
my mom wasn’t quite so bad about quack b.s. as that, but the supplement people made bank off her.
like she would meet other older people on her travels and they would get her to buy a year’s supply of some crap that flunked its pitch for “As Seen On TV” marketing.
it always seemed like the last leg of some MLM scam and she was always thankfully resistant to that side of things, if not their over priced magic potions.
Oh god did you have to ever take enzyme aids or fish oils?
the first one sounds familiar.
i think i hit an age early on where i could reject the magic medicines and she’d drop it, because they were expensive and she was using it to treat her own annoyances. a nagging cough, restless sleep, etc. she never liked what doctors said about like diet, exercise and not watching tv all night, so she was always on the lookout for some magic powder somebody from [insert northern european country here] sold her to prove that, actually, she can be totally ridiculous and have no problems because of this new scientifically-proven powder.
a nagging cough
Okay I thought you said “nagging couch” at first and I thought that was funny, cuz this medical quackery fascination also lined up pretty well with a period of my mom’s life where he became super sedentary and demanding. Like she’d spend most of the day binge watching reality TV and yelling at us kids to get her things and do stuff around the house, and then yell at my dad when he got home from his full time job with an hour commute each way to make dinner and pack our lunches for tomorrow.
I know the “nagging wife” thing is a boomer man trope but I think my dad is actually justified in complaining about it a bit.
Sorry to trauma dump though!
That makes a lot of sense. “The vaccines cause autism” is right at the center of the various groups that have now coalesced into MAHA. It was like woo white libs, new age post hippies, supplement bros, conspiracy theorists all the diverse cranks that are now all fascists together
He’s anti-medicine in general. He does not believe in modern medicine. RFK and Trump point to there being more diagnoses of autism than in the past. This is due to the advances of modern medicine making new discoveries. RFK presents the assumption that the rise in cases must be due some external factor increasing the number of people with autism, rather than modern medicine being better at detecting autism. Trump said the same exact thing about Covid. He famously said that we shouldn’t do Covid testing because that increases the number of Covid cases. The mind of a child believes that if something is not observed, then it does not exist.
There is a very simple way to understand the mind of right wingers and many religious people. They believe in the “just world fallacy”. They believe that good things only happen to people who deserve it. Example: Billionaires are rich because they are good. They believe that bad things only happen to people that deserve it. Example: poor people deserve to be poor, sick people did something wrong to get sick, victims of violence did something wrong to provoke it, etc. Within this mindset, the individual explains bad things happening in 2 ways, either they deserved it or it didn’t happen.
RFK and others are blaming Tylenol and Vaccines as a way to say that people with Autism did something wrong to deserve it. The second half will be reducing Autism detection methods, so that there will be more undiagnosed Austistic people. RFK and others will eventually move on to denying that Autism exists.
The goal is remove responsibility from the government. The goal of RFK is for people to die of preventable or curable diseases because he doesn’t want the government to spend money on medical research or helping people. In his mind, sick people deserve it or are faking it.
Who profits off of attacking Tylenol? What company produces their treatment? Etc…
I read that the company behind Tylenol is on the smaller side. So the theory is that going after them provides RFK with a Big Pharma boogie man to attack without threatening most of the industry. And like your saying, the rest of the industry can profit off of it. So its nice show to put on for the cranks without hurting the ruling class
It’s worth pointing out that it’s Johnson & Johnson specifically (the first manufacturer of a non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in the US, IIRC) and that plenty of acetominophen (also called paracetamol outside the US) generics are on the market
People/funds who short that company
My guess it’s like you said eugenics, we need neurotypical adult bodies to do wage work for the capitalists and fight their wars, since ai can’t even put 5 fingers on a person yet.
Something about an ancestral bargain between the Kennedy family and the fae gone wrong and the consequent traditional fear of changelings.
A lot of the attitude underpinning the anti-vax movement is this defense of the way things used to be done. You see these “my mom got three shots as a kid, I got five, so why is my daughter/granddaughter getting 35?” posts all the time from them. I think it’s especially strong in the 60+ contingent as they’re seeing a world in general that’s drastically changed from when they were young and there’s an anxiety that the way they did things will be viewed by history as the primitive, regressive ways that were right to be let go. Thus they’re protecting their legacy.
With that in mind, I think it’s important to note that RFK jr’s aunt Rose had developmental disabilities and the family’s “solution” was to lobotomize her and stick her in a home for the rest of her life where they didn’t visit her. So yeah, there’s the eugenics on the macro level, but for RFK jr personally, I think it’s a defense of the way his family handled mental health issues and kept them from being a “problem.”
Brain worm is worried that the autistics are on to it
I don’t care if they know, there’s no stopping the plans of my people now.
The reason why he’s going for Tylenol over vaccines is because acetaminophen taken during pregnancy is correlated to autism, whereas there’s no link of any kind for vaccines. It’s easier to defend and get individual doctors to suggest not taking acetaminophen while pregnant.
Autism is heritable and these fascist weirdos seem to be really in denial about this fact.
The tylenol-autism link actually seems to be that autistic people report higher pain during pregnancy than allistic people.
Tylenol is one of the only painkillers that can be (or previously could be) recommended during pregnancy.
It’s easier to defend and get individual doctors to suggest not taking acetaminophen while pregnant.
So just how much of every current problem is caused or exacerbated because capitalism has hyper normalized and abladed all the structures that gave firmness to reality while also feeding us individualism?
Cause sometimes it feels like an awful lot of them are.
it’s very weakly correlated in boys but not in girls and not in all children as a cohort or some shit. it’s dumb on top of dumb, including that acetaminophen is really toxic for how weak it is.
He wants to say vaccines cause it and he would love to ban vaccines, but that would cause so much backlash so they had to scale back to some bullshit excuse based on in-progress science. This is why there was still some vaccine pushback in the meeting (splitting them up, because its to much liquid at once for a little baby)
I think the goal of this is to be able to go after public health officials that speak up, claiming they are spreading medical misinformation, especially if they can nab some of the ones they have a hate boner for like Fauci
much liquid
it’s like 0.5 mL per shot lmfao
For being obsessed with autism and alleged medical industry causes of it, ans aoexidu vaccines, that goes to the UK where Andrew Wakefield fraudulently published that claim and it shot off with low information alt medicine folks, which was a big chunk of the population. The UK NIH alao covered (covers?) homeopathic medicine at the time, which is literally just giving people a little watee to drink because they think something that causes similar symptoms has been diluted out of it. This movement was also popular in the US, same kinds of people who buy Alex Jones supplements or trust chiropractors over propeely educated physios, etc etc.
There is a lot of mistrust of medicine. Combine this with a for-profit bullshit industry and blaming the medical industry for “new” problems becomes an evergreen scapegoat for any huckster. Autism was considered to be “on the rise” at the time, but like many other conditions it was probably just previously misunderstood and not diagnosed or misdiagnosed.
As for “why Tylenol?” I really have no idea.
Yeah Andrew Wakefield has been a disaster for the human race. I have frequently used the visual of “Doctors 50 years ago just said “The kid is broke” before lighting up a cigarette and smacking a nurse on the ass” no shit autism rates have increased dramatically as we’re able to actually diagnose it now.
I have a relative that called my sibling years ago and spent the better part of a hour telling them it was probably flouride that caused their child to be diagnosed with auDHD, don’t bother with the fact that we grew up in a house that was on well water in an area where natural fluoride concentrations in water tables are extremely low. Same relative has a naturopath that has sold her thousands of dollars in herbal supplements.
As for “why Tylenol?” I really have no idea.
conjecture: trying to lower market value in order to invest or strong-arming something from whoever produces acetaminaphen (sp?)
I wonder if Trump or RFK Jr didn’t short Johnson & Johnson (they are the company that owns Tylenol). (Also, just fyi it’s acetaminophen, in case knowing how to spell it improves your life in some way)
it does, thank you!
he covets what he cant have
Yeah, I gad thought it was downstream from general antivax stuff but that doesn’t seem to fit fully. I think maybe it is just idiosyncratic psudoscience enjoying.
deleted by creator
