Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!
There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol,Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.
One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.
The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.
Another expert brings up a rather salient point.
“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.
Fire that guy.
By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.
The practice may have started because men exposed to sand storms get sand grains under their foreskin when urinating, leading to painful inflammation (as reported by allied troops in North Africa).
.
If the idiot was right, we should have a solid statistical signal from millions of muslims and jews.
Circumcision is a really odd one, where the science pretty clearly says it’s stupid, but the vocal opposition comes from a flock of utter nutters inventing crazy reasons to oppose it.
The available evidence is that the genetic contribution to autism is high at 80%.
The environmental factors that contribute are not well understood right now.
Medical research also shows that autism is set in fetal development.
The tl;dr version.
A proposed model is that upstream highly interconnected regulatory ASD gene mutations disrupt transcriptional programs or signaling pathways resulting in dysregulation of downstream processes such as proliferation, neurogenesis, synaptogenesis and neural activity.
We have identified hundreds of autism associated genes, with small effects that act together, i.e. poygenic. These genes are expressed in the fetal brain. The details after that aren’t at all clear.
Needless to say, nobody is circumcising fetuses.
If this is true, then isn’t the best course of action not to circumcise infants?
I’ve always viewed circumcision as a barbaric custom without any practical benefits. I would never inflict such pain on an infant. It’s a terrible introduction to the world.
@John Watts #4, even almost forty years ago, when our two sons were born, there was zero medical reason to perform circumcision, and we decided not to do that procedure with our boys. Unfortunately, people are still making stuff up to support one side or another.
numerobis: WTF are you talking about? Who are these “utter nutters,” and what “crazy reasons” are they “inventing?”
If your momma took Tylenol while she was pregnant and you were circumcised, you have autism. And yet we are treating (preventable) communicable diseases as if they were our bosom buddy. As a medical professional for >40 years, this shit makes my brain hurt.
The disconnect between preventable disease management and the spread of unsubstantiated medical claims is troubling.
I guess I’m only half autistic, Tylenol didn’t come out until after I was born.
I guess it was his turn to make an absolutely bullshit claim to flood the public square with outrageous distractions.
By modern standards, Einstein would be diagnosed as autistic. No idea on his circumcision status, but he clearly wasn’t exposed to Tylenol or childhood vaccines.
I do hope that non-neurotypical people will someday be considered just that, atypical but completely normal. It’s not really a problem to be above average in intellect
but find most human social behaviors exhausting and pointless.
“That man is just incredibly stupid.” Yeah, but stupid sells. Stupid i’s really big in America, Must do reasonably well in other parts of the world.
A little surprising to me that so many of my boomer generation have this anti-science, anti-science-based-medicine sentiment. The first anti-vaxers I knew were boomer hippies living in the hills on “borrowed” land. Anti-vax was anti-government. Yet, all of us grew up on vaccines. I distinctly remember the Salk vaccine in 1954…first grade, my classroom window overlooking the annexes where they gave the shots. Much weeping and wailing, some screaming. Deeply unsettling, but I was imbued with how necessary it was. And it was.
I wonder—has anyone investigated whether the rampant stupidity among boomers might be related to getting polio vaccines?
Or, I could just suppose he is a cranky boomer being gratuitously antisemitic, he doesn’t really care what the study says, he never cared what the study said.
Saying that some random feature is uniquely found in common with boomers as a class is almost as much of an old wives tale as saying Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Come to think of it, that sort of kneejerk is also like prejudging the narratives from old wives.
Raging Bee:
I was commenting on a post about how RFK Jr is claiming that circumcision causes autism. What do you think I’m talking about?
seachange:
Possibly, but circumcision was widespread among boomers.
robro @9
The Salk vaccine was what I suppose is now known as IPV. I’m skimming Wikipedia. Every generation since the Boomers has gotten polio vaccinations but there was a shift to the oral Sabin vaccine. Before that was an infamous Cutter incident involving a bad batch of IPV. After several decades there was another shift in the US away from oral polio vaccination due to backmutation making vaccine derived polio remain in the population, but that switch happened after Gen X, and Millennials, and maybe some Zoomers got their doses of OPV. So some Boomers and then Zoomers got IPV.
I recently got a series of IPVs though I probably had OPV as a child. I should be really stupid now. Long story short I can’t think of anything connecting the Salk vaccine or IPV to an alleged Boomer trait.
I’ve seen some insinuation that later Boomers and Xers like me got too much lead exposure. This is usually coming from the younger generations. Grrrr!!! Was RFK Jr huffing leaded gasoline or eating paint chips?
On the upside it is possible that shingles vaccinations might reduce risk of dementia. I wonder if RFK Jr would tout that. Thankfully chickenpox vaccination is now available, though I recall reading that may have contributed to an upswing in shingles in older generations dependent on occasional chickenpox exposure as a booster.
Hemidactylus:
That was a fear, and based on that fear, the UK decided not to vaccinate children, but it hasn’t really panned out. The incidence of chicken pox and shingles in children is dramatically reduced (not 100% of course, and indeed a friend just had their vaccinated kid break out in chicken pox). The risk of shingles later in life is also dramatically reduced. The risk of shingles in parents of young children is slightly increased if the kids are vaccinated, while that in anyone older or who doesn’t have kids is unaffected.
Hemidactylus@14–
IPV (inactivated polio vaccine) is a class of vaccine. Salk is an IPV. The current recommended polio vaccines are also IPVs but they are not Salk.
Salk’s vaccine is IPV because it involves culturing polio, treating it chemically with formaldehyde so there are no active virions left, cleaning it up a bit, then giving it out as injections. In theory it is safer because there is no active virus.
Sabin’s OPV (oral polio vaccine) is an attenuated live virus. That is, the virus is cultured for generations, repeatedly selecting strains that cause less severe infection, until we arrive at a strain that causes only minor symptoms but still gives a strong immune response to the wild virus. As you say, there is a chance with an OPV that it will back-mutate to become more like the wild variant, and there are even a few examples of polio outbreaks in under-immunised communities from regained virulence.
The main reasons for the switch from Salk to Sabin were (1) the Cutter incident and (2) logistics.
The Cutter incident was triggered by a number of children getting paralysis of the injected arm, and even some cases of full-on polio, which should not have been possible. The cause was failure of complete inactivation in the Cutter lab’s manufacturing process. Vaccinees were getting dosed with active polio, and not the nice attenuated version.
In the light of this disaster, public health doctors re-evaluated polio immunisation and realised that the Sabin vaccine had a number of advantages. It gave an active viral infection, so the immune response was better. It only took a few drops by mouth (it didn’t taste bad and could even be dripped onto a sugar cube) rather than injection. It was much, much cheaper to manufacture, distribute, and administer. And it had the knock-on effect of often immunising entire families because the vaccinated child sheds attenuated virus, passing it on to others in the household (polio is highly infectious).
The swing back to IPV was driven by the low but serious rate of back-mutation in the OPV. When you have a well-immunised community (as we used to have in the West before anti-vax nonsense went mainstream), it means that despite the low risk of back-mutation, it becomes the most common cause of clinical polio infection.
But modern polio IPVs are very different to Salk. They are not cultured and killed. They are made of selected polio antigens that are inserted into GMO organisms and then harvested and purified. As a result, they do not contains thousands of unnecessary antigens (old IPVs like pertussis could have 16,000+ antigens iirc, mostly cellular debris from the killed culture cells, which meant lots of unpleasant immune responses to antigens that were not relevant to pertussis protection), and more importantly, live viral particles are not used in any part of production so there is no chance of another Cutter incident. IPVs are still a lot more expensive, less immunogenic, and more ouchy than OPVs.
OPVs may make a comeback given new research where attenuated strains have been genetically modified to be less susceptible to back-mutation. It would some pretty impressive epidemiological numbers to make it happen, though, so I suspect it’s a fair way off. Having said that, OPV is still used in countries where the logistical benefits make it superior–usually less wealthy countries with limited infrastructure and remote or difficult to access population groups.
There you have it…more than you ever wanted to know about IPVs vs OPVs!
numerobis @15
Yeah, this one here kinda puts the dampers on the putative benefits of being exposed periodically to chickenpox as a boost against developing shingles:
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S470/6764830
This one is very complicated, mostly over my head, and focused on Alberta. I guess it’s better to focus on long term benefits more than the short term hiccups if they do exist:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6015493/
Even with the chickenpox vaccine there might be some sort of much milder and perhaps rarer form of vaccine derived shingles decades down the road if I am interpreting this correctly:
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-details/varicella-vaccine
Genital mutilation is bad. It doesn’t need to do the things RFK claims it does for me to oppose it.
chrislawson @16
Thanks for the distinction between Salk’s vax vs the more general IPV category and improved technology since. I was mainly (poorly) setting a vague timeline to assess robro’s tongue in cheek attribution of Boomer issues to that earlier polio vaccine (or polio vaccines in general?).
Looking at things a little deeper Gen X may have really got the brunt of lead exposure in our formative years versus even later Boomers. That seems more an issue than vaccines and their ingredients.
beholder @18, that’s not the point. The point is that bullshit bases for policy pollute epistemic processes.
I know PZ was singling out the very bullshittiness of it, so the ostensible point is RFK Jr spouts medical nonsense, but you know, he is in fact in charge.
—
This is real and current:
EPA: Scott Pruitt
Education: Betsy DeVos
Interior: Ryan Zinke
Council on Environmental Quality: Kathleen Hartnett White
USDA: Stephen Vaden
IRS: David Kautter
HHS: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Each and every one of them has stated views that are antithetical to the agency’s brief, and has acted to weaken its function.
And don’t get me started on people such as Tulsi Gabbard being appointed Director of National Intelligence by Trump. You reckon Harris could have put in a more Russia-friendly operative in charge?
(You reckon Harris as Prez would have done as badly or even worse with that?)
—
As I noted elsethread, a good way to see this admin is as a stress test for the USA constitution.
(Not looking great, but too soon to despair, that’s my assessment as an outsider)
Hemidactylus@17: the Alberta study is a computer model. No data was harmed in the making of that paper.
Your first paper is one of several papers that demonstrates little to no downside of universal vaccination for chicken pox. Last I checked, the UK was still holding out against universal vaccination.
This BBC article links two other papers that tilt away from the chickenpox vaccination being related to any increase in shingles, see under heading “Game-changing new evidence”:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240229-why-dont-some-countries-vaccinate-against-chickenpox
I wasn’t aware RFK Jr was harping on this stuff in a ham-handed way himself:
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/05/rfk-jr-s-misleading-line-on-the-chickenpox-vaccine/
More to the actual thread topic I would add that if one gets really drunk and accidentally circumcises themself, they might want to refrain from taking Tylenol to deal with the pain.
“Your first paper is one of several papers that demonstrates little to no downside of universal vaccination for chicken pox.”
For certain values of ‘little to no downside’, sure. Population-wise, I suppose.
Surely, some people have reason to think otherwise.
e.g. https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S431/6764812
(same site, note, but this article actually shows adverse event rates)
—
“Descriptive Analysis
There were 132 763 998 VAR doses distributed in the United States during 2006–2020, with 40 684 AE reports received in VAERS (30.6/100 000 doses distributed) (Figure 1). Of all VAR reports, 1664 (4.1%) were classified as serious (1.3/100 000 doses distributed). There were 35 460 647 MMRV doses distributed during 2006–2020; 13 325 AE reports (37.6/100 000 doses distributed), including 445 (3.3%) SAE reports (1.3/100 000 doses distributed), were received in VAERS.”
Note 1.3 serious reports per 100,000 doses, so the math is easy.
[TANSTAAFL]
John Morales @23
Since I brought it up and numerobis was responding to me I was under the impression the topic at hand was whether chickenpox vaccination had any connection to increase in shingles for people of other age groups who had contracted chickenpox earlier in life. Now you go and needle numerobis over some VAERS related article that’s talking about quite different stuff. I mean some of it was interesting like if the different vaccinations might be related to developing shingles (HZ) in rare instances.
But also SIDS? “Death reports after vaccination should be interpreted with caution. The most common fatal events after VAR or MMRV were related to SIDS; the Institute of Medicine’s Immunization Safety Review Committee has rejected a causal relationship between multiple simultaneous vaccines and SIDS [31]. Other causes of death included infections, congenital anomalies, cardiac disorders, and other conditions that were not vaccine-related.”
But of greater concern: “We identified
6 previously published deaths in which complications due to vVZV infection were considered the cause of death [9, 19–23]. In 5 of these reports the decedents were immunocompromised based on medical conditions and/or medications and a sixth
report involved a child with undiagnosed but suspected primary or acquired immune deficiency. In 5 other death reports, all involving immunocompromised patients, a positive VZV PCR was noted without reported strain-typing results. Our findings emphasize the importance of following the
Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations to not administer varicella vaccine to severely immunocompromised patients or those taking or undergoing immunosuppressive medication or procedures [1].
Immunosuppression is also listed as a contraindication in the US package inserts for both vaccines [28, 29].”
So there is that.
You’re kinda sending us on a tangent from what was already a tangent. The only real interesting thing to me is the VAERS cases of herpes zoster which gets back to my curiosity over decades down the road when shingles becomes far less common but may mostly be vaccine derived. I wonder if those over 50 should still be getting Shingrix to deal with that.
Hemidactylus:
“Now you go and needle numerobis over some VAERS related article that’s talking about quite different stuff.”
Nice phrasing.
It is the very same vaccine.
But sure, risks of vaccination are quite different stuff to outcomes of vaccination.
The Impact of Universal Varicella Vaccination on Herpes Zoster Incidence in the United States:”Comparison of Birth Cohorts Preceding and Following Varicella Vaccination Program Launch
vs
Safety Surveillance of Varicella Vaccines in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, United States, 2006–2020
“You’re kinda sending us on a tangent from what was already a tangent.”
Sure. Vaccine Adverse Events are entirely tangential to The Impact of Universal Varicella Vaccination.
—
You know, I like to be informed. And it’s kinda ethical too disclose risks for medical interventions.
(But fine, tangential. And, apparently, you thought it was a personal dig)
I was talking about the shingles link.
The risk of vaccination is far below the risk of wild variant disease, obviously — that’s the whole point of vaccines after all.
#3
To be even clearer, its generally thought that the genetic factors are likely even higher, since even “known” cases of “environmental factors”, seem to be tied to genetics too. One example of this being a specific mutation (I don’t remember the name of it), which comes into effect in development at around age 6 or so, and seems to “malfunction” almost always if the child develops a fever at that age. Somehow the fever derails normal development, and causes a lot of mental progress to regress, and its irrelevant “how” they got to fever. Since getting a vaccine can trigger a fever, since a child’s immune system is still developing its reactions to germs, that can cause one, but literally getting sick with the thing the vaccine protects against will also do so, as would simply getting a cut from playing outside, and developing an infection. But, because its right smack in the middle of when some vaccines are given, and we had no bloody idea that this gene defect existed, so didn’t test for it (and maybe still don’t)…
Point being, a bloody lot of the missing 20% of the equation with autism is likely this sort of thing – and environmental factor, but not one that involves chemical poisoning, of some sort, but instead, “Some gene, or set of genes, make people that have mutant copies of them more vulnerable to specific things, at specific times in development.” The 80% we do know fall into more of a category of, “These thing happen before the child is even born, cause changes in very early development, and probably have, in most cases, nothing to do at all with environmental factors.”
But, no one with a kid wants to hear, “We know what caused it, but there is no cure, and it probably wasn’t preventable at all. Oh, and.. maybe you shouldn’t have had a kid when you where so old, because that is a factor in the existence of these broken genes in the first place.” What they want is, “This simple thing caused the problem, and here is a magic potion to fix it!!”