River News: Our View

This month is Autism Awareness Month, and for the first time in a good many years, we think there is really good news when it comes to addressing this ongoing epidemic, which has afflicted not just the United States but the world, and for far too long.

For many years now, for decades even, there has actually been a lot of awareness about autism. As the number of those with autism have skyrocketed, tens of thousands of parents have searched for answers, and so have their families and friends. As they blazed their own trails, the medical and scientific establishments largely turned their backs on them, providing no guideposts or pathways for them to use.

Lacking any moral compass, driven by profit and ideology, the establishments closed their eyes while the nation suffered, and refused to see the children in need of their help.

Not that there hasn’t been progress. There has been, thanks to that engaged grassroots army. A committed if small group of scientists has performed yeoman’s work in conducting unpopular studies that suggest environmental causes and triggers, even though they have had to endure savage attempts to ruin their careers.

Doctors, too, have plowed ahead with dietary and other interventions that have made so much difference to so many families. Educators have joined in, pioneering new approaches to teaching those with autism — individualized instruction, more structured environments, and visual supports among the tools in the toolbox. It has made all the difference in the world.

And of course there are the foot soldiers, the parents and the families and the children themselves.

About the only ones who haven’t been truly aware are those who have run the world — the medical establishment, the governments, big pharmaceutical companies. Mention awareness to them, and they say it is actually the citizens who have been unaware because they say the disorder has existed at this level all along, right in front of us. 

It’s genetic, they say. It’s just better diagnosis, they say. That’s the only reason we see 1 in 36 children with autism today when we saw only 1 in 10,000 just four decades ago. It’s not that 277 children with autism per 10,000 weren’t always there, the establishment tells us between giggles, it’s that we didn’t see them. If it were not for the medical establishment’s amazing new powers of diagnosis, they tell us, we wouldn’t see them now. 

If anything, this view goes, we should get down on our hands and knees and thank the establishment, not disparage it.

Of course, no serious person believes all that malarkey. The medical establishment doesn‘t believe it, either. They’ve been gaslighting us for years.

Now, suddenly, there’s change in the air. For the first time in our lives and for the first time since at least President John F. Kennedy was in office, we have a president who is actually doing what he said he would do when he ran, and one of the things he promised to do was finally align the government with the people in a truly scientific search for an answer to autism.

If someone had told us two years ago that Trump would be re-elected, we would have welcomed the taste of possible things to come, but we would have taken it with a grain of salt. If someone also told us two years ago that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., would be running the federal health agencies, we would have wondered what drugs those people were taking.

If people had predicted that today the Make America Great Again movement and the Make America Healthy Again movement would have united in a massive and fundamental push against corporate America’s food and pharmaceutical cartels, we would have simply sighed and said, ‘Oh, if only it could be so.’

Yet here we are. It is so. We have in place some of the best minds of science and medicine and policy we could imagine — not just Kennedy but Dr. Jay Bhattacharya running the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Marty Makary running the FDA — both stalwarts when it came to challenging government narratives during Covid.

This team is aware all right. They are aware of the gaslighting that has gone on now for decades, and, and as we report today, under their guidance the government will launch a study to finally set our sights on the root causes of autism. It’s not an academic exercise, for it will allow the world to once and for all identify the triggers that have led to the epidemic and to make policy actually based on the science, not on the ideology of corporate America’s profits.

About the only thing remaining is, will state and local health departments get on board with the program to resuscitate science in America? That will be a challenge, as the Fauci-baked pandemic taught us.

It amazed us during Covid how the zombies at the state Department of Health Services and at the Oneida County health department marched in lockstep with the fraudsters at the CDC, dutifully regurgitating every little government lie. 

“Wear a mask!” They didn’t tell us that decades of science debunked any effectiveness in doing so, unless it was a N95 respirator.

“Stay six feet apart!” Turns out Anthony Fauci says they just made that up.

“The vaccine is safe and effective!” This for a medical product for which they had to redefine the word ‘vaccine’ to make it apply, a product that couldn’t prevent infection and that has killed countless numbers of people, many young people among them, and caused serious side effects in millions more.

Here’s our favorite. Do you remember when Oneida County public health director Linda Conlon stood up before the county board and told supervisors with a straight face that they just needed two weeks to flatten the curve? We do.

In Oneida County, the health department even directed people to the World Health Organization for advice. 

That would be the same World Health Organization that is in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party, that was on the front lines pushing for the eradication of civil liberties throughout the western world, and that the Trump administration has withdrawn from because it is a left-wing political organization masquerading as a health and science organization.

Shame on the health department, which has no credibility, and shame on the Oneida County Board of Supervisors if they don’t take action to correct the rot inside that so-called health agency. 

Now that President Trump has cleaned house in our federal health agencies, it’s time for the Oneida County board of supervisors to do the same thing here. Our residents deserve better than the fake science they butter their bread with.

The same goes on the state level, but there we shall simply have to wait until 2026, when a new governor can be elected.

Of course, and we stress this, getting with the program doesn’t necessarily mean following any new narrative coming out of the federal health agencies, whether they are proffered by people we trust or not. In fact, that’s the point. There should be no narratives coming out of the federal health agencies.

What should be happening is rigorous science and transparency. The work of the health agencies is to make sure critical, transparent, and independent science is followed, and then presented to the public.

That must be the sole mission of the health agencies, to present the data to the public and let the public make the policies through their elected representatives. That’s not what the establishment agencies did. They promoted their own ideological narratives and cooked the books of the science to make it look good.

Then they tried to exercise totalitarian power.

Our goal is not to do the same. It is to dispense with the ideology altogether and get back to real science. It’s about testing hypotheses and trying to knock down the conventions of settled science, so as to either make the consensus stronger or to discard it for new hypotheses.

Science is never served by refusing to test the strength of our convictions. 

It’s about informed consent and informed choice. That’s what freedom is all about.

This week we have hope that the nation will tackle the autism epidemic at long last, and that the long and dark days of dogma are over. We trust, too, that the structured and induced epidemic known as vaccination is finally going to be confronted.

Most of all, it’s good to look up and see that titan of the ages walking the halls of federal agencies once more, white coat and all, doing the due diligence that has for so long been suppressed.

That titan’s name is Science, and in the Trump administration it is walking with a swagger.

Welcome home, old friend, and don’t mind the charlatans as they pass you on their way out the door.