The American right are freaking out about autism.
I’m neurologically diverse, and most people who know me won’t be shocked by that revelation. I first found out when I was in hospital and the neurosurgeon showed me a scan of my brain.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr — the conspiracy-minded Secretary for Health and Human Affairs — claims that vaccines and paracetamol during pregnancy cause autism. He’s also apparently found a “cure”: leucovorin calcium tablets. Unsurprisingly, these pills have never undergone the kind of expansive clinical trials required for any legitimate autism treatment.
In fact, the Trump administration’s talk of “causes and cures” for autism sounds exactly like something from Health Mail — the Daily Mail’s old weekly healthcare supplement.
Years ago, I had an office above a GP surgery. You could always tell when Health Mail had been published: the waiting room filled with anxious people clutching cut-out articles, convinced they’d found either a miracle cure or a new fatal disease.
Later, when I was a PCT Chief Executive, I saw an extreme example. An elderly man with incurable lung cancer had read a Mail article promising a new drug that could extend his life — long enough to spend Christmas with his grandkids. He’d even bought the presents. The drug wasn’t licensed, and it wouldn’t have worked for his condition anyway.
But the Daily Mail isn’t the only place where crank health ideas flourish. During Covid, conspiracy theories and quack cures spread like wildfire online. Mad ideas jumped from right-wing forums to “wellness” groups and back again. Some of the fittest, smartest people I know fell for them. Covid conspiracies were the gateway drug — leading many further down the rabbit hole.
So why the long association between right-wing politics and pseudo-scientific nonsense?
Diseases are systemic. Where people live, their education, environment, and income all shape which diseases they get. But right-wing ideologues — and their wellness-guru cousins — reject that. They believe illness comes from bad choices, and health comes from willpower.
If you’re sick or overweight, it’s your fault. You’re weak. You’re a lesser person.
The “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement blames chronic and infectious diseases on moral failure — a refusal to “eat clean” or “stay strong”.
Once you start believing that some people are simply better than others, you become an easy mark for crank medicine and authoritarian politics. Both rest on the same logic: that power and virtue belong to the “naturally superior”.
Autism doesn’t fit this worldview. Neurodiversity confuses people who can only see illness as a punishment for poor choices. The growing recognition of autism doesn’t make sense to those who divide the world into winners and losers — so they deny it, invent imaginary causes, and hawk miracle cures.
Neurodiversity undermines their ideology.
It confounds everything they believe.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/22/trump-administration-autism-causes