Sen. Cassidy Said RFK Jr. Would Not Change Autism Guidance. Now What?

Summary

Bulwark Takes - Episode Summary

Episode: Sen. Cassidy Said RFK Jr. Would Not Change Autism Guidance. Now What?
Date: November 21, 2025
Hosts: JVL (Bulwark) and Jonathan Cohn

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Overview

This episode dives into the alarming changes made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to its public stance on the non-existent link between vaccines and autism. The discussion explores the scientific consensus, the politicization of public health agencies, and the dangerous consequences for public trust and public health. The conversation also scrutinizes RFK Jr.'s influence, Senator Cassidy's role, and the larger trajectory of governmental institutions as their scientific integrity is eroded for political ends.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. CDC’s Shift on Vaccines and Autism

• What Happened:
  The CDC changed the language on its website, moving from an unequivocal statement that "vaccines do not cause autism" to a hedged claim that "studies have not ruled out the possibility."

• Why It Matters:
  This subtly validates anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and undermines decades of scientific evidence.

  “The claim that the studies have been ignored, not paid attention to, is just wrong.” — Jonathan Cohn [01:38]

  • The origin of the autism-vaccine myth traces back to the discredited Andrew Wakefield study, which was retracted and led to professional consequences for Wakefield.
  • Multiple forms of vaccine-autism arguments (thimerosal, aluminum, number of vaccines) have all been thoroughly debunked by scientific reviews.

2. Distinguishing Government Science from Political Rhetoric

• Politicians vs. Trusted Institutions:
  The CDC, as a "gold standard" agency, is supposed to be above political gamesmanship. When scientific authorities echo political misinformation, it fundamentally damages trust.

  “It is different for the CDC to... be a trusted vector for information. And this is kind of new territory…” — JVL [03:54]

• RFK Jr. and the Anti-Vax Movement:
  Anti-vaxxers, led by RFK Jr., are fundamentally opposed to all vaccines, not just concerned about autism. Attribution to autism is a convenient attack, not a core belief.

  “If there was no link between vaccines and autism, they would still be against vaccines. They don’t like vaccines. Period.” — JVL [04:23]

3. Eugenics Rhetoric and Stigmatizing Neurodivergence

• Eugenics Undertones:
  There’s recognition of a disturbing, implicit desire within some anti-vax circles to “cleanse” or marginalize autistic individuals, mirroring dark historical ideologies.

  “There is a eugenics component to this which is the attempt to make neurodivergent people out to be a dysgenic class of people.” — JVL [06:33]

  “You know, Kennedy is this big believer in what he calls natural immunity... there’s a sort of a sense that, well, you know, some natural selection taking place, we kind of cull the herd a little bit... which is, you know, it’s horrible.” — Jonathan Cohn [08:11]

4. Politicization and Hollowing Out of Federal Agencies

• Staffing and Leadership Changes:
  Key CDC roles, once held by senior career scientists, are vacant or filled by political appointees aligned with RFK Jr. or Trump, threatening the integrity and credibility of the institution.

  “There’s an office of the director of CDC vacant at the moment... All of them, they were all per, the rest were all career scientists. They are gone and they've been replaced with political appointees.” — Jonathan Cohn [10:23]

• Comparison to Authoritarian States:
  JVL compares the situation to China, where official data is strictly managed for political ends. He warns the U.S. is moving towards a model where information is only trusted if one's own party is in charge.

  “This is how authoritarian governments are run… there are political commissars... We don’t publish any data or studies that don’t comport with the political project.” — JVL [12:27]

5. Long-Term Impact: Crisis of Trust

• Trust Once Broken:
  Restoring credibility to scientific agencies and government data is an immense challenge. Once undermined, trust is difficult and slow to rebuild.

  “Trust doesn’t work... like trust has to be right every time. And once it’s broken once, it takes a long time to put it back together.” — JVL [13:20]

  • Future Scenario:
    The hosts wonder how public health or economic data can be credible if trust depends on which party is in power.

    “How do we live in a world where you can trust economic data put out by the government when one party is in power and when the other party is in power, we have to turn that off and no longer be able to trust economic data.” — JVL [13:50]

  • Hope for Restoration:
    Jonathan Cohn suggests hope lies with remaining career officials and the need for a bipartisan effort to restore trust, but acknowledges the difficulty.

    “Somehow you rebuild some of that trust and hope that maybe... the Republican Party decides actually this is not in their interest either, that there’s enough people, grown-ups there who say we don’t want this going forward…” — Jonathan Cohn [15:24]

    “In order for trust to be rebuilt, you need a Republican administration which is committed to rebuilding public trust in the functions of government. And I think that that project is actually wholly antithetical to the current Republican project.” — JVL [16:21]

  • Communication and Mistakes:
    Scientists and public health officials must also reflect on communication failures during the pandemic but cannot alone solve the crisis of trust.

    “[Maybe] there are ways to sort of reach out and sort of... kind of rebuild some of that, there is some measure of this that falls on the scientific community, figure out how to at least communicate better...” — Jonathan Cohn [18:29]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Science vs. Uncertainty:

  “Science can’t prove that it’s impossible that I will fly tomorrow... But I can’t prove that I absolutely won’t have it in the morning. That’s not how it works. And yet this is the standard that they’ve adopted.” — JVL [05:23]

• Riff on Neurodivergence:

  “Once you start looking for it, you see how, like, everybody’s a little bit neurodivergent in some way. Right. Maybe not you, you’re a very even keeled guy.” — JVL [07:27]
  “Oh, I wouldn’t assume that.” – Jonathan Cohn [07:39]

• Warning About Political Capture:

  “We've got a couple high profile cases of this now. But trust doesn't work... Like trust has to be right every time. And once it's broken once, it takes a long time to put it back together.” — JVL [13:20]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• CDC Website Change Explained: [00:32–01:38]
• Scientific Debunking of Autism/Vaccine Link: [01:38–03:54]
• CDC’s Unique Responsibility: [03:54–06:33]
• Eugenics and Anti-Vax Ideology: [06:33–08:48]
• Politicization and Leadership Changes at CDC: [09:55–11:00]
• Authoritarian Comparisons and Data Manipulation: [12:27–14:50]
• How to Rebuild Trust: [14:50–17:48]
• Responsibility of the Scientific Community: [18:29–19:40]

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Tone & Takeaways

The hosts maintain a clear, urgent, and sometimes sardonic tone throughout, lamenting the erosion of public trust and the dangerous normalization of politicizing science. They are particularly alarmed at the CDC’s capitulation to anti-vaccine rhetoric and are deeply skeptical about the possibility of reversing these trends without a fundamental shift in the political project of the Republican Party. The episode is a call to vigor in defending scientific institutions and a warning against complacency.

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End note:
Jonathan Cohn and JVL close with resigned humor—“it’s pretty thin, but I guess we’ll take it”—and urge listeners to remain vigilant as they wish America good luck in facing these challenges.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hello everyone. I'm JVL here with my bulwark colleague Jonathan Cohn. And something happened over at the cdc, the Centers for Disease Control. Yesterday the CDC changed a page on its website about the link between vaccines and autism. And this page said previously vaccines do not cause autism. And the new page says the claim vaccines do not cause autism is not an evidence based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities. It goes on from there. Jonathan Cohn I get pretty worked up over stuff like this, so why don't you give, give me your non worked up view of what the fuck is going on with this thing.

[C]

I mean it's hard not to get worked up about this. So I mean there's the, how this decision got made and there's the substance of, of what they said. Well, let's start with the substance. The claim that the studies have been ignored, not paid attention to is just wrong. You know, all of this, this whole discussion about autism and vaccines goes, you know, if the sort of, the beginning of this, right, the real sort of intellectual basis for this was a paper by a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield that was published in the Lancet. That sort of set off this whole, you know, it's kind of, you know, everything that has flowed since then has come, come, you know, know, traces back. A lot of it traces back to there. And that paper was retracted. You know, Dr. Wakefield had his medical license in Britain stripped. Nevertheless, it set off such a so much concern that over the years that followed there have been all kinds of studies and all kinds of reviews. You know, there's been original studies, there's been literature reviews where they go back over the old studies. The National Academy of Sciences has gone through every possible vaccine, autism link and you know, and they've proliferated. It's quite hard to keep track because there's several different arguments. Well, it's the thimerosal, no it's the aluminum, actually. No, it's the volume of vaccines. Well, all of these have been studied very carefully and over and over again the finding is, nope, that's not it. You know, we can talk about, you know, why there's a rise in autism, how much is detection versus some other factors. There are, we do know we're learning more about it. There are genetic factors, there are factors could be like the age of parents, things like that, very much worth investigating. Vaccines not on the list. And yet here we have CDC claiming this wasn't investigated. So, and for CDC to just say that is a, it's just, it's remarkable. I mean, you know, we say something as unscientific, unscientific science isn't, you know, nothing in science. Science is not black and white. There's truth and falsehood. What we mean is that in science we study things a certain way and we come to conclusions. The scientific conclusion based on all of the evidence we have is there's no link. And, and CDC just decided, nope, that's wrong. We're going to say something different.

[B]

Yeah, it's important here to, to draw a line between things that politicians say and things that nonpartisan sort of gold standard portions of the federal government say. Right. So it's one thing for, it's not a good thing, but it's one thing for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to say, as RFK has said many times, that there is a link between autism and vaccines. It's not good, but at least you're like, well, he's a politician. Politicians lie all the time, they exaggerate, etc. Etc. It is different for the CDC to, I mean there are parts of the government which are supposed to be trusted vectors for information. And this is kind of new territory I think, to have, you know, the, a trusted vector of the government. And it is something which we can roll the videotape here. Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to confirm RFK specifically said that he had been promised that the CDC would not change anything on its website about the links between vaccines and autism. There's a lot to unpack here. It is worth saying that this is an over determined view from the anti vax crowd because RFK and his confederates are against all vaccines, period, as a sort of theological matter. And so blaming autism and saying there's linked autism, that's just a convenient thing, right? This is. If there wasn't a, if there was no link between vaccines and autism, they would still be against vaccines. They don't like vaccines. Period. They don't like any vaccines, period. Xeno RFK has said previously, you know, no vaccines are safe. And to have him then being like, well, look at this, you know, nobody has proven this negative. Which again is not a thing. Like science can't prove that it's impossible that I will fly tomorrow. You know, like science can prove that I've never flown before. That no, no person has flown before. Nobody has spontaneously begun to have the superpower of flight. But I can't prove that I absolutely won't have it in the morning. That's not how it works. And yet this is the standard that they've adopted.

[C]

It's.

[B]

I don't man. Ah. And I think we should say what the stakes are over this. The stakes are, is that this isn't an attempt to discourage parents from getting their children vaccinated. And so the, the result of that is going to be more sickness and death among kids. And the other thing, I'm sorry, I'm just like ranting at this point and I, you go, you go, you got. There is a, there is a eugenics component to this which is the, the attempt to make neurodivergent people out to be a dysgenic class of people who, they just don't like, they don't, they don't like the existence of autistic people. And I, that's, that's really bad. Like, you know, I like neurodivergence is just a thing. Right. You know, one and one. Also, once you start looking for it, you see how like everybody's a little bit neurodivergent in some way. Right. Maybe not you, you're a very even keeled guy.

[C]

Oh, I wouldn't assume that.

[B]

And you know, like the extent to, to which these, you know, these folks, autistic folks are, are being labeled here is like something to be cleansed and stand. And it just like sets off all sorts of alarm bells.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

In me. I don't know, am I, am I over interpreting that?

[C]

No, no. I mean, look, I know there's a bunch of things there. So let me start by saying that I think you're right about that. Like they just don't like vaccines. And part of that is, you know, it's not just that vaccines cause autism.

[B]

Right.

[C]

I mean their whole theory, I mean, you know, Kennedy is this big believer in what he calls natural immunity. Right. You know, you acquire it makes you stronger. And I do think there is, I can't see into the man's brain. I don't, I guess because that's why I'd see a worm there or whatever, but I can't see into the man's brain or soul. I don't know what any individual person believes, but I think when you look at the rhetoric that comes out of this movement, it's very clear. There's a sort of a sense that, well, you know, some natural selection taking place, we kind of call the herd a little bit. And that's how, you know, we become stronger as a kind of, you know, as a. As a. As a. As a race or as a. As a species or whatever, which is, you know, it's horrible.

[B]

A master race.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I didn't want to go there, but. Okay.

[C]

And so I know there's definitely an element of that. And I was thinking about, you know, the sort of. The importance of the sort of the different distinction between what politicians say and what an agency like CDC says. And I don't want to be seeming like I'm sucking up, but this is the subject of your triad today. It's excellent. I hope everybody reads it. But there has been this distinction. I mean, you know, agencies. We depend on, agencies like the cdc, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You go down the list, and there's been this understanding that there are places where the politics stops. And that doesn't mean that people producing scientific data might not have biases. It doesn't mean that sometimes political agendas don't affect the, you know, the kind of work they do. But we do try to guard against that. And there has always been this understanding that at some level, like, scientific information was something, you know, you didn't touch. And there's a very. There's a very practical way to see this change at the cdc and something that I think foretold what we just saw last night, which we learned about a couple months ago, which is, you know, cdc, in addition to everything else.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Like every other part of hhs, has just been slashed in terms of number. You know, they've cut offices, they've cut people, and they've also purged most of the senior leadership.

[B]

And.

[C]

And there's an office of the director of CDC vacant at the moment. There's an acting CDC director, not clear he can serve, and there's this whole complicated mess about that.

[B]

But.

[C]

And in the office of the director, there's a set of sort of deputies there who historically, the only person that office who was a political appointee was the director. Right? CDC director was always a political appointee, although even then it was a political appointee. Who typically was somebody with a lot of background and you know, medicine, science, whatever. All of the, all of them, they were all per. The rest were all career scientists. They are gone and they've been replaced with political appointees. So this is now an agency run by political appointees serving the agenda of, you know, either Robert F. Kennedy or Donald Trump or some amalgam of the two.

[D]

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[B]

Yeah, and this is, I mean to be very clear, this is how authoritarian governments are running. So you know, you go over to China and the, the Chinese cdc, they have political commissars there who make sure that like, hey, you know, we don't publish any data or studies that don't comport with the political project of the politburo. And you know, for, for instance, you see this in their Covid numbers. So you know, I think the official Chinese count was like 83,000 deaths from COVID The answer is more like 1.4 million. We've seen this, I'm a demographics guy. We've seen this for decades from Chinese demographers who like, if you really wanted to understand what fertility rates were in China, you couldn't read any papers. You had to wait until you were at an international conference with some Chinese demographers and then go and talk to them one on one. And they would tell you verbally, but that was it because they couldn't publish stuff. And that's where the parts of the federal government are going. And here's the thing, like, it's not, it's not everywhere, right? We've got a couple high profile cases of this now. But trust doesn't work. Like, like trust has to be right every time. And once it's broken once, it takes a long time to put it back together. And this is my question to you, Jonathan. Like when we look at, well, okay, let's assume we get out of this pickle. We'll assume three years from now we get out like, liberalism is basically stable, democracy is okay, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How do we live in a world where you can trust economic data put out by the government when one party is in power and when the other party is in power, we have to turn that off and no longer be able to trust economic data. And so businesses can't make decisions about hiring, firing, capex, et cetera, et cetera. How do you live in a world where you can trust public health information when one party is in power, but then when the other party's in power, everybody switches their frame and understands, oh, okay, well, we can't listen to the CDC now. Like, how does that work?

[C]

Oh, an easy question for me. I mean, I don't know how it works, to be honest with you. I would bank, I'm bank, I would bank on two things, hopefully. Number one, that there is still, even now, even with these political people at the top of CDC and so many other agencies like that, you still have career officials there who are, are doing their best and will be able to police, you know, do what they can from the inside. And when they can't, they will step outside and call attention to the, to the lies, to the misrepresentation. We've again, we've had that at cdc. We had those very high profile resignations of several longtime CDC career scientists. And then it is incumbent on whoever, whenever, then three years from now that this be front and center, a sort of rebuilding of that trust. And somehow one of two things has to then happen. Somehow there needs to be a show that wins over some of the skeptics, right? Some of the people who have lost faith and authority for reasons of their own. I mean, you know, there's A whole complicated story, why his trust has fallen. Somehow you rebuild some of that trust and hope that maybe, I mean, I don't know. You're not exactly the optimist on this. I know, but the Republican Party, the other party that you're referring to, decides actually this is not in their interest either, that there's enough people, grown ups there who say we don't want this going forward and we want to go back to the way it was. And I don't know.

[B]

That's the. Just put your finger on it. Because the problem is that in order to rebuild trust, it isn't the Democrats who have to do it. Right. In order for trust to be rebuilt, you need a Republican administration which is committed to rebuilding public trust in the functions of government. And I think that that project is actually wholly antithetical to the current Republican project. I don't say that lightly. I think it is literally entirely antithetical. The entire Republican project right now is to destroy trust, to level things and make it so that nobody knows what to believe and to wage war on the federal government itself. Because they want the federal government to be simply an arm of the executive. And so that is their project. They don't want the federal government. They don't want people to trust the federal government unless they're in charge of it. So they, you know, their position is you can't trust anything coming out of the cdc. If it's Joe Biden's cdc. I don't know, man. Like it. Am I wrong about this? Am I, am I being too hard on the Republicans?

[C]

Okay, I'll give two asterisks on this.

[B]

Okay?

[C]

I'm not sure I believe them, but.

[B]

I'm just gonna throw them out there.

[C]

Number one, I would say it was not that long ago there were Republicans who were just as committed to the, to things like reliable information, you know, you know, respecting institutions. And I know they're not part of the Republican. They're not part of the Republican.

[B]

It's been a decade, Jonathan. I'm old. That doesn't seem that you say, you say it wasn't that long ago, but we are coming up on a decade.

[C]

Of this my world. It wasn't that long ago.

[B]

Okay. Okay.

[C]

So I think there's that part of it. And this is the one thing I'll say, you know, I've actually been trying to think about this a lot lately and why trust has fallen. And as much as I put this sort of blame, you know, as much as I. The bad faith, the dishonesty of the likes of, you know, Robert F. Kennedy, who are totally believing this, and people like Trump who may or may not believe it, but are happy to enable it, whatever. And then the rest of the party and Cassidy, who's willing to vote for it, even though he clearly knows better. When I sort of deconstruct why trust is fallen, there is, you know, scientists themselves, you know, we look at some of the decisions made during COVID and things, I think at least the way they were communicated, there were places to do better where they made mistakes and maybe sort of show, you know, maybe there are ways to sort of reach out and sort of. I don't know. I'm thinking this, as I say out loud, it almost sounds ridiculous. But somehow to kind of rebuild some of that, there is some measure of this that falls on the scientific community, figure out how to at least communicate better in a way that slowly rebuilds the trust, and maybe that helps a little bit. I don't know. That's all I got.

[B]

I mean, it's pretty thin, but I guess we'll take it. Guys, do us a favor, hit, like, hit. Subscribe, follow the channel. Jonathan Cohn, great to be with you, my friend. To everybody else, good luck, America.