Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his staff are working on policy changes that would sweep children with autism spectrum disorder into a federal program that compensates people for alleged vaccine injuries, an adviser said Thursday.

Changes to the list of compensated injuries in the 1990s has made it nearly impossible for children with encephalopathy — a broad term for brain dysfunction — to win awards through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, Drew Downing, a vaccine injury lawyer who now serves as a senior adviser to Kennedy, said at an autism discussion hosted by the MAHA Institute. The group backs the secretary’s agenda.

“Part of what Secretary Kennedy is doing right now — and with my help, and we have a team looking at it — is we have to figure out a way to capture these kids,” Downing said.

“If you don’t want to use the ‘A word,’ whatever, that’s fine,” he said, referring to autism. “How do we capture them: do we broaden the definition of encephalopathic events? Do we broaden neurological injuries? How do we do that?”

Public health experts and program lawyers have warned that adding autism to the compensation program would exhaust the court’s workforce and financial resources. VICP currently has about $4 billion on hand.

Downing didn’t provide more details, but Kennedy made similar complaints about compensation for brain dysfunction in a July interview with the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“What we’re going to try to do is to make sure that the parents who do get injured get compensation, that they get it very quickly, and they get it without the kind of adversarial impediments that have now been erected over the past 40 years,” Kennedy said.

Downing recalled his experience around the omnibus autism proceedings in the 2000s — a multi-year effort by a federal court to manage more than 5,000 claims filed by families arguing certain vaccines caused their children’s autism. The court’s special masters ruled against compensation in all cases, finding the science didn’t support their arguments.

“Since that time, autism is the ‘A word’ that you’re not allowed to utter within the vaccine program realm because you will be vilified, as you guys know,” Downing said.

“But autism is simply a collection of symptoms — collection of symptoms that place someone on a spectrum of neurological disease” that can be caused by “any number of things,” he added.

Remember all those cheerful op-eds from a few months ago, about how Kennedy was a modest man, always willing to listen to reason?

It’s true, Oster acknowledged, that there isn’t any evidence that raw milk provides any health benefits.  But the risk posed by drinking it is small, and similar to plenty of other risks that we allow individuals to decide to take.

The conclusions for public health messaging, in a country where an anti-science crank has just become the government’s chief public health official, are according to Oster the following:  Public health officials should not just tell people what to do and not do, but also explain the reasons for their recommendations.  They should also modulate and nuance their messages, instead of offering all of them with the same apparent level of confidence and urgency.  “The problem,” Prof. Oster argues, “is that when people find one piece of guidance is overstated, they may begin to distrust everything.”

This sounds reasonable, at least in the abstract, especially when combined with a further point she makes about messaging.  Simply saying that vaccines are good and raw milk is bad is too simplistic, given the complexity of the evidence.  In America in 2025, people like to do their own research, and if they conclude the risks of drinking raw milk have been exaggerated, they may go on to (incorrectly) think the costs and benefits regarding vaccines have been mis-stated as well.  “With more information,” Oster argues, “we provide room for people to drink raw milk but also vaccinate their kids. Which is, basically, a reasonable choice.”

She notes that, “deservedly or not,” public health officials lost much of the public’s trust during the Covid pandemic, and that they need to get it back.   The way to do that, she says, is “to put more trust in their audience. This means communicating that sometimes the evidence is uncertain or complicated and may change over time.”

She concludes that public health messaging inevitably involves tradeoffs.  A more nuanced message might lead to more raw milk drinking, which is a little bit bad.  But it might, she says, lead to more measles vaccinations, which would be a very good thing.  “It’s not a perfect scenario, but it may mean that fewer people get sick and die.  Which, after all, should be the ultimate goal.”

This is a classic argument for harm reduction, and I want to embrace it wholeheartedly, I really do, but [extreme Bill Paxton voice] I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with current events Prof. Oster, but the people who would purportedly benefit from a more nuanced public health message than “vaccines good; raw milk bad” just elected Donald Trump president, which suggests rather strongly that the greater American public doesn’t really “do” nuance, on this or any other subject.

The theory of causation Oster is suggesting here strikes me as completely wacky, and yet another example of how intellectuals will reach for any explanation for the public’s behavior rather than the obvious one, which is that people in general are not real good at the whole thinking thing.  This makes them vulnerable to manipulation by the most preposterously shameless demagogues, such as for example Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and most of all the man who made him the nation’s top health official.

The greater American public doesn’t read New York Times op-eds by medical economists, let alone attend harm reduction seminars at schools of public health.  The sad truth – and I really hate this conclusion myself, because I would love Oster’s argument to be correct – is that “vaccines good, raw milk bad” is as sophisticated as a public health message can realistically be.

This is especially true in a country whose president suggested that people drink bleach to cure themselves of a deadly virus, and whose chief public health official is an ex-heroin addict with a bunch of irrational purity fetishes, and a strong attraction to grotesque and scientifically discredited strains of eugenic thinking.

From The Triumph of Stupidity