Med Page Today “We need to stop trusting the experts,” Kennedy recently said. Erin McCanlies, MPH, PhD, was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery. Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past 2 decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just 3 weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.