A few years ago, I came across this 1979 special performance by Dolly Parton and Carol Burnett. Watch them interact. They are wonderful. As they talk, they write a song, then invite the audience to join in. It is funny, warm, and happy. I think I have watched it 10 times.
“No One Picks Like a Nashville Picker Picks.”
It’s wonderful to watch two stars at the top of their game.
RFK Jr. has said that there is a link between circumcision and autism but a new study says he is wrong.
Medpage reported:
A study of U.S. children found no evidence linking neonatal male circumcision with autism spectrum disorder, prospective data from the ECHO cohort showed.
Among nearly 2,800 boys in 14 ECHO sites, 6% of those who were circumcised had autism compared with 9% of uncircumcised males, according to Monica McGrath, ScD, MHS, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and co-authors.
After adjusting for confounders, circumcision was not associated with an autism diagnosis (OR 0.83, 95% CI 0.59-1.17), McGrath and colleagues reported in JAMA Pediatricsopens in a new tab or window.
Stratifying data by region, preterm birth, and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admission yielded either an inverse or no association. Circumcision also was not associated with autism-related traits or behaviors.
Only 4% of circumcised boys received acetaminophen (Tylenol) during the procedure and 7% had acetaminophen in the 30 days after birth, the researchers said. Most infants received nerve blocks (72%), oral glucose/sucrose (59%), or anesthetic cream (12%).
“These findings may provide reassurance for families who are considering or have elected circumcision for their son,” McGrath told MedPage Today.
In September 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimedopens in a new tab or window that circumcised boys were twice as likely to develop autism as those not circumcised because they were given acetaminophen. The remarks came weeks after the White House warned pregnant women not to take acetaminophen over an unproven link with autism.
“We started hearing from friends, family, and colleagues in the fall of 2025 after media coverage of administration comments about a possible male circumcision-autism connection that referenced studies that were published over a decade ago,” McGrath said. “We knew the ECHO cohort had relevant data to help investigate this question.”
About half of newborn males in the U.S.are circumcised in the hospital within 28 days, but analyses of autism risk in circumcised boys are scarce. “There have been two poorly conducted studies that suggest a connection between circumcision and autism,” observed David Mandell, ScD, of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who wasn’t involved with the research.
The blogger who identifies as “Accountabaloney” wrote to report on his/her political fortunes in a deep red county in Florida. It’s no secret that the blogger is a Democrat, but gets re-elected as a strong supporter of public schools. Trump, DeSantis, and the Florida legislature love charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, and other alternatives, but Accountabaloney wins as a forthright supporter of teachers and public schools.
Accountabaloney writes:
In case you didn’t know, in my “spare time” I am an elected member of the Monroe County School Board and, unless expressly stated, the views stated here reflect my own opinions and should not be construed to represent the views of the Monroe County School Board.
I have been told that I am a unicorn: a registered Democrat who has repeatedly won countywide in an increasingly Republican county.
I was first elected to the Monroe County School Board without opposition in 2018. By then, I was already well known in my district as a passionate advocate for our public schools. Before filing to run, I reached out to virtually everyone I thought might be interested in the seat, told them I planned to run and asked for their support. One by one, I received it. In the end, no one filed to run against me.
In 2022, that support was tested at the ballot box. I faced a well-financed, politically savvy Republican opponent who had been recruited and endorsed by Moms for Liberty and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
I didn’t respond by running away from public education or by trying to out-partisan my opponent. I ran on my record and on my belief that strong public schools are essential to strong communities.
I won.
This year, the partisan question became even more explicit.
My opponent prominently displayed the word “CONSERVATIVE” on her campaign signs and made her political and religious identity an important part of her campaign. She attended churches encouraging voters to support a candidate who shared their Conservative Christian values and promoted publicly funded homeschooling and tuition vouchers. She even accused me of “hiding behind the nonpartisan label.”
But nonpartisan wasn’t a label I chose. Florida school board elections are nonpartisan by law.
And I wasn’t hiding.
People knew I was a Democrat.
So rather than fight an election over partisan identity, I made a different bet. I trusted voters to care more about what I stood for than the letter next to my name in other elections.
And I made what I stood for unmistakable.
I ran unabashedly for public education.
I talked about our successful schools and the extraordinary people who work in them. I talked about putting great teachers in every classroom—and paying and supporting them well enough that they can afford to stay. I talked about expanding opportunities for students through the arts, athletics, career and technical education, advanced academics, dual enrollment and field trips.
I talked about responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and protecting classrooms when budgets get tight.
Most of all, I refused to accept the premise that our public schools are failing institutions from which children need to escape. I talked about them as valuable community institutions worth protecting, investing in and making even better.
The voters responded.
I received 64 percent of the vote and won every precinct in Monroe County—including precincts that had voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump just two years earlier.
The voters didn’t suddenly become Democrats.
They knew I was a Democrat, and they voted for me anyway.
They chose a public education advocate for School Board.
And that makes me wonder whether the real lesson of this election has much to do with unicorns at all.
For years, education politics has been dominated by the language of “school choice”—vouchers, education savings accounts, publicly funded homeschooling and the growing movement of public dollars into private education. Advocates for public schools have too often allowed themselves to be put on the defensive, as though supporting the public system that educates the overwhelming majority of American children is somehow the politically risky position.
Maybe we have that backward.
My election certainly doesn’t prove that every person who voted for me opposes vouchers or publicly funded homeschooling. Elections aren’t referenda on a single issue. Many people who strongly support public schools also support a parent’s right to choose another option for their own child.
But there is an important difference between respecting individual choice and abandoning our collective commitment to public education.
And perhaps candidates have underestimated how many voters understand that distinction.
Supporting public schools is popular.
Supporting teachers is popular.
Giving children more opportunities is popular.
Believing every community should have an excellent public school is popular.
Those aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. They are community values.
So perhaps I’m not a unicorn after all.
Perhaps candidates don’t need to attack school choice to win the education debate.
Perhaps they simply need to stop being afraid to champion public schools.
The cruelest of Trump’s policies is his determination to deport millions of immigrants. Stephen Miller, the man without a heart, wants to deport one million immigrants every year. The new head of the Department of Himrland Security, Markwayne Mullen, wants to meet that goal. So now the numbers of people detained has risen sharply, but most of them have never committed a violent crime.
Remember when Trump said he would deport “the worst of the worst”? Remember when he said he would expel the rapists and murderers?
I remember. You probably remember too.
Some are married to American citizens. Some are waiting for their green card to arrive.
That’s who he is deporting. Most of those detained have never committed a violent crime. Most are hardworking people who are contributing to society. Most are running small businesses or working on farms or in construction or landscaping. They need to get their papers, and they want them, but there is no path to legal citizenship.
Some of the deportees have lived here for twenty years or more.
No matter. The door to American citizenship is closed, except for white South Africans. For those whose skin is not white, go away.
Albert Sun and Alison McCann of The New York Times reported:
A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people who had not previously been the focus of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. They included people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.
A majority of the immigrants arrested in July were people who were accused of violating civil immigration laws but who had not been charged with or convicted of a crime, an analysis of newly released federal data shows. The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.
Overall, immigration arrests rose to record highs with 43,000 ICE arrests in June and 49,000 in July. Two fatal shootings involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, in Texas and Maine, drew outrage but did not meaningfully slow the pace of arrests.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that the administration was keeping its promises to arrest and deport criminals and that anyone in the country illegally was a target for enforcement.
The new data contains details on every ICE arrest through Aug. 5 and offers the fullest picture yet of how the agency’s activities have shifted since public backlash forced a retreat from the aggressive tactics seen in Minneapolis early this year. It was obtained by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group, through a public records lawsuit and analyzed by The New York Times.
After his confirmation this spring, the secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, promised quieter but more effective enforcement. ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.
“They have more officers, more money, more detention space, more local partners and better systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official. “And they’re finally putting all the pieces together to build out this deportation machine.”
Immigration arrests are near all-time highs in almost every state. Even sparsely populated Montana and Vermont saw spikes, with arrest rates more than doubling.
But the surge was strongest in Florida and Texas, two states with large unauthorized immigrant populations and leaders friendly to the Trump administration’s crackdown.
The golden door is closed.
Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump, notes that Trump behavior in increasingly unhinged, narcissistic, and frankly, ridiculous. Yet no one in his inner circle will tell him the truth. No one will tell him that he has humiliated America in the eyes of the world. Mary is a psychologist and the son of Trump’s older brother. She judges him by his actions and his words, not his braggadocio’
Donald rushed the White House press corps into the Oval Office saying he had a big announcement, which is that, effective immediately, he is going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.
One of his flunkies, when asked, “Do you have anything to say about it, Ben?” said, “Yes, sir,” before explaining that this was a straightforward but important executive order. It directs Secretary Burgum and the Department of the Interior to update the Geographic Names Information System to reflect that the lake once known as Lake Ontario will from this time forward be known as Lake America. According to him, this is a lake that has most of its volume in the United States and the deepest parts of the lake sit in United States territory, so this will reflect that this is an American lake. Thankfully, all of the necessary papers and documents were filed to make this official.
In case you were thinking, “Oh, well, okay, maybe he’s finally done renaming bodies of water,” you would be wrong.
This is what Donald said:
The lake change, Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually. As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico. We changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America. So if you think about it, we have a Gulf and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.
That’s the President of the United States of America who currently has us involved in an illegal, unconstitutional war of choice, who is currently engaged in an unprovoked trade war with our closest ally and second largest trading partner, which will wreak havoc on both the economies of Canada and the United States of America, creating even more hardship for Americans given the fact that the economy, thanks to Donald’s completely stupid economic policies and the aforementioned war of choice, is in shambles.
American farmers are going bankrupt by the score, up to 77 per day. America is divided. America’s reputation across the world is cratering. America is a shadow of its once relatively respectable self, all because of that man and the fascist Republican Party that continues to enable him.
And it’s not because they don’t know what’s going on. They can see clearly that he is in serious, serious cognitive decline. There is overwhelming evidence of this.
They see clearly his toddler like levels of self involvement, his delusions of godhood, and his grasping need for attention. They see that his only priority is his wealth, his power, his megalomania, and yet Republicans continue to go along with his demands, which are increasingly insane, detached from reality, and utterly humiliating.
It’s not an accident, or maybe it is an accident, but it’s a convenient one, that by renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, the acronym for the Great Lakes, Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, and Erie, is now SHAME.
And I have begun to wonder if America will ever, ever be able to get out from under the weight of the shame Donald Trump and the Republicans have heaped upon us.
It is clear to any sentient being who isn’t lying to him or herself that Donald is increasingly unfit, increasingly just a prisoner to his psychopathologies. And now so too are we because not only has there been no pushback, he continues to be enabled. He continues to be told that he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to, because he’s him.
As you may have heard, Donald had wanted to close the Kennedy Center for two years because it needed such extensive renovations, according to him. Howard Lutnick is claiming that Donald is the only person in the world great enough to renovate the Kennedy Center. He also said that when the renovation project started, Donald, the great master builder, should be the project manager because being President is just another part time job.
We’ve also learned recently that Donald wants to make the midterms about himself. So here’s what holier than thou, sick of it Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had to say about it.
This is what Mike Johnson said:
The president is going to look right into the camera and say, I am on the ballot, okay? Because even though his name isn’t, it’s his administration, his legacy.
No, that isn’t how any of this works.
By continuing to enable him, by continuing to spread the wild, unhinged, untethered from reality narratives, Donald is trapped with it. They continue to act as if it is normal for a president at war to spend his time giving tours of the White House construction projects, to spend millions of dollars renovating a reflecting pool and then arresting people because the job was done so incompetently it made him look bad.
This is the President of the United States spending his time changing the names of bodies of water. First the Gulf of Mexico becomes the Gulf of America. Now Lake Ontario becomes Lake America. And apparently, having secured a gulf and a lake, Donald is considering moving on to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans because, as he explained, “Now all we need is an ocean.”
This is happening while America is at war. It is happening while farmers are going bankrupt. It is happening while we are engaged in a trade war with Canada. It is happening while the economy is in shambles and America’s reputation around the world continues to crater.
Yet the people surrounding Donald continue to treat his increasingly bizarre demands as if they are perfectly normal acts of presidential leadership. Nobody apparently has the courage to tell him that changing the name of Lake Ontario is not an important presidential accomplishment, just as nobody seems willing to tell him that being President of the United States is not a part time job that leaves plenty of room for managing the renovation of the Kennedy Center.
Instead, they flatter him. They indulge him. They tell him that he is the only person in the world capable of doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with the job the American people elected him to perform.
As long as we have people like Mike Johnson and everybody else in Donald’s inner circle trying to normalize this deviance, we are all part of this psychopathological system that will lead inevitably to our destruction.
To which I say, is there not one sane adult who knows where this is going to lead? Is there not one person in the Trump regime who can send up the signal flare to the rest of us that some of them are willing to start speaking out against this insanity?
Because this isn’t simply about renaming Lake Ontario. It isn’t simply about whether Donald decides tomorrow that the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean needs to have America stamped across its name, too. It is about the fact that there seems to be nobody around him willing to say no. There is nobody willing to stop indulging his grasping need for attention, his delusions of godhood, his megalomania, and his increasingly insane demands.
The Republican Party sees what the rest of us see. They know what is happening. They see the same behavior. They hear the same words. They watch him make the same increasingly detached demands, and rather than push back, they continue enabling him. They continue pretending that this is normal because Donald is Donald and therefore, apparently, he gets to do whatever he wants whenever he wants.
And that is how we get here. We have a President of the United States involved in an illegal and unconstitutional war of choice, an unprovoked trade war with one of our closest allies, and an economy that is creating extraordinary hardship for Americans, while he summons the White House press corps to announce that Lake Ontario is now Lake America.
And everybody around him plays along.
Donald said that now that America has a gulf and a lake, all we need is an ocean. Maybe he’ll change the Atlantic. Maybe he’ll change the Pacific. Maybe he’ll change both.
Meanwhile, the Great Lakes are now, conveniently enough, Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, and Erie.
SHAME.
That may be the most appropriate thing Donald has named yet.
This is unsustainable. He is unsustainable. And the sooner somebody is willing to stand up against the depredations that continue to be made against the American people by Donald and those who are perpetuating this, the better.
John Merrow interviewed Dolly Parton about her program called the Imagination Library. she loved to read and she wanted to inspire the same love of reading in children.
She began sending free books to the children in her county in Tennessee. Some of their families couldn’t afford to buy a book. No matter their family income, every child received a free book with their name on it, once a month for five years.
Dolly became known as “the book lady,” a title she cherished. She wanted to do good in the world, and she did. Her book program expands to children across Tennessee, then across the United States, then to other countries.
By the time of her death, she had given away close to 300 million books. She loved being “the book lady.”
She didn’t do it for fame or praise. She did it because she wanted every child to learn to read and to love reading.
As I have previously written, it’s hard to think of any sort of philanthropy carried out by other people of great wealth.
Now that Trump is in full megalomania mode, the possibilities are endless.
As threatened, Trump has issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes. Now it will be “Lake America.”
He previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico, calling it “the Gulf of America.”
He said:
“If you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean,” Trump said during the signing ceremony, comparing the move to his administration’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.”
The Atlantic Ocean? The Trump East Ocean.
The Pacific Ocean, The Trump West Ocean.
Or why not name them for his children? The Donald Trump, Jr. Ocean. The Eric Trump Ocean.
But what’s left for Ivanka? The Indian Ocean?
As for Tiffany and Barron? Name the Swiss Alps for Tiffany, and the Danube for Barron. Or the Rhine.
The possibilities are endless.
All glory to the Trump family. Until 2029.
I wish I knew the identity of the commenter Quickwrit. He/she contributes remarkable insights. This blog is dedicated to education and democracy. But our leaders are so arrogant and irresponsible that they endanger education, democracy, and our survival.
Here is the latest from Quickwrit:
IT’S NOT JUST the USS Abraham Lincoln: MOST of the U.S. ships on patrol in the Iran war are in sad-to-dire condition. Recall that the USS Benfold, a key guided-missile ship, drifted without propulsion and internal power for four days, during which time it was a sitting duck for Iranian missiles. Inside the ship, the lack of internal power meant that the crew had no working toilets (most U.S. ships don’t have flush toilets and rely on vacuum power to suck waste away), no air conditioning in the cramped quarters below deck, and no way to prepare food for the crew.
And among all the ships on Iran patrol that are in need of repair, the one that’s most likely to fail next is also the most critical in the blockade: The USS Boxer. Boxer is far overdue for a two-year complete overhaul. It was supposed to be in dry dock in San Diego through October of this year, but was instead deployed in March to Iran.
Dry dock overhauls aren’t just like going in for an oil change — the ships are virtually gutted and rebuilt from the inside out because of the tremendous wear and tear on the machinery during deployment at sea. USS Boxer is in sad shape right now and the current photos of the rust all over her hull only hint at that band aids being applied to the equipment inside to keep her somewhat combat ready. Her crew had expected to be on leave with their families during the dry dock period; instead, they just turned around and went to Iran. They and their families are justifiably furious.
Many other U.S. ships and crews are near the breaking point, mechanically and psychologically.
The food situation for the entire fleet in Iranian waters is critical because of TRUMP’S RETREAT that has had nearly zero coverage by U.S. media —
TRUMP RETREATS — The U.S. has been forced by Iran to move resupply operations from Bahrain to Diego Garcia, a U.S. base more than 2,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean, making it more difficult and dangerous to resupply U.S. ships and bases. Some supply lines are even longer than that now.
THE REASON FOR THE RETREAT, just at a time when the difficulties of resupplying U.S. carriers and other ships has made headlines, is because China has armed Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can easily penetrate U.S. defenses, and because of the critical shortage of U.S. defensive missiles.
CHINA has declared that “China is A STRONG STRATEGIC PARTNER” of Iran, and “China STRONGLY SUPPORTS IRAN on safeguarding its sovereignty, security, and national dignity.”
So, during the cease-fire, China has supplied Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can evade U.S. missiles and electronic countermeasures
Iran’s new missiles from China operate with China’s own “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A global positioning system (GPS) to guide missiles accurately to hit U.S. and Israeli targets.
The Chinese BDS-3 military-tier B3A system makes U.S. targeting and electronic countermeasures basically useless because “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A is based on highly-complex frequency-hopping technology and incorporates Navigation Message Authentication (NMA) that prevents “spoofing”.
Before Iran switched to Chinese BDS-3/B3A technology, when Iran fired missiles or sent drones at U.S. bases and ships or at Israel and other nations, the Iranian missiles and drones could be electronically jammed or “spoofed” with false target coordinates.
But, now the U.S. and Israel must rely on old-fashioned radar and fire volleys of large numbers of defensive missiles in the hopes of hitting an incoming Iranian target. THAT’S WHY the U.S. and Israel are depleting their stocks of defensive missiles.
All this information about Iran’s DBS-3/D3A missiles/drone guidance system was available in the Pentagon before Trump’s Iran war, but He-Man Hegseth fired any general who tried to tell him this and tell him that it was a bad idea to launch a war against Iran.
MEANWHILE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have just signed a mutual defense agreement that LEAVES OUT THE U.S. because Saudi Arabia and Turkey have come to recognize that America’s military can’t defend them and so they have joined with Pakistan, which is a nuclear power and is no friend of America. That spells a BIG LOSS of influence for the United States.
AND NOW desperate Trump is flailing around and attacking U.S. allies — he told Fox News host Trey Yingst that “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them!” Oman has been trying to negotiate a settlement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, acting on America’s behalf at Trump’s request. The Middle East nations are now all asking who Trump will abandon and target next in his desperation.
PLUS — China has been watching and counting as Hegseth has been stripping defensive missiles from U.S. bases and ships in Asia, to the point that the U.S. Asian bases and ships have barely enough missiles left to defend themselves, let alone challenge China when it invades Taiwan.
AND NOW, Trump has announced that he is withdrawing America’s last supercarrier from Asia and sending it to the Iran war. China must be very pleased.
When China invades Taiwan soon, the entire U.S. economy will crash because U.S. industry — as well as the U.S. defense industry — depends on computer chips made in Taiwan.
This is a disaster that has been caused by Trump thinking that by winning a quick war against Iran, he could distract American voters from his continuing withholding of the Epstein papers.
(Share this strategic information because the public isn’t receiving it from the media.)
The Washington Post obtained internal financial documents of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The documents confirm what many suspected: the Trump takeover was a financial disaster.
Before Trump, the Center was decidedly nonpartisan. Its board contained members of different political parties and no political party. When Trump took over, he cleaned out the entire board, excepting members of Congress whom he could not fire. He replaced the board with Trump loyalists, who tried to turn the institution into a monument to Dear Leader Trump. And the board fired the key members of the staff, who were professionals.
Once Trump’s name was added to the facade, artists and performances canceled, and ticket sales dropped precipitously.
Trump’s people said that any problems were inherited from the previous board and pretended that the Trump-Kennedy Center was better, more successful than ever.
Lies. Lies. Lies.
Someone handed the Center’s financial documents to The Washington Post.
Reporter Jonathan Edwards wrote:
““The center took a huge hit when the takeover happened,” and then appeared to stabilize, according to an official familiar with the center’s financial situation. But after the name change, “it was just an absolute fiscal cliff. Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared — like it was doomsday.”
One outside observer said that the fallout after the name change was catastrophic. A spokesman for the Kennedy Center said that any financial problems were the fault of the previous management.
But common sense suggests that putting Trump’s name on a memorial to John F. Kennedy was disastrous, not only because patrons were repelled by the name change and by the politicization of a beloved arts institution, but because the new, inexperienced staff was incompetent.
As is often said, whatever Trump touches soon dies.
Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In this interview, published by Medpages, he explains why Trump’s vaccine recommendations are crazy.
Offit: What Donald Trump said made about as much sense as when he said we all should drink bleach and expose ourselves to UV light to treat COVID. Maybe he’s not the guy to go to, to get the best medical information.
Trump: Effective immediately, my administration’s recognizing gold-standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella], which hopefully will be split up. You have the MMR, we want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective. So the MMR, we want to have separate — separate visits, separate times. The vaccine being broken into three separate single doses and vaccines being administered in separate visits.
Offit: So, here’s where this all comes from. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher, published a paper in the journal The Lancet of eight children who had received the combination measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, and then within a month supposedly developed signs and symptoms of autism. Now, that paper was ultimately retracted.
Nonetheless, the day after he published that paper, Andrew Wakefield held a press conference and he said, “I think this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts to lessen the risk of autism.” And so when I was on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices between 1998 and 2003, we were asked to vote on whether or not this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts, which made no sense. I mean, if the vaccine doesn’t cause autism, then separating it into its three component parts won’t make it less likely to cause autism. We were forced to basically have that vote and we all unanimously voted no.
So, the first measles vaccine came into existence in the United States in 1963, the last best measles vaccine in ’68. The mumps vaccine came into existence in 1967, the first rubella vaccine in 1969. Those three vaccines were combined in 1971 and have been used safely for the last 50 years. We have an enormous amount of information showing that those single vaccines when given singly are no safer and no less effective than when you give the vaccine as a combination.
So the combination vaccine is safe, it’s effective, and it means children get two shots instead of six. This is an administration that constantly talks about giving fewer shots and then makes a recommendation to give more shots.
Trump: And I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.
Offit: Would love to see the proof that President Trump has of a bottle of soda being poured into a little child’s body. The standard dose of vaccine for children is 0.5 mL. That’s roughly a 10th of a teaspoon. If you look at a multi-dose vial, which would contain say 10 doses, that would be one teaspoon of fluid. A soda bottle contains about 2,000 mL, or said another way, it contains 4,000 doses of vaccine. What is he talking about?
I think the most amazing aspect of that particular press conference is that the media who was standing there listening to him didn’t all burst out laughing. It’s just a ridiculous thing to say. And if he says he has proof of it, great. Let’s see that proof.
Trump: Very importantly, vaccinations to hepatitis B, COVID-19, and influenza, among others, are no longer recommended for all children.
Offit: So, in January, beginning of January of 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put out a schedule, which was a made-up schedule that was ultimately defeated by a federal court action in March of 2026. But in that schedule, RFK Jr. said that there were three vaccines that basically are optional, shared clinical decision-making. You could choose to get them or not choose to get them reasonably. And those were the influenza vaccine, the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID vaccine, and the rotavirus vaccine.
Now there was another category, the so-called high-risk vaccine category, which President Trump alluded to there, which included the hepatitis A vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine, RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus, as a monoclonal antibody, and the meningococcal vaccines. Well, everyone is susceptible. I mean, there are arguably some high-risk groups, but everyone is susceptible to those diseases. That’s why everyone is routinely recommended to receive them.
A choice not to get those diseases is a choice to put your child at risk. That’s why they’re routinely recommended. I mean, who’s at high risk for hepatitis A? Anybody who ever eats at a restaurant. The notion that there’s a high-risk group is just absurd. In 1991, we, the United States, recommended a universal hepatitis B vaccine for every child born in this country. At the time in 1991, there were roughly 16,000 cases of hepatitis B in children less than 10 years of age.
This is an AIDS virus. This is a virus that can be transmitted relatively casually because it’s a virus that lives on surfaces for up to 7 days. So sharing towels, sharing washcloths, sharing toothbrushes, sharing razor blades, can put a child at risk of hepatitis B. Those other 8,000 children less than 10 who got hepatitis B from places other than their mother weren’t getting it because they were intravenous drug users. They weren’t getting it because they were sex workers. They were getting it because chronic hepatitis B infections are common in this country and it’s easy to come in contact with someone who could infect you.
Now, if you’re infected in the first year of life, if you’re infected while traveling through the birth canal of a mother who is infected, then you have a 90% chance of going on to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.
So we dramatically decreased the incidence of hepatitis B in children less than 10, virtually eliminating it because of that recommendation more than 30 years ago. Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want to loosen the reins there to once again let hepatitis B back into a situation where it can cause cirrhosis, meaning chronic liver disease or liver cancers. It’s an incredibly unconscionable thing to do.
Trump: Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today in those times. People were much healthy and of course the high rates of autism now observed did not exist.
Offit: So, those were not the glory times. I’m not sure what he’s talking about when he’s saying that the incidence of autism has increased because of an increase in vaccines when that’s not true. The reason that the diagnosis of autism has increased is, most importantly, we’ve changed the definition. It’s now autism spectrum disorder, which includes a much wider spectrum of children. Two, we have better diagnostic tests.
It’s at least 80% genetic. Not all of it is heritable genetics. There are de novo or spontaneous mutations. There are factors associated with maternal health, with maternal infections during pregnancy, with maternal drugs taken during pregnancy that increase the risk of autism. But you don’t hear about any of that because people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump have taken the autism story hostage to support their own false beliefs — false, immutable, science-resistant beliefs — that vaccines are the cause.
That is the single best studied environmental influence on autism and it’s not it. So why are we still spending money on this fruitless dead-end hypothesis? We could be spending money on far more promising leads. By doing what RFK Jr. and President Trump are doing, by taking autism hostage for their own anti-vaccine efforts, all they’re doing is hurting children with autism.
After the executive order came out, the sun came up the next day. Parents took their children to the pediatrician’s office. Pediatricians gave them their vaccines according to a schedule, the recommended childhood schedule that is science-based. And the sun came up the next day and the next day after that. I think that this will largely be ignored. I think that state health departments and governors in states are largely going to ignore this. And we can then move past this in much the same way we move past President Trump’s recommendation to drink bleach to try and treat your COVID.
Check out this related video: RFK Jr. Falsely Claims Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’
The interview was conducted by:
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