Washington D.C. – Following Trump Health Secretary Kennedy’s announcement today of 21 new members of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a review from Protect Our Care’s Public Health Watch project finds most of these members bring a sordid history of promoting dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracy theories including the widely disproven claim of a link between vaccines and autism. *See review below.
Kennedy’s dubious statement that he’s enlisted “the most qualified experts” on autism comes on the heels of a major analysis released last month from the WHO global expert committee on vaccine safety finding no causal link exists between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders (ASD), “with evidence based on 31 primary research studies, published between January 2010 and August 2025, including data from multiple countries”.
The Trump administration’s overhauled IACC also follows Secretary Kennedy’s firing of four of the nine members of the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccinations (ACCV), which advises the government on which injuries should be eligible for compensation. As the Washington Post warned in its January 26th editorial, those firings set the stage for RFK Jr’s “next front” in the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine campaign. The Post editorial board raised an important question: “Will he stack the committee with cranks who would bless efforts by Kennedy to allow compensation for autism, despite overwhelming evidence that vaccines do not cause the condition? This could lead to more than $100 billion in estimated awards. The current reserve is just $4 billion. If the fund goes insolvent, or if special masters who review injury claims — known colloquially as the Vaccine Court — are not willing to go along, claimants would likely turn to civil court for their grievances. Those lawsuits might not succeed, but they would chill pharmaceutical innovation. [..] [Kennedy’s likely] objective is to return to the days when manufacturers saw immunizations as risky ventures. That would be a boon for Kennedy’s fellow trial lawyers, but it would make Americans sicker and more vulnerable to contagion.”
“It’s clear that RFK Jr. is stacking these key advisory committees with anti-vax quacks not to get to the bottom of what causes autism, but to stifle vaccine innovation and access based on his preconceived yet widely disproven insistence that vaccines are the culprit,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “Secretary Kennedy is essentially creating an ideological echo chamber where his research committee made up of anti-vaxxers provides highly dubious conclusions to another panel that could push vaccine manufacturers into frivolous lawsuit hell – which could easily bankrupt the system that has allowed for greater innovation and less disease transmission. Rather than wait for that nightmare scenario to become reality, now is the time for vaccine advocates in Congress like Bill Cassidy to put up guardrails to protect vaccine access and our public health from an administration co-opted by the anti-vax fringe.”
Many Autism advocates and families are not buying what RFK Jr is selling, and neither should Congress:
- The Guardian: ‘It becomes my whole job’: autism advocates fight RFK Jr’s barrage of misinformation
- WTTW: Advocates, Families Push Back Against RFK Jr.’s ‘Dehumanizing’ Comments on Autism
- Politico: RFK Jr.’s autism pledge divides advocates
PUBLIC HEALTH WATCH REVIEW: RFK Jr.’s Overhauled Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee is Stacked With Members From the Anti-Vax Fringe:
- John Gilmore was one of the conspiracy theorists who ran RFK Jr.’s super PAC during his presidential campaign. Gilmore Gilmore is the head of a nonprofit called the Autism Action Network that grew out of a group of parents of “vaccine-injured children” who maintained there was a link between the use of mercury in vaccines and autism. AAN is listed as a partner on the website of RFK’s Children’s Health Defense, and in 2021, AAN and Children’s Health Defense held a panel discussion titled “The Covid Vaccine on Trial: If You Only Knew…” that featured Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers in which Gilmore claimed that Covid vaccines were part of an immense plot mounted by “oligarchs” worth “literally trillions of dollars” to gain control of the world.
- Lisa Ackerman leads The Autism Community in Action, which rebranded from Talk About Curing Autism and is known for promoting the false idea that there’s a biomedical “cure” for autism. Ackerman has partnered with anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy and defends the discredited Dr. Andrew Wakefield who falsified evidence linking vaccines to autism, saying, “We support Dr. Andrew Wakefield for being courageous, examining sick children and for listening to parents.”
- Taylor Slepcevic was a fundraiser for RFK’s presidential campaign. Slepcevic published a book called Warrior Mom about her years raising a son with autism that she blames on routine childhood vaccines. The book was endorsed by Kennedy and sold by his campaign. Slepcevic now offers coaching to parents on how to “heal” autism through restrictive diets and dangerous quack treatments.
- Honey Rinicella is the executive director of the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs and mother of twins with autism that she blames on vaccines. Rinicella’s advocacy is “deeply rooted in her desire to highlight the potential link between vaccines and autism” and she insists that, “You cannot say that vaccines don’t cause autism.”
- Sylvia Fogel and Elena Monarch are a psychiatrist and a PhD in clinical psychology respectively. Fogel has advocated against tightening vaccine requirements for school entry. Together Monarch and Fogel attended RFK Jr. campaign events and supported his campaign.
- Daniel Rossignol is a physician who has supported numerous quack autism “cures.” Rossignol served as a scientific advisor to Jenny McCarthy’s Generation Rescue, a group committed to the idea that vaccines and mercury cause autism. In 2010, Rossignol was the subject of a lawsuit from the parents of a boy with autism who claimed that he provided treatments without proven scientific benefit that carried risks of serious harm.
- Elizabeth Mumper is affiliated with RFK’s anti-vaccine Children’s Health Defense. Bogus Covid cures. Mumper is a part of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which pushed a bogus COVID-19 treatment long after it was proved ineffective.
- Laura Cellini is mother of an autistic child who has questioned vaccine safety. Cellini recently wrote: “Vaccines are an important public health tool for prevention of serious communicable diseases, but for children with certain immune or metabolic primers, a tightly clustered set of immune challenges may function as an acute trigger.”
- Toby Rogers is a longtime anti-vaccine advocate. He testified at one of Ron Johnson’s anti-vaccine hearings last year. His controversial paper on the “cost of autism” was retracted.
- Ginger Taylor is the director of Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice, an organization she started after her son Chandler was diagnosed with autism. She believes this happened following a series of vaccinations. Taylor has urged people not to see pediatricians because they support vaccines and is a long-time anti-vaxxer and measles conspiracy theorist.
- Katie Sweeny is the executive support manager for the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs, which is an anti-vaccine group and a parent of an autistic child. She is part of the “MAHA Moms” movement and a supporter of RFK’s presidential campaign.
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