The Moms Across America celebrating RFK Jnr’s anti-vax autism theories

Now, she hopes Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s health secretary and a fellow vaccine sceptic, will vindicate her beliefs when he makes an announcement next month on the “causes” of autism.

RFK has claimed vaccines have contributed to a rise in autism

But scientists have cautioned that research shows there is no link between vaccines and autism — and they warned the policies could result in children dying from preventable illnesses.

In a cabinet meeting last week, Kennedy, 71, who founded the “Make America healthy again” movement, declared: “We will have announcements as promised in September, finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism.”

Later, in an interview on Fox News, the secretary of health and human services said his agency would publish a report that he thinks will reveal an “aggregation of causes” that led to the disorder.

“This is a crisis,” he said. “There is not a single cause. There are many, many — there’s an aggregation of causes.”

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In April, Kennedy called growing rates of autism an “epidemic” that “dwarfs the Covid epidemic”. Mainstream medical professionals have pointed to increased awareness of the condition as one of the reasons for rising levels of diagnoses.

For mothers such as Honeycutt, Kennedy’s claim that vaccines contribute to a rise in autism is a vindication of their beliefs. He has said it is caused by “an environmental toxin” and that it is preventable, and also that it “destroys families”. But scientists such as Dr Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have described Kennedy’s claims regarding a link with vaccines as a dangerous and deadly conspiracy.

“Scientists have studied autism for decades. In fact, the current administration disbanded the unit at CDC that has funded much of the major research on this,” said Frieden, who is now head of Resolve to Save Lives, a non-profit organisation that works to combat preventable diseases.

Zen Honeycutt believes autism can be partly caused by ingredients in childhood vaccines

“We know there has also been an increase, a real increase, in autism,” he added. “We know that there are some risk factors, such as advanced paternal age, but if there’s going to be an announcement of a cause, and especially if that cause has to do with vaccination, that would be pseudoscience, and very dangerous pseudoscience.”

Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition and there is no evidence it can be reversed or eradicated. Many autistic people say such goals are not even desirable, arguing there is no single correct brain type, just as there is no correct ethnicity or sexuality. Increasingly, interventions are designed to help autistic people manage in a non-autistic world, rather than to change their behaviour to be less autistic.

• ‘RFK Jr is a disaster’: Staff describe chaos in ‘anti-science’ regime

“He wants to find this ‘thing’ that causes autism and prevent it,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of paediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “He wants the big win. Trump wants the big win.

“And so what he’s going to do is he’s probably in September going to hold up a paper that’s going to be poorly performed, methodologically flawed, uninterpretable, as he always does.”

Kennedy’s announcement came during a week of crisis for the national health agency, which has been dogged by a series of scandals since Trump began his second term in February.

On Wednesday, Kennedy fired Susan Monarez, the director of the CDC — who had been in the role for less than a month — because she refused to implement changes he had demanded, including altering vaccine recommendations and firing key members of staff.

Susan Monarez

KEVIN MOHATT/REUTERS

The White House said she was being dismissed from the agency, which had traditionally enjoyed a degree of independence, because she was not “aligned with the president’s agenda”.

Monarez refused to go, however, and dozens of staff walked out of the CDC headquarters in protest. Even Republican allies have criticised Kennedy, among them Susan Collins, a senator from Maine, who said she was “very concerned and alarmed” by Monarez’s sacking.

Passions run high in America over health: this month, a man who had been critical of the Covid-19 vaccine fired hundreds of rounds of bullets at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, highlighting growing mistrust and anger towards public health institutions.

Mourners gather in the aftermath of the CDC shooting in Atlanta in August

ERIK S. LESSER/EPA

Kennedy ignored the criticism, however, and named as Monarez’s acting replacement his own deputy, Jim O’Neill, a former Silicon Valley technology executive who shares many of his unconventional views.

In a social media post after his appointment, O’Neill accused the CDC under the Biden administration of “manipulating health data to support a political narrative” — though without giving any details. It was now “rebuilding trust” and refocusing on its “core mission of keeping America safe from infectious disease’.

Among the new administration’s achievements so far, he added, were ending “the misuse of the childhood immunisation schedule for Covid vaccine mandates” — an apparent reference to the practice of inoculating healthy children against Covid-19, which Kennedy is ending.

Amid the turmoil, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency would “continue to follow the latest gold standard science to best serve the American people”.

She added: “Let’s be clear: Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability. His longstanding advocacy has focused on ensuring that vaccines and all medical interventions meet the highest standards of safety and are backed by gold standard science.

“He believes the American people deserve radical transparency — not censorship — so they can make truly informed decisions about their health.”

In the run-up to the election, Trump brought Kennedy onto his team largely to harness the enormous following that he amassed during the years in which he spread his healthcare beliefs and conspiracies. These included claims the Covid-19 virus was “ethnically targeted” and that wi-fi causes brain bleeds.

He has also long claimed there is “overwhelming evidence” that the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F Kennedy — an idea dismissed by mainstream historians.

Kennedy’s inclusion on Trump’s ticket broadened the “Make America great again” coalition to include swathes of people who felt disenchanted and disenfranchised by the US health system.

Even Kennedy’s critics agree he is right on some things: America is in the midst of a cataclysmic health crisis. People in the US, on average, live shorter lives, have higher rates of obesity and drug use and are killed by guns more often than in other rich countries.

As health secretary, Kennedy has planned to take on the food industry, including by removing dyes that might be harmful to children from food and drinks. He has also spoken out against the enormous power that pharmaceutical companies wield in Congress.

Yet the cornerstone of his beliefs, which has gained him support over decades, is his speculation that vaccines raise risks for autism in children — despite the fact that billions of dollars have been poured into research that disproves this.

When the British doctor Andrew Wakefield published his now-discredited paper in The Lancet medical journal in 1998 claiming the MMR vaccine causes autism, Kennedy enthusiastically promoted it. “Even though study after study showed that that wasn’t true, he still continued to believe it,” Offit said. Wakefield was struck off over the fraudulent research and is now a prominent antivaxer in the US.

Andrew Wakefield in 2010. His theories on the links between autism and vaccines have been discredited but people continue to believe them

LUKE MACGREGOR/REUTERS

Honeycutt’s advocacy group, Moms Across America, is made up of thousands of mothers who believe, as Kennedy does, that their children’s autism has been partly caused by ingredients in childhood vaccines.

“We believe they are the major contributing factor to autism and this administration is finally researching this information,” she said. “We have an unwavering support for Bobby because he has an unwavering support for us. He told us he would die with his boots on, fighting for our children.”

Honeycutt’s sons Ben and Bodee both experienced mental health and behavioural struggles. She believes they are both autistic. She believed both showed what she calls “symptoms” of autism.

Zen Honeycutt with her sons, left to right, Bodee, Bronson and Ben in 2021

COURTESY OF ZEN HONEYCUTT

Ben’s mental health struggles escalated to the point that he took his own life last month at the age of 22. Honeycutt believes his problems were exacerbated by vaccinations. “I know there were toxins in his body that do contribute to suicide ideation,” she said. It is a theory that has been widely disproved by the medical establishment.

Honeycutt claims that Kennedy has been an “adviser” to the group for years, and she to him. “I have been thrilled since this administration has got in,” she said, adding that she trusts Kennedy’s “integrity”.

For Honeycutt, in the wake of her eldest son’s death, the fight continues, ignoring what she says are “daily threats” from people who disagree with her.

“We think it’s one of the biggest travesties in American medicine, that parents have not been informed about the ingredients in vaccines and the impact those ingredients can have. And Bobby Kennedy is calling for transparency at last.”