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The war on science being waged by the US health secretary and the White House is bound to spread. We must be on our guard

In the recent past, Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that Donald Trump is “a terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath”. But in the US’s new age of irrationalism and chaos, these two men are now of one voice, pursuing a strand of Trumpist politics that sometimes feels strangely overlooked. With Trump once again in the White House and Kennedy ensconced as his health and human services secretary, what they are jointly leading is becoming clearer by the day: a war on science and knowledge that aims to replace them with the modern superstitions of conspiracy theory.

Nearly 2,000 members of the US’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have warned of “slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration”. Even work on cancer is now under threat. But if you want to really understand the Trump regime’s monstrousness, consider where Kennedy and a gang of acolytes are heading on an issue that goes to the heart of millions of lives: autism.

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