What RFK Jr. Missed

www.americanthinker.com

At 72, Robet F. Kennedy, Jr. is an impressively educated environmental lawyer, author, aggressive activist on vaccines, critic of the pharmaceutical and food industries, and a lifetime political activist, many of whose credentials — particularly his creative thinking — appealed to President Trump, who nominated him to be secretary of Health and Human Services.

Of course, lifetime Democrats went crazy, as did a good number of his still prominent relatives, as well as Big Pharma and also 75 Nobel laureates who urged the U.S. Senate to oppose Kennedy’s nomination. But RFK Jr. was ultimately confirmed and sworn in by Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch in the Oval Office on February 13, 2025.

Since then, RFK Jr. has accomplished many groundbreaking initiatives, including — this is the very short list — the following:

1. Establishing the Chemical Contaminants Transparency Tool (CCTT), an online database that the public can use to search for the levels of harmful chemicals allowed in food.

2. FDA GRAS Rule Reform. RFK Jr. wants to close the current loophole in food safety checks in which companies bypass these safety checks and fail to ensure that ingredients being introduced into foods are safe. Some of the ingredients pushed through were linked to tumors in animals; damage to DNA; and liver, kidney, and intestinal issues in high doses, plus possible heart and brain defects.

3. Operation Stork Speed was launched to ensure that baby formula in the U.S. is safe, nutritious, and always available.

4. Proposing that the MAHA Commission ban candy and sugary drinks from the food stamp program (SNAP). In 2023, 41.7 million Americans received SNAP benefits, costing taxpayers nearly $94 billion. But “sweetened soda water has no nutritional value,” said RFK Jr.

5. Fluoride Review. This is an effort to ban fluoridated drinking water, with studies indicating that it significantly lowers I.Q.s in children and reduces testosterone.

6. School lunch improvements. To tackle the chronic childhood health crisis, RFK Jr. has proposed an immediate ban on ultra-processed foods, with obesity affecting 20% of children in the U.S., and school meals playing a critical role in shaping kids’ diets.

7. Studying the cause of autism. This was not only the most important item on RFK Jr.’s list, but the one with the farthest-reaching consequences, considering that in 2020, the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that one in 36 children (approximately four percent of boys and one percent of girls) was estimated to have autism-spectrum disorder, and just five years later, the Department of Health and Human Services stated that autism had surged in America nearly 400% and now affects 1 in 31 American children.

What is wrong with this very disturbing picture?

RFK Jr. promised to deliver answers to the American people by September 2025. I think he met that deadline, but what did he suggest? That pregnant women stop taking Tylenol!

Well, duh! Tylenol? Are you kidding? Most women I’ve known and taught wouldn’t even take a handful of M&Ms while pregnant, much less enough Tylenol to cause autism!

A month later, on October 11, 2025, my article about the possible roots of autism was published. In that article, I cited my years as a delivery room nurse and my own observations over a 20-year period of teaching Lamaze childbirth classes and the startling connection I observed between the precipitous rise of autism diagnoses and the equally precipitous rise in sonogram exams, starting in the mid- to late 1970s.

I also mentioned the deadly effect — literally — of sonar waves, and the intense heat they produce, from Navy ships on pods of dolphins and whales, even two hundred miles away from these sea creatures. How, then, do all those sound waves and all that heat affect the delicate brain development of gestating human embryos?

Also, the important research being done at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh about the sonogram-autism link.

Also, the scrupulous research by author Jennifer Margulis, author of Business of Baby, who wrote that the Yale professor Dr. Rakic “concluded that all nonmedical use of ultrasound on pregnant women should be avoided.”

In her research, Margulis said she discovered that “there is mounting evidence that overexposure to sound waves — or perhaps exposure to sound waves at a critical time during fetal development — is to blame for the astronomic rise in neurological disorders among America’s children.”

Clearly, there is a vast human tragedy — a true man-made disaster — taking place before our eyes.

For whatever reasons — follow the money? — the mountain of evidence that points to a causal relationship between prenatal ultrasound exams and an escalating pandemic of autism is being systematically ignored.

Could it have anything to do with the huge investments doctors and scientists have made in ultrasound technology, which, according to Jennifer Margulis, “adds more than $1 billion to the cost of caring for pregnant women in America each year”?

Could it have anything to do with the revenue now pouring like an avalanche into the coffers of diagnostic and treatment centers?

Could it have anything to do with modern journalism’s almost complete abandonment of hard-nosed reporting and life-saving exposés about this subject?

As researcher Caroline Rodgers has said, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to the subject of autism. That elephant is the worldwide blitzkrieg of ultrasound exams on pregnant women — exams that have bombarded the babies they’re carrying with sound waves and heat that could have affects that last every second of their lives.

I sent my article via X to the entire Trump Cabinet, with RFK Jr. being the first on the list. Then I sent my article to RFK Jr. via X and email. Then I sent it one more time.

The response was silence — not even a “thank you,” not even an acknowledgment of receipt.

But much, much worse! A complete refusal on RFK Jr.’s part to look into the compelling and quite convincing evidence that the overuse of prenatal sonograms is directly associated with the frightening, terrifying, catastrophic rise in autism.

It’s way past time to give the billion-dollar industry of pregnancy sonograms the same attention and warnings RFK Jr. gave so confidently to Tylenol.

Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com and she can be reached at [email protected].

Image: Nogwater via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).