Want to Understand Autism?

Meet Dr. Daniel Geschwind, who explains that autism is inherited

Screenshot from Tylenol website

That’s Dr. Daniel Geschwind, from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, describing how autism works from a medical perspective, not from the perspective of an insane president who listens to a brainworm infestation before blurting out preposterous theories about Tylenol and acetaminophen generic brands.

Trump’s newly trained dog, RFK Jr., has been systematically tearing down the science part of the Department of Health and Human Services since being confirmed by a Senate of sycophants as its Secretary.

The scary thing about him is that some people who claim to be on our side believe the crackpot theories. I lose at least two or three subscribers whenever I post an article condemning RFK Jr., and I’ve received occasional comments, which I usually delete, that defend him.

Since I’m not a scientist myself, but only someone who thinks we should listen to them, I’m referring you to one of the pre-eminent scientists researching autism in this century of American quackery.

Dr. Geschwind is a Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry at UCLA. His autism research led to a National Academy of Medicine prize, the Sarnat Prize, in 2022.¹

Much of this post relies² on information from the David Geffen School of Medicine. I find it comforting that not all Hollywood entertainers blather about junk science. Some actually fund real science.

Geffen, who is a wildly successful music producer, has spent…

…are you sitting down?

…$450 million helping to build UCLA’s medical research facility that is now deservedly in his name.³

One of Herr Pedoführer’s fans might want to ask him how much he has spent combating autism.

Geffen has also donated to the Lincoln Project, the snarky social media organization that made its initial mark using highly polished videos to poke fun at the mad clown.⁴

So what does UCLA’s Dr. Geschwind say about Autism?

“Autism is a constellation,” he says.

“You can think about the causes of autism like you might think about the causes of pneumonia,” he explains. “There’s no single cause of pneumonia; it can have many causes: bacteria, a virus, a fungus, or even a parasite.”

What doesn’t cause autism? Tylenol/acetaminophen. And not vaccines.

Researchers have established that between 200 and 1,000 genes can be attributed to autism.⁵

The environment rarely plays a role in triggering autism in the womb, according to real researchers. Some studies have shown that prenatal exposure to valproic acid (for example) might affect the genes and trigger them to create autism while you’re still in the womb. But mostly, it’s purely inheritance (about 80%).

Getting a jab of a measles or a Covid vaccine from a pediatrician doesn’t give someone autism. Autism is something you’re born with.

But there is some good news, Dr. Geschwind says:

“We’ve successfully identified genetic causes of autism. We’re now ready and moving into a new phase where we’re using the genetic information to develop therapeutics, and that’s very exciting.

When he says they’re on the way to developing therapeutics, he means that they’re on the way to actually treating autism.

Luckily, unlike many institutions getting hammered by Russell Vought and his Project 2025 budget-cutting machine, Dr. Geschwind’s research is relatively safe because it’s largely funded by a philanthropist. No, not him:

Close-up of the head of a penis, public domain

That’s Russell Vought, who wants to shut down the government and fire everyone who works for it.

The philanthropist is David Geffen:

David Geffen in 1973. He looks different now, but maybe if he spends some of his money on augmentation, he can return to those halcyon days. Image by Tony Barnard, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And RFK Jr. can’t pull Geffen’s funding. Not even Russell Vought can do that. So that’s a relief, too.

Here are some quick facts about Autism, according to UCLA:

Screenshot from https://medschool.ucla.edu/news-article/is-autism-genetic

Take special note of that last bullet point. Save it somewhere in your memory bank because you’ll need it when someone tells you stories about autism that were made up by people who don’t have degrees in the sciences (like RFK Jr., who, allegedly, is a lawyer). This means that research has consistently shown that vaccines can’t give you autism. Nothing can “give you” autism. You either have it, or you don’t.

As methodologies for identifying symptoms have improved, so has the number of people who appear to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. We live in a society that requires autistic folks to find ways to fit in, and sometimes even discover their own place in the spectrum. This, understandably, sometimes pisses them off enough to hunt for reasons why they have to deal with it.

But no peer-reviewed studies demonstrate a link between autism and Tylenol (or its main ingredient, acetaminophen). The same is true for vaccines.

After Trump’s ludicrous claims about acetaminophen, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) was forced to issue a statement expressing alarm over the regime’s promotion of bad science:⁶

“Suggestions that acetaminophen use in pregnancy causes autism are not only highly concerning to clinicians but also irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients, including those who may need to rely on this beneficial medicine during pregnancy,” read a statement from Steven Fleischman, the president of the ACOG.

To this, most people on the far right presumably said, “Well, what do you expect from a trade group?” Sigh.

Dr. Geschwind and his scientific colleagues throughout the world emphasize the following:⁷

Autism is hereditary and therefore does run in families. A majority (around 80%) of autism cases can be linked to inherited genetic mutations. The remaining cases likely stem from non-inherited mutations.

There’s no evidence that children can develop autism after early fetal development as a result of exposure to vaccines or postnatal toxins.

“Everything known to cause autism occurs during early brain development,” Dr. Geschwind says. Other researchers have consistently backed up Dr. Geschwind’s findings.

Many times, you’ll hear a few people on our side say something like, “Well, yeah, but these researchers are funded by corporate elites.”

David Geffen probably qualifies there. But it’s not like he has an agenda. He’s a music guy.

Given the current state of U.S. government funding, it’s a good thing Geffen is around to help pay for this stuff. It looks like Dr. Geschwind is one of the lucky ones when it comes to funding. Government funding for medical research is evaporating.

Studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), before Russell Vought started tearing it down, came up with the same conclusions as Dr. Geschwind and his many colleagues throughout the world.

The Vaccine Hoax

The Autism-vaccine connection was a hoax originally perpetrated by a fellow named Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, in 1998.

He published an article in a prestigious medical journal named The Lancet that claimed a connection between MMR vaccines (measles, mumps, and rubella) and autism.

The magazine retracted the article shortly after it was published, but the damage was done.

Parents are quick to blame autism on vaccines because autism tends to manifest during early school years, right around the time most kids start getting vaccines. If their heads fell off instead, some parents would blame the vaccines.

Wakefield jumped all over this parental tendency by claiming that out of his tiny, random sample size of 12 children, eight of them developed autism after receiving the MMR vaccine.

What Wakefield didn’t clarify was that the kids’ symptoms developed, not autism itself, which developed while the kids were still in momma’s womb.

Joshua M. Sharfstein, MD, Vice Dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, explains the aftermath:⁸

Parents are looking for answers, understandably. And so the issue was very ripe for it to be associated with vaccines—not by cause and effect, but by timing and temporality.

The attention this question got led to a number of large epidemiological studies that looked at kids who were vaccinated with the MMR vaccine and those who weren’t, so there were control groups. And those studies found no association between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Once it started to become clear that the MMR vaccine was not associated with autism, the hypothesis shifted from the MMR vaccine [as a cause of autism] to thimerosal, which at the time was used as a preservative in some childhood vaccines. Thimerosal was never used in the MMR vaccine, but it was used as a preservative in multidose vials of other vaccines.

That led to a number of large studies looking at thimerosal in vaccines and autism, and those studies also found no relationship. Then the hypothesis shifted again to the number of vaccines given at one time, so there were studies of that, which also found no relationship between vaccines and autism.

At this point, we have 16 well-conducted, large population-based studies, carefully designed, done by different investigators in different countries, using different but strong methods. And all have found no relationship between MMR vaccine, thimerosal in vaccines, or the number of vaccines given and autism. The evidence is compelling.

The myth, however, persists, thanks to social media rage posters.

Peer-reviewed studies show that four vaccines are also linked to lower rates of dementia:⁹

• Flu vaccines

• Shingles vaccines

• The Tdap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (whooping cough)

• RSV vaccines

There isn’t a specific chemical that helps with dementia, so don’t start blasting your eyes with Thimerosal-infused saline solution, even if Trump or RJF Jr. tells you to. The reasons vaccines seem to help, researchers say, is that they help reduce inflammation throughout the body, which in turn cuts down on nasty things like brain atrophy.

This means that preventing these diseases from, at a minimum, impacting you with their full arsenal of symptoms can help protect you from the effects of Alzheimer’s and related diseases.

There are no guarantees in science. But taking vaccines is generally a good bet.

Are there too many vaccines? Do we need to take them all? Those are questions you have to answer for yourself, unless there’s another epidemic, when taking a vaccine becomes a moral responsibility.¹⁰

But here’s the thing:

There’s only one person you should listen to when it comes to vaccines, autism, or anything else related to your health: Your doctor.

Not me, and most definitely not RFK Jr. or Donald F Trump.

Thanks for reading!

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Footnotes

1. “Researcher Awarded National Academy of Medicine Prize for Work on Genetics of Autism.” 2022. Uclahealth.org. UCLA Health. September 15, 2022. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/researcher-awarded-national-academy-medicine-prize-work.

2. “Is Autism Genetic? | UCLA Medical School.” 2024. UCLA Medical School. April 10, 2024. https://medschool.ucla.edu/news-article/is-autism-genetic.

3. The initial contribution was $200 million. The $450 million has been accumulated over the years, some of it for scholarships, some for UCLA more generally, but most devoted to the school of medicine.

Wheelock, Jennifer. 2019. “David Geffen Adds $46 Million to Landmark Medical Scholarships Program.” UCLA. December 2, 2019. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/david-geffen-gift-expands-medical-scholarships.

4. Contributors. 2003. “American Businessman and Musician.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. September 18, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Geffen#Political_views.

5. Chen, Jason A, Olga Peñagarikano, T Grant Belgard, Vivek Swarup, and Daniel H Geschwind. 2015. “The Emerging Picture of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Genetics and Pathology.” Annual Review of Pathology Mechanisms of Disease 10 (1): 111–44. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-pathol-012414-040405.

6. Marcos, Coral Murphy. 2025. “Experts Alarmed as Trump Pushes Unproven Link between Tylenol and Autism.” The Guardian. The Guardian. September 23, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/22/trump-tylenol-experts-autism.

7. UCLA Medical School, ibid

8. “The Evidence on Vaccines and Autism | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.” 2025. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. March 19, 2025. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-evidence-on-vaccines-and-autism.

9. Sima, Richard. 2025. “4 Vaccines Linked to a Lower Risk of Dementia.” The Washington Post. September 25, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/09/25/vaccines-dementia-risk-reduction/

10. If a new virus that spreads like wildfire comes around and I’m told to take a vaccine for it, I will. If it kills me and saves you because they didn’t have enough time to test it, that’s fine. We all die of something anyway.