Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism “by September.” That didn’t pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again—by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to “innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention” with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world.
Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine movement. Many of the 21 new members have previously worked in some capacity with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy founded. Others are parent advocates with little to no apparent scientific training. In keeping with IACC requirements, the committee has three autistic members; one of them is a high school senior. Many of the new committee members have been involved with movements that claim there is a biomedical “cure” for autism, a stance that is opposed by most autistism self-advocacy groups.
A few of the other committee members have an unusual specialty in common. Several have relationships with organizations that promote “spelling to communicate” a controversial technique that claims to help non-speaking autistic people communicate with the use of letter boards. However, several expert organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, warn that there’s scant scientific evidence that spelling to communicate works, that unconscious influence might be exercised by the person interpreting the speller’s apparent messages—often a parent or a caregiver—and that focusing on spelling might discourage caregivers from using more evidence-based interventions.
Here’s a non-exhaustive guide to some of Kennedy’s controversial picks:
Tracy Slepcevic is an “integrative health practitioner” who claims that she cured her son’s autism. In 2022, she was a speaker at Reawaken America, a MAGA-meets-evangelical Christian tour convened by former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn. As Kiera Butler wrote at the time:
Last year, Slepcevic was a featured speaker on the ReAwaken America tour where she hawked her new book, Warrior Mom: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Her Son With Autism, with an introduction by Andrew Wakefield. In December, Slepcevic was interviewed by [far-right live streamer] Stew Peters. She told Peters the story of her son’s “recovery” from autism with supplements and diets. In January, Michael Flynn promoted Slepcevic’s book, tweeting “check out this e-book for only $.99 cents on how one Mama Bear nurtured her son back to health from autism resulting from a jab!”
In 2024, as our colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman reported, Slepcevic and her husband, Steve Slepcevic, hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Steve was also present at the rally at the Capitol that preceded the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Toby Rogers is an anti-vaccine activist and fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a libertarian think tank founded in 2021 which opposed Covid safety measures during the pandemic. Rogers has said he believes that vaccines are the primary cause of autism, and he often uses extreme rhetoric to express this view. Vaccines, he has said, are “genocidal,” and vaccine makers, he argued in an article last year on the Brownstone Institute website, “enslave society.” He believes that “no thinking person vaccinates.” In a 2024 tweet, Rogers argued that Anthony Fauci was “in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He must be arrested and prosecuted.” He also has a habit of waxing conspiratorial on X. Earlier this month, for example, he mused, “What if the entire Covid disaster—the design and release of SARS-CoV-2, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, censorship, the suppression of effective meds, Remdesivir, the toxic Covid shots, etc.—was engineered by AI to increase the power of AI?”
Ginger Taylor is a former marriage and family therapist-turned-anti-vaccine activist who “writes on the politics of autism, health, vaccination, informed consent and both corporate and government corruption from a biblical perspective.” She previously served on the “Spiritual Advisory Committee” for Children’s Health Defense. The founder of a Maine-based anti-vaccine group, she also runs NoDeception.org, a website on vaccines and Christianity where she writes about “the removal of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates” and what this “means for the Body of Christ.”
Elena Monarch is a neuropsychologist who does not appear to specialize in autism; rather she runs an independent clinic in Massachusetts for people who suffer from Lyme disease and the controversial strep-related neurological condition PANS/PANDAS. Fellow committee-member Sylvia Fogel, who has opposed efforts to eliminate religious exemptions for routine childhood vaccination requirements, works as a psychiatrist at the same practice. Monarch appeared at events with Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and Fogel was a recent guest on a Children’s Health Defense podcast.
John Gilmore is, like many of the others on the committee, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. He’s the co-founder of the Autism Action Network, which he created after his now-adult son was, according to him, injured by a vaccine. He, too, has ties to Children’s Health Defense and co-authored an editorial in 2021 with Mary Holland, the organization’s legal counsel and current CEO. (On Children’s Health Defense’s website, Holland is quoted as saying, “It is wonderful news that there are now people on this committee who are truly motivated to solve many of the existential autism issues, including prevention, treatment, education, employment opportunities, long-term care and housing.”)
Walter Zahorodny, Ph.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school. He appeared onstage with Kennedy during his first-ever press conference as HHS Secretary in April 2025. As Mother Jones reported at the time, Zahorodny has ties to researchers who deal in autism-related pseudoscience. He appeared in a 2018 video for the organization SafeMinds, which has falsely suggested that autism is caused by mercury exposure in vaccines. (In the video, Zahorodny didn’t take a position on mercury exposure, but instead talked about what he described as an increase in autism prevalence.) Zahorodny also co-authored a study in 2020 of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense.
Dan Rossignol is a family medicine doctor who runs autism clinics in Florida and California. Rossignol has advocated for “chelation” therapy, a debunked autism treatment. In 2010, he was sued by the father of a child for using “dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments” on his son. (The outcome of that suit is unclear.)
Two people on the panel are nonverbal communicators. One of them, Minnesota community college student Caden Larson, communicates with spelling and serves on the board of an organization called the Spellers Freedom Foundation. Another person on the board, Elizabeth Bonker, an autism advocate, uses typing to communicate and is the executive director of Communication 4 ALL, a group which advocates for typing-based communication for nonverbal students, saying that they should be provided access to “spelling on a letterboard or typing on a keyboard with a communication partner.”
Honey Rinicella is the executive director of the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs (MedMAPS). While the organization looks, from a certain angle, like a professional medical body, it often shares decidedly pseudoscientific ideas that aren’t supported by actual medical organizations. Several of its experts previously worked with Defeat Autism Now! (DAN) , a program created by the Autism Research Institute that advocated for unproven “biomedical” interventions to “cure” autism, including massive doses of supplements and chelation therapy, a process that removes heavy metals from the blood; there is no evidence that either approach “treats” autism, and both have the potential to cause serious harm. (The Autism Research Institute stopped promoting DAN in 2011.)
Today, MedMAPS contributors often promote the idea that autism and other neurodevelopmental delays could be caused by vaccines; contributors have also made other pseudo-medical, vaccine-skeptical claims, including promoting the false idea that Covid vaccines were actually “gene therapy.” MedMAPS also uncritically cites other anti-vaccine, pseudomedical groups with anodyne names, including the National Vaccine Information Center.
Katie Sweeney is another self-proclaimed “autism warrior mom” who works as an executive support manager for MedMAPS, meaning that two people from the same pseudomedical organization are now serving on the IACC.
Krystal Higgins is the executive director of the National Autism Association, a small nonprofit whose board consists of people whose children have autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. The organization has expressed skepticism about vaccines: in a 2012 statement to a Congressional committee — before Higgins was the executive director — the NAA claimed that vaccines “can cause immune and/or inflammatory injuries to the brain that eventually manifest as an autism diagnosis,” which is not a thesis that is shared by any mainstream medical body. (Today, the NAA’s website does not seem to take a specific position on the debunked vaccine-autism connection.)
The organization also advocates for assisted communication, including S2C (Spelling 2 Communicate) and RPM (Rapid Prompting Method) both of which are controversial in mainstream medical bodies. The American Speech-Hearing-Language Association says, of RPM, “There is no scientific evidence supporting the assertion that messages produced using RPM reflect the communication of the person with a disability.” Higgins is, per her bio on HHS’ website, “a certified Spelling to Communicate (S2C) practitioner, and is a devoted mother to an adolescent with complex medical needs.”
In all, Kennedy’s selections are another startlingly blatant effort to stack HHS with people who distrust vaccines and, in many cases, have devoted long careers to promoting debunked medical misinformation about them, as well as people who promote unproven “cures” and treatments for the condition. In a statement, Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a body that focuses on funding actual scientific research and evidence-based autism interventions, called the new committee “a complete and unprecedented overhaul, with no continuity from prior committees and a striking absence of scientific experts.”
“The IACC, created through the efforts of the broad autism community’s work with Congress and sustained for more than two decades by the dedicated service of leading scientists, advocates, and public servants, has been fundamentally compromised,” ASF added in its statement. “The current committee has been hijacked by a narrow ideological agenda that does not reflect either the autism community or the state of autism science. By sidelining rigorous, evidence-based inquiry, this shift will stall scientific progress, distort research priorities, and ultimately harm people with autism and all who love and support them.”
