A group of autism researchers and advocates with ties to Dr. Paul Offit on Tuesday said they formed their own autism research committee in protest of changes made by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the official government panel of autism advisers.
On Jan. 28, Kennedy appointed 21 new members to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a committee that coordinates federal efforts on autism, including policy and government-funded research. Kennedy said in a statement:
“President Trump directed us to bring autism research into the 21st century. … We are doing that by appointing the most qualified experts — leaders with decades of experience studying, researching, and treating autism. These public servants will pursue rigorous science and deliver the answers Americans deserve.”
Former committee members claimed Kennedy’s overhaul of the committee undermined its scientific integrity.
Helen Tager-Flusberg, Ph.D., a member of the new Independent Autism Coordinating Committee, founder of the Coalition of Autism Scientists and a former IACC member, said in a press release that the new group “restores the rigor and coordination needed to accurately assess progress and ensure that evidence-based progress continues to be made.”
The new committee plans to submit annual reports to Congress and issue recommendations on autism research priorities, Medscape reported.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard told The Defender that the new committee doesn’t replace the federal committee appointed by Kennedy, which operates under HHS. She said:
“The federal IACC will continue to fulfill President Trump’s directive to bring autism research to the 21st century and support breakthroughs in autism diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.”
Former IACC members prioritized research on genetic causes of autism, failed to find answers
John Gilmore, executive director of the Autism Action Network and one of the new members appointed by Kennedy to the IACC, told The Defender that Kennedy’s overhaul was warranted because the committee’s former members failed to answer many parents’ questions about autism.
“The IACC began 25 years ago, but since then, we have failed to find the cause or causes of autism. No treatments have been developed, no prevention, no cures,” he said.
Kennedy’s overhaul brought in many families whose voices were previously discounted, Dr. Sylvia Fogel, chair of the new IACC under HHS, told The New York Times.
Fogel is an assistant in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the mother of a son with profound autism.
For years, the IACC had prioritized research on the genetic causes of autism, which failed to generate answers for the many families whose previously healthy children regressed into profound autism, she said.
Fogel’s son was a typical 2-year-old who sang songs and spoke in three- to four-word phrases. After a respiratory infection, he lost the ability to communicate verbally, maintain eye contact or engage socially. “He was a shell of his former self,” Fogel told the Times. “Nobody could tell me what happened with my son. And no one could offer any treatment.”
The IACC’s charter requires the committee to include at least three members who are autistic, three who are parents or legal guardians of someone on the spectrum, and at least three members who represent organizations active in autism advocacy, research or service.
Before Kennedy reshaped it, the IACC had historically been led by people “on the more high-functioning side of the spectrum,” according to Jackie Kancir, executive director of the National Council on Severe Autism and parent of a profoundly autistic 22-year-old daughter.
Many parents of profoundly autistic children were “jumping for joy, feeling like they’ve finally been heard” when Kennedy announced the new members, Kancir told the Times.
Gilmore said the new independent committee, comprised largely of former IACC members, would likely ignore these parents’ concerns. “Clearly, they have no intention of listening to any of the voices many of them spent years trying to silence,” he said.
The new independent committee plans to meet on the same day and time as the IACC so it can “respond quickly to any recommendations that are not supported by science,” according to a press release.
Both groups will meet on March 19. “It’s like a jilted lover throwing a big party on the wedding day of the former partner,” Gilmore said. “This is bizarre, creepy behavior.”
The new independent committee includes Jim Greenwood, the former president and CEO of the largest biotechnology trade group and former U.S. representative for Pennsylvania. Greenwood sponsored the Children’s Health Act of 2000, which established the IACC.
IACC would ‘strike fear in people’ if it advised HHS to study vaccine-autism link
Alison Singer, a former IACC member and member of the new independent committee, told The Washington Post it would “strike fear in people” if the IACC announced that the government should study whether vaccines cause autism.
The Post is credited with first reporting on the new committee.
“Why is any avenue of investigation off limits?” asked Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) senior research scientist. “It is appropriate to look hard everywhere, and look much harder where powerful interests tell you not to.”
Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, is largely responsible for forming the new independent committee, Medscape reported.
The Autism Science Foundation’s board of directors includes Offit, a long-time promoter of vaccines. Offit has historically donated profits from the sale of his book “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” to the nonprofit, which has doled out over $5 million for autism research.
Singer told the Post there are “dozens and dozens of studies” that “exonerate vaccines as a cause of autism.” The Post linked to a list of studies procured by the Autism Science Foundation to back up her claim.
However, the majority of studies cited by the nonprofit looked only at the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine or thimerosal-containing vaccines, according to Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer.
The other studies claiming to have found no link between vaccination and autism are “dubious in quality and fraught with conflicts of interest,” he said.
Hooker said the Autism Science Foundation’s list omitted recent studies suggesting a link between vaccines and autism — including a 2025 peer-reviewed study showing that vaccinated children were at least four times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis compared to unvaccinated children.
A 2025 peer-reviewed paper in Molecular Neurobiology, which reviewed 519 studies, determined that autism is not a genetic disorder. The authors concluded that autism may arise from a dynamic and potentially modifiable set of biological drivers, including immune system disruption, environmental exposures and gut-brain physiology.
A comprehensive review of 300 studies published in October 2025 identified vaccination as the leading “modifiable risk factor” for autism.
The Defender asked a representative of the new independent committee if the members believe that research has ruled out the possibility that a vaccine, or a combination of vaccines administered over time, could increase the risk of autism in genetically susceptible children. The group did not respond by the deadline.
In addition to Singer, Tager-Flusberg and Greenwood, the new independent committee members are:
- Dr. Zack Williams, UCLA, Autistic Scientist/Self Advocate
- Dr. Joshua Gordon, former Director, National Institute of Mental Health; IACC Chair (2016-2024)
- Dr. Tom Insel, former Director, National Institute of Mental Health; IACC Chair (2002-2015)
- Joseph Joyce, President and CEO, Autism Society of America
- Dr. Amy Lutz, University of Pennsylvania; Autism Parent
- Dr. David Mandell, University of Pennsylvania; former IACC member
- Dr. Kristin Sohl, American Academy of Pediatrics
- Dr. Matthew State, UCSF, Scientific Director, Aligning Research to Impact Autism
- Dr. John Walkup, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
