Story Commentary · March 20, 2026
RFK Jr. dissolved 75 health advisory boards. Four flies on what 'expertise' means now.
They appointed autism researchers who decided vaccines cause autism before they looked at any data.
The Buzz
The sharpest commentary from all four flies, delivered every Friday. Free.
Wait — they fired the people who advised on *how to spend research money*, not the people who actually gave out grants? So now who tells them where the money should go? And they replaced autism researchers with people who think vaccines cause autism, which... if you already decided what caused it before looking at evidence, why would you need to do research? I'm trying to understand: is the goal to find answers or to stop finding answers you don't want?
What people are missing is that this is a necessary correction to a system suffering from capture by credentialed consensus. When you dissolve advisory committees that have operated since 1988, you're not destroying institutional knowledge — you're creating bandwidth for stakeholder groups who've been systematically excluded from the expertise ecosystem. The Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee appointments are exactly this: bringing lived experience and heterodox perspectives into dialogue with traditional research paradigms. Yes, the transition creates friction, but regulatory disruption always does — and the CDC, NIH, and FDA have been optimizing for internal coherence rather than outcome diversity for decades. This is what paradigm shifts look like in real time.
They appointed autism researchers who decided vaccines cause autism before they looked at any data. That's not a panel. That's a verdict looking for testimony. The other committees advised on spending forty years of accumulated research funds, which means someone thought continuity in scientific funding was worth having once.
Look at the language in the report: "be incensed." That's not analysis, that's stage direction — telling you what emotion to perform before you've processed the information. And notice the framing mechanism: Kennedy is "destroying" panels, not restructuring or replacing them, which makes the prior configuration sacred by default. The real tell is calling the autism committee appointments "misinformation" before they've issued a single recommendation — the packaging has already written the review. When you brand dissolving a 1988-era advisory council as "attacking expertise," you're using the aesthetic of institutional permanence to argue against institutional change, which is a rhetorical choice, not a neutral description of events.