Let’s Get Retarded in Here
America’s Working Plan for the Health of US Children
Am I referencing a 20 year-old song by the Black-Eyed Peas to get away with saying a bad word? No. I’m talking about a federal mandate to bring back the mentally retarded -in the historic context of the term.
Every American older than 40 remembers when mental retardation was a medical diagnosis despite its frequent appropriation as a slur. I promise this will make sense as you continue, which is more than I can say about the unthinkably anti-scientific policies that are already making it possible. Click the song link in the intro to soothe the news about the more intellectually impaired future ahead of us.
Everyone in the know is talking about how measles and other infectious illnesses can kill your children, but no one is talking about how much brain damage those diseases inflict among the survivors. But I will. Now that many Americans (and our entire federal government) are inviting completely avoidable infections back into our children’s lives, its important to understand that the measles-parties of yesteryear yielded more than a few entries into the special education classrooms of the time.
Buckle up folks. Some of your kids are not going to college or trade school courtesy of elevating an anti-scientific attorney to the highest health authority of the land.
A brief history of the terminology for intellectual disability
To be clear: I am not using “mentally retarded” or its derivatives derogatorily as it has come to be defined in the last 20 years; I am using it objectively, as it was originally applied as a medical diagnosis in the 1970’s.
Prior to the 2013, “mental retardation” was the standard term used in clinical, legal, and educational contexts. It was introduced in 1961 by the American Association on Mental Retardation in order to replace earlier terms that had become widely used as insults. What were those terms? “Idiot," "imbecile,” and “moron,” which were specific medical diagnoses bestowed upon those who scored 0-25, 26-50, or 51-75 on an IQ test. Initially, they were just medical terms, but as you can surmise, the public was quick to adopt them into the vernacular.
Insulting someone’s intelligence is practically instinctive in matters of verbal conflict, and as such, medical terminology that describes severe impairment will inevitably be appropriated by the layperson in order to roast their adversaries. Thus, while these terms frequently appear in academic, clinical, and policy contexts without ill intent, intentionally offensive use of these words inevitably emerge in the larger population.
So is the use of “retarded” coming back into fashion?
Elon Musk certainly thinks so, which is profoundly ironic given that he identifies as autistic -a group that led the charge to vilify the use of the word. Mr. Musk had the audacity to later level that same insult against an astronaut whilst arguing about the things that astronauts are experts in, but in a fact-optional world, no absurdities are impossible. Elon's unapologetic use of the term is bringing the R-word back as a slur, just as RFK Jr.’s attack on vaccines is bringing back eliminated disease as a commonplace reality. But I digress.
Where does Intellectual Disability come from?
Not all causes of intellectual disability are unavoidable accidents of genetics. Some are acquired by trauma, others by poisoning, and more than you think by infection -particularly prior to the availability of vaccines. Vaccinations prevent ten different flavors of brain-eating infections, but thanks to declining rates of vaccination, we are already seeing a return of preventable deaths, and because even devastating brain injuries take a little longer to diagnose in young children, they are statistically inevitable as outbreaks of childhood diseases become more common. Make no mistake: the decline of vaccination rates in the US will be made worse under RFK Jr.
So really there is another cause of intellectual disability: willful neglect of its causes. Prevention of trauma, poisonings, and infectious diseases all reduce the incidence of intellectual disability. Ignoring these facts literally causes brain damage.
What is the history of the term “mental retardation” as it pertains to public perceptions of increasing rates of intellectual impairment?
The term intellectually disabled, and all of its synonyms (offensive or otherwise) refer to a functional problem: an impairment of cognitive ability to reason that is so significant that it prevents its bearer from performing some or all of the activities required for independent living. Many people quite incorrectly assume that this is a disease in and of itself, but it isn’t. Intellectual disability is a functional assessment of cognitive problems caused by hundreds of different conditions that just happen to share a heavy toll on the brain. If we simplify the list of causes into broad categories, you can conceptualize it like this:
The overlap of these categories does not mean that they are causally connected, but rather represents the fact that each category shares a possible outcome of intellectual disability. Being in the red circle doesn’t mean you have all 5 problems, it just means that the one you have was severe enough to put you there.
For example, a child born with the genetic defect that causes Christianson syndrome will have the same limited capacity to learn as a survivor of shaken baby syndrome. Both have intellectual disability, but not for the same reasons. Similarly, two different children who both have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will see markedly different futures ahead of them if one is profoundly intellectually disabled, while the other suffers from social and emotional impairments only. The former may never grow up to speak or recognize their own name, while the latter may become the CEO of Tesla.
So the point is, intellectual disability isn’t a disease so much as an outcome of many kinds of disease and trauma.
People commonly conflate intellectual disability with its unrelated causative factors because schools address these children as a single group via special education classes. This is an effective strategy for education because even though the causes of their disabilities are wildly diverse, Special Ed concentrates children with similar needs into a space where their education can be addressed with expertise and insulated from the ridicule of neurotypical children.
Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is a slogan that implies that we were healthier in the past than we are today. From the perspective of acquired brain damage, that is patently false, because it has never been lower. By undermining public trust in vaccines at a federal level (under disprovable pretenses), we will return to a time in history when a lot more kids suffered intellectual devastation by diseases that later came to be vaccine preventable. So in a sense, MAHA is telling the truth that we will return to the same level of health as yesteryear, and it isn’t going to be healthy. No one longs for the days when cholera and leprosy were incurable diseases, but at its heart, MAHA is working to return us to a time when injury and suffering could not be prevented. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so ghoulish in purpose and imminent in its arrival.
That is depressing. How does it relate to vaccination?
It doesn’t.
But… the MAHA faithful and its founder insist that there is “an explosion” of chronic disease among children in the US. Kennedy isn’t wrong in terms of raw numbers: there have been notable increases in obesity, asthma, and neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) since the 1960’s, but the causes are complex, and its easier to blame food and vaccines than it is to do (or even read) legitimate research. I am not going to tackle asthma or obesity here, but let’s look at NDD more closely.
Rates of NDD (a broad category of problems that include autism spectrum disorders), have gone up significantly since the discovery of autism in 1930. This is because before it was discovered, the recorded rate was zero. The dwarf planet Pluto was also discovered in 1930. Rather than making the rational conclusion that autism has always been with humanity (because it has), anti-science activists like RFK Jr. insist that rising rates are caused by something else.
Consider that rates of NDD have (in part) increased as enhanced awareness and understanding of ASD has led to the inclusion of high functioning individuals into its numbers over time. Arbitrarily concluding that increased rates of autism are tied to vaccines -in spite of ample evidence to the contrary, is as fallacious as concluding that the discovery of Pluto caused autism; ASD and Pluto are associated with the same date, but association does not prove causation. Both existed LONG before our awareness of them, and our understanding of both has grown over time with careful study. Some spurious correlations sound more absurd than others, but spreaders of disinformation relentlessly market these fallacies to a public with a poor understanding of science and causality, which can make ridiculous things sound appealingly reasonable.
Aside from better diagnosis, where is all of this intellectual disability coming from if not vaccines or the discovery of Pluto?
Reverse eugenics. Unexpected? Consider this: Eugenics is the philosophy of purposefully increasing the frequency of traits in a human population that are considered favorable. The people in charge usually decide what counts as favorable, but typically athleticism, hardiness, fertility, attractiveness, and intelligence are at the top of the list. Increasing the prevalence of these traits among the population is accomplished by selective mating (think of it as dog breeding, but its your grandchildren -easy in theory, but really hard to pull off because of all the revulsion among the participants), or by killing everyone who possess traits that are undesirable. History demonstrates that it is much easier to commit genocide with the right combination of authoritarianism and patriotic delusion than it is to get two people who don’t like each other to have procreative sex. Kids today. Soooo picky.
Modern medicine strives to preserve life at all costs. In ancient cultures, the sick and weak infants that didn’t die immediately of their ailments were left to succumb to the elements in order to keep the population strong. Natural selection is undone by advances in medical science, because illnesses and injuries that were historically eliminated from the population by failure to survive, are nurtured back to complete or incomplete health, granting those individuals a chance at life in the larger population. While many of these improvements are directly attributable to mass vaccination efforts, advances in obstetric and pediatric care have also made substantial contributions. Witness the profound impact of medically-driven reverse eugenics in the span of a single lifetime:
The children of today are up to 5 times more likely to survive to adulthood than they were in RFK Jr.’s halcyon days 60 years ago. But wait, there is more! Premature births were historically a grave marker of mortality until the tireless efforts of neonatologists unravelled the tapestry of unique threats and abnormal physiology of children born too soon to survive from the neolithic until the invention of the 8-track tape.
Prior to 1965, pre-term babies had an effective survival rate of zero. This is the time in history that RFK Jr. longs for and seeks to inflict upon us once more -because that’s the “again” part of MAHA. He completely ignores that the survival of premature infants born today is about 80%.
RFK Jr. should be celebrating the scientific achievements that made these miracles possible, collectively helping to make children the least likely demographic to die of any cause. Our children were healthier in the 1960’s -if, and only if- we ignore all of the dead ones, and there were plenty. The children who survived the disease and circumstance that we can prevent today were healthier because the weaker ones were eliminated via natural selection. This is eugenics, if you look backwards in time to argue in favor of achieving lower rates of chronic disease via culling of the kids most likely to have chronic disease. This should really be talked about more than it is.
The cost of taking your baby home rather than burying it
Premature infants are more likely to suffer from neurodevelopmental disorders than healthy term infants. Compared to full term babies, infants born at 32 weeks are over 70% more likely to have NDD, and infants born before 28 weeks gestation are more than 1,600% more likely to have NDD. The risks are substantial, but in all of my years in labor and delivery, I have yet to see a parent disappointed in the successful resuscitation of their premature infant.
Children who would have died of genetic disorders, trauma, and infections in the 1960’s, survive today because of advancements made in medicine that occurred in the intervening years. So of course, we have more children with a myriad of chronic diseases -because they would all be dead if they were born in the era that RFK Jr. idolizes.
The US secretary of health is blissfully unaware of survivorship bias -which in and of itself is a strong argument for strengthening the department of education rather than dismantling it, as critical thinking is in such short supply that it extends upwards to the highest echelons of American leadership. Sadly, this inability to reason is driving the creation of policies on the basis of fallacy in spite of evidence.
Behind every complex, multifactoral problem there are simple solutions - and they are all wrong. That’s why we don’t have Alternative aircraft mechanics or holistic nuclear reactors. Intellectual disability is no different.
If you are a Gen X or older, you remember that the kids who were officially deemed “retarded” at your school were severely cognitively impaired. They were not in special ed for subtle things like OCD, texture issues, and social impairment -because those kids had normal or above average intelligence. The latter group who were indisputably autistic by today’s standards, could still learn in school just fine. High functioning autistic kids were not only lumped in with neurotypical kids back in the day, they weren’t recognized as having a problem in the first place. They were just the weird kids who did great on tests but were perpetually bullied for being social outcasts. Instead of getting a little extra support for their disabilities, they were just doomed to suffer the abuse of jocks and popular girls for 13 long years.
Thus, even though the educational community of the past was aware of autism, they were focused on addressing the most severe cases that included cognitive disfunction. Autism wasn’t recognized as a spectrum until 1994, and higher functioning individuals who were never previously counted as autistic added substantially to the ranks of the affected. So this “explosion” of autism that non-scientists clutch their pearls over is an artifact of increased awareness and diagnostic nuance.
If we exclude high-functioning, cognitively intact individuals from today’s counts (as they were excluded from historical counts), the rate of true, profound intellectual disability -what was formally labeled “mental retardation” in times past, has actually remained relatively stable over the last 70 years, but only coincidentally so. Consider:
Newborn screening for congenital conditions has reduced the rate of intellectual disability (ID)
Advances in the resuscitation of critically ill and premature newborns has increased the rate of ID, because those kids often do not come through the experience fully intact (and they wouldn’t have counted as ID if they died as they did in the past).
If as MAHA suggests, healthy brains are being steadily poisoned by food or vaccines, we should expect rates of ID to steadily increase as new vaccines are added to routine guidelines, and as new outrageous flavors are added to Doritos… but we have not seen that. We have seen improved survival among children who would have died of their ailments. We have seen Americans get steadily fatter, but that’s the Doritos, not the vaccines. MAHA’s simple solutions to complicated problems are not only wrong, they are dangerous.
You may think TikTok is rotting your kid’s brain, but these are the infective players that can literally rot it in a way that they will never recover from:
While some childhood infections are mild and without consequence, measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella are viruses that are known to cause irreversible brain damage in a percentage of those who are infected.
Not to be outdone by viruses, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), and Neisseria meningitidis are bacteria that all share a predilection for eating your brain after dining on its protective coverings, the meninges.
Rounding things out, Influenza A and B, Varicella, Hepatitis A, and Cytomegalovirus (CMV) can all bring about Reye’s syndrome, which causes the brain to swell and crush itself against the inside of the skull, particularly if you take an aspirin while sick.
With the sole exception of CMV, vaccines offer safe protection against each and every one of these 10 pathogens. When people ask:
“why are there SO many shots for my baby?”
I can’t help but wonder which kind of brain damage they prefer their child to be vulnerable to. After all, there are a dazzling array of mechanisms of cognitive annihilation to choose from:
Encephalitis - A directly infected brain leads to the death of brain cells, compounded by inflammation and disruption of the blood brain barrier.
Meningitis - An infection of the membrane around the brain. It can lead to the death of brain cells from direct spread of bacteria, and is also compounded by inflammation and disruption of the blood brain barrier.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) - a dreaded complication of measles, particularly in kids under 5. A child recovers completely from a mild case of measles. Five to ten years later, that same child gradually exhibits subtle behavioral changes, then steady cognitive decline, followed by seizures, motor dysfunction, and eventually a vegetative state and death within 1-3 years of diagnosis. There are no survivors.
Teratogenesis - mother’s may suffer mild effects of an infection, but the previously normal child developing within suffers devastating harm. Rubella (German measles) is the biggest culprit, but varicella (chicken pox) contributes to brain damage cases as well.
Vasculopathy - infection of blood vessels in the brain leads to inflammation and strokes.
Cerebral edema - inflammation of the brain causes it to swell, but since most skulls are fixed in volume, this damages the whole brain by squishing it under pressure, sometimes enough squeeze it through the toothpaste hole at the base of the skull where the spinal cord exits (this is called herniation, and it is almost always fatal; its what TV doctors are sad about when they say “pupils are fixed and dilated.”)
Each of the devastating processes listed above is completely natural, and lead to predictable tolls of brain damage as various pathogens descend upon a community protected only by their natural, untainted immune system. Antivaxers make a huge deal about the virtues of natural immunity, without any understanding of just how brutal natural selection is: immune systems don’t have to save everyone, just enough of the species to keep it going. Sorry ma’am, your honor roll student is going to have to be tube fed from now on, but your neighbor’s slacker-kid is going to be just fine. That is natural selection by way of natural immunity.
How will Special Education enrollment look in an America with declining vaccination rates?
Like it or not, a combination of brutal budget cuts and radical realignment of federal health policy in favor of fiction is going to reduce confidence in, awareness of, and access to vaccines. The historic survivors of these brain damaging diseases had to spend the rest of their lives with mental retardation; and while they outlived the social acceptance of the term given to them for their intellectual disability, they couldn’t outgrow the disability itself.
Let’s quantify how much brain damage vaccination prevents by adjusting pre-vaccination annual infection numbers to the present day population. I can’t really compare it to today’s rates of injury because as long as everyone stays mostly vaccinated, those rates are zero. Ignoring this benefit is the epitome of privileged ignorance, made possible by the success of vaccination.
Here is the damage we can expect among survivors when vaccination rates drop across the country, as they already have in pockets of the US:
If we adjust for the growth in US population, there is north of twenty thousand cases of permanent cognitive impairment that are completely avoidable via vaccination.
Some are bound to say that 20,652 children with new brain injuries isn’t all that much (and you should be ashamed), but it represents 1.25 brain-injured children for every Starbucks outlet in the US. Unless you were blinded by measles, you have seen a lot of Starbucks around, even in smaller cities.
Imagine if Starbucks doubled the number of stores it had this year. And then added the same number next year, and every year in perpetuity. That would be terrifying bit of caffeinated real estate cancer, but it would still only account for 80% of the children who acquired brain damage every single year because their parents thought it was safer to skip vaccinating them. That is far more tragic than theoretical metastatic Starbucks disease, but we are seeing more and more parents who choose to avoid vaccination in order to manifest preventable intellectual disability into reality.
Am I excited about this? No, but a lot of Americans seem to be. They can’t wait to go back in time to revel in all of this preventable death and brain injury, including the only four physicians in the US Senate, all of whom voted for RFK Jr. -despite understanding everything that I have just laid out for you. You should write them a letter and share how feel about their oath to do no harm.
My parting shot by cosplaying as a pseudoscientitist
I asked: “What do the statistics of other countries say about the benefits of vaccination with respect to intellectual disability?” I was surprised to see that this has never been formally studied. I encourage scientists more accomplished than I to investigate, because “doing my own research” turned up something rather intriguing.
I looked up the prevalence of intellectual disability in several countries, and compared that to that country’s rate of coverage for a single dose of measles vaccine, and plotted the results. I only looked at measles, because it keeps the data cleaner than looking at every single kind of vaccination (and I still haven’t gotten any Big Pharma money for all the shilling I do).
You can see that countries with the highest rate of vaccine coverage have the lowest prevalence of intellectual disability. Similarly, the countries with the lowest rates of vaccine coverage have the highest rates of intellectual disability:
In full transparency, while this data was obtained from legitimate, peer-reviewed epidemiological sources, this relationship wasn’t specifically studied in any of them, and as such doesn’t control for confounding factors such as socioeconomics, differences in endemic diseases, or regional variability in the availability of White Monster energy drinks. But in addition to discovering an interesting correlation, this is the kind of half-assed research that fuels the entire anti-vax movement. Turnabout is fair play, and at least I am identifying my own momentary indulgence in flawed methodology.
In closing (finally)
I am going to say the quiet part out loud: If you are a Baby Boomer, a Gen X, or even an elder Millennial, many of the “retarded” kids you went to grade school with weren’t born that way: they caught it from a disease that they weren’t protected from.
They may have been born before a vaccine was available for the particular bug that did it, or they may have had the misfortune of being born to parents who declined to vaccinate their children, but the fact remains that their devastating and irrevocable brain injury is safely and cheaply preventable by today’s standards. Barring a handful of rare medical contraindications, there is no rational reason to decline the insurance vaccination provides against a lifetime of struggle and tragedy.
The reason most parents avoid or delay vaccinations is out of a fear of brain injury. Thanks to grifters like Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, Joseph Mercola, and RFK Jr., parents understandably fret about the neurological affects of vaccines, and the trace amounts of aluminum and mercury that are present in some of them as adjuvants and preservatives respectively. They firmly believe that they are shielding their children from a risk of cognitive impairment, because that’s what they were told on Instagram, Facebook, and a host of privately run anti-scientific websites. These sources are wrong, but they are more accessible and easier to read than scientific journal articles, and the messengers are far more charismatic than the reserved eggheads of science. Unfortunately, truth is not determined by accessibility or charisma, but it is very effectively distorted by it.
The supreme irony is that in seeking to shield their children from intellectual disabilities by avoiding vaccination, concerned parents are making their children FAR more vulnerable to it. Horrors that were once eliminated are now back once more, and people are cheering about it because most know little to nothing about the diseases of yore.
We live in unprecedentedly absurd times. One might go so far as to question if the intellectually disabled were running the show and are acting with determination to grow their ranks.