Inside an anti-vaccine autism summit in the age of RFK Jr.

SAN DIEGO — The attendees of the second-annual Autism Health Summit had already sat through hours of presentations about treatments that promise miracles to help heal the condition — water filters and electromagnetic gadgets, supplements, stem cell treatments only available in Europe, and fecal transplants here in the U.S.  

Of all the speakers at the conference, the one who got the biggest round of applause wasn’t even in the room.  

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former fixture at this kind of gathering, addressed the audience in a short, prerecorded video — not as the anti-vaccine lawyer and activist as he had so many times before, but as a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, the secretary of Health and Human Services. 

And from that seat of power, Kennedy affirmed he was still their man, praising summit organizers Tracey and Steve Slepcevic as “dear friends” who had “given their lives in service to the autistic and their families.”

“Your issue is no longer on the fringe,” he said, finishing with a promise of a future “where autism is once again, very rare, where families with autism are well supported, where people on the spectrum are valued for the unique gifts they have to offer in our society.” 

These types of gatherings are on the rise. While they may advertise different themes, there’s a shared belief system among them: a rejection of mainstream science, skepticism about the government and loud complaints that the powerful are hiding something from the everyday American.  

With Kennedy now in Washington, and the president himself suggesting there’s merit to those claims, the gatherings are becoming less fringe and more politically relevant. 

The conference room at the Town and Country hotel was already abuzz with Kennedy’s latest bombshell. While rattling off his department’s early endeavors at a televised Cabinet meeting last week — they included getting “bad chemicals” out of food and “good food” into school lunches — he stated plainly that he would, in five months, discover the cause of autism.  

“By September,” he had said to the president, “we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. And we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.” 

“That would be so big,” Trump replied. 

And it would — if it weren’t so unlikely. Kennedy later told Fox News that National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya had only just begun soliciting proposals from scientists around the world, and HHS hasn’t said more about the timeline. Even if they handed out grants immediately, it would give them barely more than a season to solve a puzzle that has preoccupied researchers for over 80 years.  

Since Austrian-American psychiatrist Dr. Leo Kanner first gave it a name in 1943, doctors, scientists, parents, and people with autism have sought answers to the complex set of conditions that vary widely in presentation and severity. About 1 out of 36 children has been identified as having an autism spectrum disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

Research points to genetics as the primary factor, likely in combination with certain environmental and developmental influences that scientists are still researching.  

But the extensively studied and disproven theory that vaccines are to blame for autism has been embraced by parents and groups like those at the summit. The condition generally emerges during childhood, around when routine immunizations are administered. To this group, it’s no coincidence. 

Science isn’t built to prove a universal negative. Every variable cannot be tested in every circumstance across all time. So it is that despite large, peer-reviewed studies in the U.S., Japan, Denmark, and elsewhere showing no causal link between vaccines and autism, it’s never been proven to the satisfaction of the anti-vaccine community.  

The question has also been litigated, and claims have fallen short against the overwhelming evidence presented by doctors and scientists. Still, because there’s always a sliver of possibility — however remote — that something could be true somewhere, somehow, the theory persists. 

Before his autism announcement, Kennedy’s short tenure as HHS secretary had already stirred condemnation among public health experts who said that his anti-vaccine views undermined trust in science.  

Author James Terence Fisher, who has an autistic son, said in an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Kennedy’s rise to power had “re-traumatized” many autism families and warned that the administration could make people like his son “guinea pigs for experiments and treatments based on conspiratorial and money-making theories that have frequently led to abusive and ineffective treatments.”  

It’s happened before, he wrote. Andrew Wakefield, the British former physician whose retracted 1998 study in The Lancet helped launch the modern anti-vaccine movement, used “invasive and demeaning techniques,” Fischer wrote, adding that Wakefield had paid children at his own child’s birthday party for blood samples.  

Kennedy’s faithful bristled when he recently recommended that children in Texas get vaccinated to protect against measles, after an outbreak there sickened hundreds and killed at least two. To them, the guidance was a betrayal of a movement he helped create.  

But with Kennedy’s promise to root out and eliminate by this fall the specific environmental causes of autism — whether in food, water or, as Trump suggested at the Cabinet meeting, “the shots”— Kennedy offered a return to the foundational myth of the modern anti-vaccine movement.  

The crowd at the Autism Health Summit heard him loud and clear, and now they were on their feet. 

The three-day summit didn’t have an option for press coverage on its website, so I paid the $395 for a ticket using my name and work email. I wore my name badge and introduced myself as a journalist, handing out my business card to everyone I spoke with. Photos and videos were permitted, and the event was livestreamed to remote attendees.  

Advertised as a “journey to wellness,” the Autism Health Summit was one of several anti-vaccine-adjacent events to take place in recent weeks. The Summit for Truth & Wellness was held at the end of March in Rochester, New York. Drs. Pierre Kory and Mary Talley Bowden, both known for prescribing Ivermectin for Covid-19 and long Covid despite a lack of evidence, shared a stage with the writer and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf and Mary Holland, president of the Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy once chaired. 

Earlier this month, a hotel in Atlanta hosted Honest Medicine: Redefining Health, a conference organized by the Independent Medical Alliance — formerly the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a group whose doctors prescribe anti-viral medications that go against medical consensus. Some of their doctors have been disciplined by medical boards for spreading misinformation. 

There used to be just one such marquee gathering. AutismOne, held annually by a nonprofit of the same name in a Chicago hotel near the airport, was the flagship convention for self-described Autism Moms and Dads. But with the growth of other anti-vaccine groups that thrived during the pandemic — including Kennedy’s own Children’s Health Defense — and the ease of online organizing, AutismOne’s funding dried up. It quietly dissolved in January.  

Into that void stepped Tracy Slepcevic, an Air Force veteran and author of the book “Warrior Mom” (not to be confused with former anti-vaccine spokeswoman Jenny McCarthy’s “Mother Warriors”). Slepcevic supported Kennedy’s failed run for president in 2024 and registered Autism Health Inc. as a nonprofit last year. She currently coaches other parents on how to “heal” their autistic kids. 

She said she tried hyperbaric oxygen, special diets, stem cell therapy and “everything but the kitchen sink” to “heal” her now-adult son’s autism, which she believes was caused by vaccines.

Slepcevic told the crowd that she spent all the money she had, even short-selling her house to pay for the treatments. 

“If anyone says, ‘I can’t afford it,’ I’m not going to feel sorry for you,” Slepcevic said from the stage. 

After a song performed by movement stalwarts Geoff and Simone Sewell, Slepcevic called up a couple to the stage — her new clients, she explained.

The father told the crowd that after just two weeks of following Slepcevic’s advice restricting dairy and cutting out apple juice, their 6-year-old son had seemed to improve. 

He spoke of how they had been lost and hopeless and sad. They were depressed, just like many in the crowd, he suspected. But now, they were optimistic.  

They were going to do whatever it takes, he said.

They were going to be warrior parents.

Outside the ballroom were the vendors, about 50 tables packed together, all offering the same message: healing was possible — for a price.  

Each table pushed a product or service promising some pathway to wellness. There were water filters — one to detoxify, another to “alkalize”— and a nearly $6,000 electromagnetic gadget that claimed to improve circulation.  

Contraptions emitted infrared light or pulsed electromagnetic fields. Supplement kits promised to flush out mold, heavy metals and microplastics. Vibrating plates were pitched as neurological reset tools. And there were countless devices — necklaces, patches, laptop shields, pet collars and full-body blankets — meant to block 5G, electromagnetic fields and radiation, including the Wi-Fi all around us.

Alongside the gadgets were services, too — nutritionists offering on-the-spot consultations, sessions in a hyperbaric chamber and one vendor advertising something described as a “blood oil change.”