America’s Relapse into the Middle Ages - How the White House Turns Autism into a Stage for Superstition

It is a document that one has to read twice to realize that it is not a joke. Under the White House letterhead, an “Autism Action Plan” is presented that resembles a medieval indulgence trade more than modern science. Acetaminophen, known in the rest of the world as paracetamol, is suddenly stylized as a danger to the unborn child. Vague phrases about “possible associations” between painkillers during pregnancy and neurological damage are presented as if the connection were already proven. One senses the hand of those forces that turn uncertainty into a weapon - and forge a political dogma out of statistical coincidences.

But it does not stop with this warning. In a mixture of cynicism and political despair, leucovorin, a folic acid derivative known for decades, is suddenly declared the first “recognized therapy” against autism. The logic is grotesque: because there are rare metabolic disorders in which leucovorin can help, it is now supposed to work against autism on a broad scale. That autism is a complex neurobiological spectrum that cannot be reduced to vitamin pills does not matter. What matters is only the headline: “The first drug against autism.” Staging triumphs over reality.

This spectacle is crowned by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who in a speech with the US president behind him declares that 40 to 70 percent of mothers of autistic children believe their children were harmed by vaccines. One has to let this sentence sink in: of all places, the White House elevates subjective beliefs to political truth. Science is replaced by majority belief in a survey, evidence by perceived percentages. President Trump, according to Kennedy, wants to “listen” to these mothers instead of “gaslighting them like previous administrations.” A quote that shows how far the administration is willing to go: the state is no longer to protect, it is to affirm - even if by doing so it legitimizes dangerous myths.

Here, in this absurd triad of painkiller hysteria, vitamin miracle cure, and vaccine conspiracy, the true face of this policy emerges. It is the relapse into a time when witches were blamed for crop failures, when healing was promise and not research, when fear and superstition took the place of enlightenment. That this is being carried out in 2025 by the most powerful government in the world is not only a step backward, it is a betrayal of reason.

When a Republican representative like Mary Miller - known for her closeness to the extreme right and notorious for her praise of Hitler as someone who “won the youth” - publicly declares that Trump’s autism plan is “the leadership we prayed for,” it shows how far the US has moved into a theocratic narrative. Politics is no longer understood as a secular task, but as a divine fulfillment. Here one does not pray for justice, but for decrees based on superstition. That a representative with such a past of all people celebrates the alliance with an autism program that ignores scientific foundations makes the absurdity complete: the state acts like a church, and its disciples cheer as if they were holding a mass.

The irresponsibility is breathtaking. Thousands of families with autistic children need support, inclusion, research, therapies based on evidence. What they get is a political fairground where scientifically weak studies are inflated, pseudo-therapies are celebrated, and anti-vaxxers are made the voice of the nation. This ‘action program’ delivers not hope, but uncertainty. Research is replaced by slogans, protection by the dangerous message: belief counts more than evidence.

America is thereby staging itself more and more as a theocracy, the spirit that speaks here is that of the Inquisition. It declares skepticism a sin and superstition a state doctrine. One might think the Enlightenment had never happened.