Kelly Martino took her son Luca for his scheduled vaccines when he was 18 months old.
What followed devastated the family.
“The next day, we saw changes,” Martino, a mother-of-four from northwest Ohio, told The Epoch Times.
“As time went on, we kept seeing more and more regression. He went from being a happy child to being aggressive and angry. We couldn’t take him in public. He wasn’t reaching typical milestones,” she said.
When he was 2 years and 8 months old, Luca was diagnosed with autism.
Martino said she is “all about” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. placing focus on researching the cause behind the spike in autism in the United States.
In a Cabinet meeting in April, Kennedy outlined plans to select scientists and fund their research into autism.
“We will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said at the time.
Martino said she hopes the research will bring answers so “we can make children in the future healthier than what many children are today.”
She doesn’t believe that Luca, now 10, will ever live on his own, but recently, he made his own lunch and dressed himself for school, tasks that Martino wondered if he would ever perform.
“This is an epidemic, and it is clearly an epidemic, and it’s happening. And epidemics are not caused by genes. Genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental exposure, and we need to identify what that exposure is. What is doing this to our kids?” Kennedy said on April 28.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that although autism can be diagnosed at any age, it’s described “as a ‘developmental disorder’ because symptoms generally appear in the first two years of life.”
For parents and vaccine safety advocates such as Scott Shoemaker, studying potential links between childhood vaccines and autism is long overdue.
Shoemaker, who is president of Health Freedom Ohio, told The Epoch Times that his son was diagnosed with autism at the age of 15 months.
“My son had an MMR shot,” Shoemaker said. “He was in bed for two weeks when he got home. At the time, I wasn’t concerned because the doctor said before the shot that some kids have problems with it and they might feel sick.”
He believes that most parents of children with autism can say, “My kid’s problems started after a round of vaccines.”
“The only way positive change is going to happen is by showing people the science. I’m looking forward to what happens,” Shoemaker said.
“The bottom line is we want the truth. We want safe products for our kids. We don’t want Big Pharma to just say vaccines are safe and effective.”
The requirement is “a radical departure from past practices,” the spokesperson said via email.
“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” the spokesperson said.
JB Handley, the founder of an equity firm and the co-founder and chairman of Generation Rescue, a nonprofit organization focused on helping children recover from autism, said his son Jamison was diagnosed with autism in 2004, at the age of 16 months. In his book “Underestimated: An Autism Miracle,” one of many he authored on autism, Handley chronicles the journey of his family and Jamison.
The book details Jamison’s emergence at 17 from his self-described “prison of silence.”
“There was a rapid fire of vaccines, from the day of birth, at two months, at four months, and at six months. It was after each of those appointments that Jamie just seemed to get sicker and sicker. We knew something did not make sense,” Handley said.
He said it’s difficult for people to understand profound autism.
“Come spend a week in a profound autism school, and you'll see just how severe it is. Bobby highlighted a marginalized segment of our society, people with profound autism,” he said.
Handley said that he is hopeful about Kennedy’s plans.
“I don’t think there’s any way to get to the finish line without including a wide variety of scientists, and I simply pray that those scientists will be objective,” he said.
“I pray the scientists he finds will be uncorrupted and open to the truth. I accept the possibility that the answer may be more complicated than even the one that I understand.”
In an address on April 16, Kennedy said that autism is an epidemic and criticized those who attribute the jump in cases largely or solely to better screening and diagnostic criteria.
“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children,” he said.
“These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
The remarks drew criticism from some parents, who said that their autistic children are successful and not reflective of what Kennedy described.
Other parents of children with autism defended Kennedy, noting that he was accurately describing how the condition impacts some families.
In a town hall with Dr. Phil McGraw on April 28, Kennedy reiterated that he was bringing attention to the plight of families who have children with “profound autism,” which he said represents around 26.4 percent of people with the condition.
“What that means is non-verbal, non-toilet trained, and all these other stereotypical behaviors like toe walking, stimming, hand flapping, et cetera,” he said.
Kevin Barry, an autism awareness advocate and author, is the father of three children, including a 27-year-old son with profound autism.
“Parents in 2025 know their children are exponentially more at risk of autism,” he said, adding that if there is found to be a connection between vaccines and autism, “the vaccine risk/benefit equation changes.”
Barry said that his son was verbal until he was 1. He is 27 and remains non-verbal.
“There’s always been a tug of war under the autism umbrella where the high-functioning children have little in common with those with profound autism—the children that Kennedy talked about,” Barry said.
Barry said he was motivated to become an autism awareness advocate because of how he was “lied to and gaslit on a large scale” after his son was diagnosed at the age of 2 in 2000.
“When your child hits milestones and then loses skills he had, you know something happened and you want to find out exactly what happened,” he said.
“I think that avoiding the childhood vaccine schedule minefield, or doing it differently, allows parents to have better results with their children compared to parents who follow the vaccine schedule.”
Danielle Lasher, president of Informed Choice Maryland and a former Kennedy campaign volunteer, said her son, who is about to turn 21, started regressing after his two-year shots. Her five other children are neurotypical.
“Autism does destroy families. I’ve seen it happen. Sometimes, it is families with profound autism. Sometimes, it’s families with children like my son,” Lasher said.
“Just because my family is still standing doesn’t mean it’s been easy getting here. I guess I can’t say that it destroyed us. We’re still here, but it hasn’t been a benefit. It hasn’t been this gift that people talk about.”
Lasher said Kennedy’s plans to address autism and study vaccines are desperately needed.
“I think that it’s quite necessary that we rule certain things out and we get a clear picture of what this is,” she said. “I don’t personally think that vaccines are the only potential cause of autism.”
