There’s been a lot on the news lately about the MAHA crowd riding along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vax stance — even as everyone tries to dance around calling it that. And I think it’s really done a disservice to the country. It raises fear. Kennedy isn’t a doctor. He’s not a scientist. He’s a weird guy with weird ideas, and he’s in charge of what our national health approach is going to be on a whole range of things. Now it’s actually happened: the vaccine recommendations are being changed based on theories — conspiracy theories, really.
I understand it reaches people where they’re vulnerable. Their children’s health. It’s very easy to scare people there, and I understand the fear and concern parents have, which is exactly what makes it so easy to exploit. Unfortunately, they’re not using science. So I get the hesitancy. I know someone I went to school with who, on the surface, looks like she might be anti-vax — but she’s not an unreasonable person. Not at all.
I’ll have AI fact-check me after this. But here’s my perspective.
The autism question
There are all these numbers coming out trying to link the rise in autism to the rise in the number of vaccines. When I look at that, I can see a correlation — but from my understanding the studies don’t actually show causation. Still, I can see how it would be a fear. As science advances, they develop more vaccines than they had when I was a kid — the kind that would’ve helped with something like HPV, as an example.
If I look at it through my own logic — and logic coming from my perspective doesn’t necessarily make it logical — it seems unlikely, though I suppose still possible, that the increase in vaccines is the underlying cause of autism. I’ll put that out there.
First, given everything else we consume, vaccines are relatively few and far between. There are probably signs of autism in those kids before they ever start getting vaccinated. And one of the reasons I think autism rates have gone up is that pediatricians and doctors have simply gotten better at spotting the signs earlier.
Here’s the other piece — and I may be wrong on this, so check my logic against the data. Some of it seems to correlate with women entering the workforce. We started putting our kids into childcare earlier. They’re doing more group activities, around other children at a greater rate — probably starting in the ’80s and really picking up through the ’80s and ’90s. That’s the past thirty to thirty-five years, which is right where these correlations tend to show up.
When kids are in that environment with other children, you can compare their development against peers early on. Siblings aren’t a good gauge — my own kids are different ages and just different people, they acted completely differently, so it was hard for us to compare them. But among kids their own age, developmentally, is where you start to notice things. Everybody’s on a slightly different timetable, but it becomes more obvious earlier that something might be different — both because of that peer comparison and because childcare providers are better educated about what to look for now. Same thing with ADHD and all these other developmental and emotional things that it seems like everybody has now. When I was growing up, if you were hyperactive — well, you were just hyperactive.
The suspects nobody wants to name
From my perspective, the more likely source of the increase in these conditions — and the decrease in fertility, and all the other things creeping in — sits in that same timeframe: the forever chemicals, the pesticides, all the stuff that’s become so much more prevalent in our food supply and our water supply.
The things that weren’t as concentrated forty or fifty years ago, we’re now detecting everywhere. And they tend to be in everything. The chemicals used in fracking leak into the groundwater. The chemicals in pesticides, the pollutants, the byproducts of manufacturing — they all find their way into places they shouldn’t be.
Sure, you could blame declining fertility on vaccines, because everybody gets them. But to me that seems like a lazy, oversimplified way of looking at it. What makes more sense is that we’ve pretty much undermined the nutritional value of our food supply and compromised our water — dumping waste everywhere the whole time. That, from where I sit, is a far more likely source of the health problems in the world. Forget even the highly processed foods people eat — we can throw those in there too.
I don’t know whether nutrition affects the earliest stages of development, when a child is forming on a molecular level. But in some ways it’s almost like something got altered in that space. If the quality of both female and male reproductive processes is declining, that points to a much bigger underlying issue than a childhood vaccine. Those vaccines aren’t genetically modifying anybody, and probably not at those doses. What’s far more likely to make a real dent are the hidden chemicals that are everywhere.
People don’t want to look at that. It’s not politically advantageous, because it’s an incredibly complex thing to fix. It’s everywhere — how do you even get rid of it? The chemicals on the food supply are obvious. The stuff we inject into animals in the food supply — who knows.
For the record: I believe in science
Looking at some of the hysteria over vaccines — I believe in science. If a vaccine comes out for a real disease, I’m going to be first in line. Lyme disease alone is so prevalent, such a problem — all of these tick-borne diseases are ridiculous. I’ll be first in line. You want to try it on me? You want to put me in the trial? I’ll do it.
The level of testing that has gone into vaccines throughout history is way more extensive than anything they’ve done on forever chemicals. So I’d be more willing to take a vaccine than to have somebody hand me a glass of water from Flint, Michigan and say, “here you go, drink this.” Is there even a debate there? Drinking contaminated water your entire life, from infancy to adulthood — that’s going to have a far greater impact on you, even developmentally, than a few vaccines here and there.
A baby or a child has a much smaller body mass, sure. But it just doesn’t seem like a handful of vaccines would be able to alter their chemistry or their development that dramatically. We’re pretty resilient. The underlying toxicity in a parent, though — in the people who conceived that child, whatever damage it may have done to the egg or the sperm — that’s much more likely tied to the harmful chemicals we already know are harmful to humans. And some of them they don’t even fully understand, because people were never supposed to be ingesting them in the first place.
That’s my take. AI can fact-check me below. Maybe I’m completely off my rocker and all the anti-vaxxers running on false information are right. But what I perceive as false, I think really is false — I think it’s been proven that the things they’re saying aren’t true. It’s just unfortunate that they’ve got this microphone, reaching vulnerable people who are only trying to make the best decisions they can for their kids. Polio. The guy is nuts with what he says about the efficacy of vaccines, and he clearly doesn’t understand the science behind it — which makes it even more terrifying.
Garbage, Gangsters and Greed
Just by chance, last night we ended up watching a documentary — a local one — based on an investigation that some kids in Middletown, New York did back in the ’90s about illegal dumping and the pollution of an aquifer. Garbage, Gangsters and Greed, I think it was called. Middletown isn’t far from where we live.
This actually falls right into what I’m talking about, in terms of when things started happening. In the ’70s, as I recall, the plastics industry really exploded. Things that used to be made of glass started getting made of plastic. And with that increase in plastic production came an increase in all sorts of other chemicals. That late-’60s-to-’70s stretch is really when things went haywire — people just dumping toxic chemicals all over the place.
Some of it, as in this documentary, was the mafia dumping whatever they wanted, illegally, in any dump near the manufacturing — within a 200-mile radius, according to the film. But I’m assuming this was happening all over the country, wherever there was manufacturing, most likely near densely populated areas. And they weren’t doing it properly.
I’ve got another piece I’ve written about the sheer volume of trash we produce and the number of dumps and landfills all over this country. There was a landfill in practically every town near where we live, and they’re all full now. Was there corruption in those little town governments? Maybe it wasn’t worth it for the mafia to bother with them. But I’m assuming they went wherever they could, I’m assuming there was corruption, and I’m assuming there are toxic chemicals sitting in those dumps. Were they built properly? Probably not. People were saving money. They weren’t worried about the environment when they started building them.
The documentary wasn’t very good on the follow-through. There was no real resolution on what actually happened, and it seemed like nobody really did anything. One of the things they did was just put a cap on it — which, okay, stops water from running through the top, but it doesn’t stop the stuff that’s already down there from leaching into the water. With microplastics, and these toxic forever chemicals, and things that were never supposed to be in the ground anyway — man-made chemicals that don’t break down, or take forever to, kind of like plastic — that’s probably causing more of a problem than anything science developed on purpose. Something that required illegal activity, bribery, and corruption to get rid of is probably going to cause more harm than something that’s been tested on humans. I don’t know. That’s just me.
So in some ways, we’re wasting time looking for the causes of our health problems in the wrong place. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m delusional, but I think there’s a significant chance that most of the health problems affecting humans today are coming from the things we ingest constantly — our food, our water, the air we breathe. We’re already seeing the effects of our lack of concern for the environment. The storms are increasing; the science shows it. People just don’t like to listen to scientists or smart people, because it’s easier to blame them than the criminals. We’d rather blame the scientist than the mafia. Which is nuts, but that’s where we are.
Downstream: the Wallkill River
On top of all that — with the chemicals leaking into the aquifer and the water supply — here’s what happens directly around here. The Wallkill River runs through Middletown and the Town of Wallkill (which is presumably why it’s named that), and it flows north. So all the chemicals dumped illegally in those landfills seep into the water and end up in the Wallkill.
Then farmers pull water from that river to irrigate their crops. Now those crops are either used for animal feed or they’re vegetables and produce that people in the area eat. And if this is happening all over the country, then these toxins and chemicals are making it into the food supply and the water supply one way or another — through the animal feed or directly into the vegetables.
I’d argue that prolonged exposure like that has a far greater effect on the changes we’re seeing — autism, birth defects, lower fertility — than a few vaccines, on top of the air pollution too. That’s why I think focusing on vaccines is a distraction. It’s the same thing I said about the vaccine itself: it’s too easy. The bigger problem is everywhere, and it’s hard to look at. So instead — “oh no, it’s the vaccine.” Let’s blame the thing that’s stopping people from dying, rather than the issues that came from corruption and crime, the ones we don’t want to look at.
And now it all comes wrapped in plastic
Here’s something else that’s changed, and it’s separate from just how much plastic we make. Think about where our food actually lives now. It’s all in plastic. The water’s in plastic. The milk’s in plastic, or a plastic-lined carton. The meat sits on a foam tray under plastic wrap. Almost everything we buy comes in some kind of plastic container or plastic liner. So forget the production of it for a second — every one of those containers is in constant contact with the thing you’re about to eat or drink, and whatever residual chemicals are in that plastic have a way of migrating into the food. It’s the same idea as the rinse agent on the glass: a little bit of something leaching off the surface into what goes in your mouth, meal after meal. And this is before you even get to the processing itself, or the chemicals sprayed on the food while it was growing. Just the packaging and the delivery of it. We’ve wrapped the entire food supply in the stuff.
One more thing, and I’m only half joking
Every night we run the dishwasher, and we throw in that little rinse agent — the stuff that keeps the water from spotting the glasses. Think about what that actually is. It’s a chemical engineered to sheet the water off so everything dries clear instead of streaky, which means it presumably leaves a thin film behind. And here’s the part that really gets me: the glasses. You pull a “clean” glass out of the rack, fill it with water, and drink — and if there’s any of that film left on it, you’re basically rinsing it right back into the water and drinking it straight down. Then you refill the same glass and do it again, all day long. The plates matter too, but the water glass is the most direct version of it — there’s no food in the way, it’s just the film, the water, and you. Every glass, every day, for our entire lives. I have no idea if it matters. But when I’m making my list of things we quietly ingest without ever thinking about it, that rinse aid is right there in the bottom of the glass. Maybe that’s the culprit. Probably not. But I’d bet nobody’s really looking there either.
Claude Fact Check
This piece makes a two-part argument: that vaccines have been wrongly blamed for the rise in autism, infertility, and other modern health problems, and that widespread environmental contamination is the more likely culprit. Here is how each part holds up against the published evidence.
Claim: vaccines don’t cause autism. Correct — and it isn’t close.
The vaccine–autism link is one of the most heavily studied questions in modern medicine, and it fails every large test:
- Hviid et al., 2019 (Annals of Internal Medicine) followed 657,461 Danish children and found the MMR vaccine did not increase autism risk — not overall, and not even among the higher-risk subgroups (such as siblings of autistic children) that vaccine-worried parents care about most.
- Taylor et al., 2014 (Vaccine) pooled data on more than 1.2 million children and found no association between vaccination — including MMR and the mercury preservative thimerosal — and autism.
- A 2025 Danish cohort of roughly 1.2 million children found no link between aluminum-adjuvanted childhood vaccines and autism or 49 other conditions.
- The entire scare traces back to a single 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield (just 12 children) that was retracted for fraud; Wakefield lost his medical license.
The related claim — that signs of autism are usually present before the vaccine schedule ramps up — also holds. Autism has strong genetic and early-developmental roots and is increasingly detectable in infancy.
Claim: much of the “increase” is really better, earlier detection. Largely supported.
Broadened diagnostic criteria (the definition of autism widened over successive editions of the DSM), expanded screening, greater awareness, and “diagnostic substitution” account for a large share of the measured rise in both autism and ADHD. The honest caveat is that most researchers say these factors explain much but not necessarily all of the increase — which leaves room for genuine environmental contributors rather than closing the door on them.
Claim: environmental chemicals are the more likely driver. This is where the science is actively pointing — as association, not yet proof.
This is the heart of the argument, so it deserves the closest look. Condition by condition:
Autism and environmental chemicals — real, published associations. The CHARGE study (Shelton et al., 2014, Environmental Health Perspectives) found that mothers who lived near agricultural pesticide spraying (organophosphates, pyrethroids) during pregnancy had a significantly higher likelihood of a child with autism or developmental delay. A 2023 meta-analysis of maternal pesticide exposure reached similar conclusions for autism and ADHD, and a parallel body of research links prenatal air pollution to autism risk. These are correlation-plus-plausible-mechanism findings, not proof, and they don’t claim chemicals cause most autism — but there is far more serious research pointing at prenatal chemical exposure than there ever was pointing at vaccines.
Declining fertility and sperm counts — the decline is real; chemicals are the leading suspect, not a verdict. Levine et al., 2017 (Human Reproduction Update), a meta-analysis of 185 studies from 1973–2011, found sperm concentration fell 52% and total sperm count 59% among men in Western countries. The authors are explicit that the study “is not designed to provide direct information on the causes,” and they name endocrine-disrupting chemical exposures (prenatal and adult) and lifestyle as the plausible drivers. Separately, PFAS (“forever chemicals”) are associated with reduced sperm quality and lower fertility — one study found roughly 40% lower odds of pregnancy among women with higher PFAS levels. So the trend is documented and alarming, and chemicals are the prime suspect; population-level causation simply isn’t nailed down yet.
The chemicals really are everywhere — flatly true. PFAS are detectable in the blood of 97–99% of Americans (CDC biomonitoring), and they persist in water, soil, rain, and food essentially forever. Pesticide- and fracking-related groundwater contamination is documented in many specific cases.
Vaccines are far better tested than industrial chemicals — true, broadly. Vaccines undergo years of trials plus ongoing safety surveillance. Vast numbers of industrial chemicals entered wide use with comparatively little safety testing — a real and frequently-cited regulatory gap, and the reason reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act keeps coming up.
Claim: plastics really exploded in the 1970s. Correct.
Global plastic production (Geyer et al., 2017; Our World in Data), in million metric tonnes:
| Year | Production (Mt) |
|---|---|
| 1950 | 2 |
| 1960 | 8 |
| 1970 | 35 |
| 1980 | 60 |
| 1990 | 100 |
| 2000 | 200 |
| 2019 | ~460 |
Output was a rounding error in 1950, roughly 17× higher by 1970, and nearly doubled again across the ’70s. The shift from glass to plastic packaging that took hold in the late ’60s and ’70s is exactly where the curve turns vertical.
Claim: the Middletown dumping story is real. Confirmed.
The student film was Garbage, Gangsters and Greed (1996), made by Middletown High School television-journalism students under teacher Fred Isseks, beginning around 1991. The recent documentary about them is Middletown / Teenage Wasteland (2025, directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine). The students documented buried 55-gallon drums, industrial solvents, paint sludge, and medical waste, and soil tests showing dangerous levels of ammonia, arsenic, and toluene. Then-Congressman Maurice Hinchey pursued the case, and investigations confirmed illegal dumping with organized-crime ties to the private waste industry; President Clinton praised the students’ work in 1993. The film’s “200-mile radius” describes the geographic scope of the hauling operations — there is no published roster of a specific number of named towns.
Claim: the contamination runs into the Wallkill and downstream toward the farms. Confirmed.
The main site — the county-owned Orange County Landfill in the Town of Wallkill — sits directly on top of the county’s largest aquifer, wedged between the old Wallkill River channel and the Cheechunk Canal (an early-1800s drainage cut that turned the region into farmland). Investigators documented leachate laced with ammonia and manganese seeping out of the banks, with the landfill mass itself slowly sloughing toward the canal. The identified contamination path runs “from the black dirt farms of Pine Island all the way to Wallkill and New Paltz, then Kingston and the Hudson” — which is to say, right past Gardiner, and along exactly the water-and-food route the piece describes above. So the downstream argument isn’t a stretch; it’s the documented geography.
The dump and contamination sites that are actually nearby
New York’s environmental-remediation registry (NYSDEC) lists the closed landfills and contaminated sites near Gardiner. The nearest is in Gardiner itself; the rest cluster through southern Ulster County and northern Orange County. Site classes: 02 = a significant threat requiring action; 03 = does not currently pose a significant threat; 04 = closed/remediated but requiring ongoing management.
Ulster County (closest to home):
| Site | Town | Class | Contaminants |
|---|---|---|---|
| VirTis Co. | Gardiner | pre-listing | 1,2-dichloroethane |
| Rosendale Cleaners | Rosendale | 02 | cis-1,2-dichloroethene |
| Mohonk Road Industrial Plant | Marbletown | 04 | vinyl chloride, others |
| Mead Property | Lloyd (Highland) | 04 | PCBs |
| Former Panasonic Display | Highland | active | solvents |
Orange County (the Middletown dumping cluster, ~20–25 miles southwest):
| Site | Town | Class | Contaminants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Middletown Dump | Middletown | 03 | waste solvents |
| Wallkill Town Landfill | Wallkill | 04 | waste solvents |
| Old Al Turi Landfill | Goshen | 04 | benzene, 1,1-dichloroethene, barium |
| Fulton Street MGP | Middletown | active | coal tar, BTEX, naphthalene |
| Revere Smelting & Refining | Middletown | 02 | lead, arsenic |
| Mayer Landfill | Blooming Grove | 04 | acetone, lead, zinc |
| DuPont-Stauffer Landfill | Newburgh | 04 | PCBs, lead, incinerator ash |
There are more in the full registry — this is the near-Gardiner subset. Note that the Al Turi Landfill in Goshen, though listed as closed, was cited again by the DEC as recently as 2025 for leachate and landfill-gas problems.
Claim: a landfill cap doesn’t fix the underlying problem. Correct.
A cap is a cover — soil, clay, or a synthetic liner — laid over contaminated material. It does keep rain and snowmelt from soaking down through the waste, controls landfill gas, stops wind-blown dust, and blocks direct human and animal contact. It does not remove or destroy anything: whatever has already dissolved into the groundwater below keeps migrating, and the cap needs monitoring wells and permanent maintenance. Capping is containment, not a cure — which is precisely why the “they just put a cap on it” outcome is not much of an outcome.
Claim: our food and water now live in plastic, and chemicals migrate out of it. Well documented.
This is one of the better-supported worries in the whole piece. Chemicals genuinely leach out of plastic packaging into the food and drink it holds — a 2024 review in Environment International catalogued endocrine- and metabolism-disrupting chemicals migrating out of plastic food-contact materials, and the usual suspects, bisphenols (like BPA) and phthalates, are both common in packaging and known endocrine disruptors. It isn’t only dissolved chemicals, either: microplastics themselves have now been found in human blood (2022) and in every human placenta tested in a 2024 study. Whether all of this adds up to specific diseases is still being worked out, but the exposure route described here — packaging to food to you — is real and measurable, and the fact that nearly everything we eat and drink now passes through plastic makes it a genuine, under-examined source rather than a fringe worry.
Claim: maybe it’s the dishwasher rinse aid. Half a joke — but there’s actually a study.
This one lands closer to a real finding than the sarcasm lets on. A 2022 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (Ogulur et al., Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research) found that rinse-aid residue left on dishes — specifically the alcohol-ethoxylate surfactants — damaged the gut epithelial barrier in laboratory models (human intestinal organoids and a “gut-on-a-chip”). The damage showed up mainly with the residue left by fast commercial dishwashers that skip a proper rinse; a normal home cycle that rinses well leaves far less behind. And the drinking-glass instinct is right: a glass you refill with water is about the most direct way to ingest whatever film is left, since the residue simply redissolves into the water you drink. The caveats matter: this is a cell-and-tissue result, not proof that rinse aid causes disease in people, and a weakened gut barrier is a plausible pathway to inflammatory and allergic conditions rather than a demonstrated cause of them. So — not established, but not crazy either. Someone is, in fact, looking there.
Bottom line
The central argument holds up. Vaccines have been genuinely cleared as a cause of autism and the rest, while the environmental-contamination case is real, actively researched, and — for autism and fertility — supported by a growing body of published associations. The one line worth holding is the distinction between “associated with / leading suspect” and “proven cause.” Science is, in fact, chasing the things this piece points at; it just hasn’t closed that case the way it has closed the book on vaccines.
Sources: Hviid et al., 2019 (Annals of Internal Medicine); Shelton et al., 2014, CHARGE study (Environmental Health Perspectives); Levine et al., 2017 (Human Reproduction Update); Our World in Data — plastics; Migration of endocrine-disrupting chemicals from plastic food packaging (Environment International, 2024); Ogulur et al., 2022 (J Allergy Clin Immunol) — rinse aids & the gut barrier; NYSDEC Environmental Remediation Sites; Garbage, Gangsters and Greed; Middletown / Teenage Wasteland (2025).
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