Pumpkin-spice lattes and autism

There’s an old aphorism which wise physician professors teach their brand-new med students. Young physicians are dazzled by the most dramatic diagnoses. Does the patient have a fever? Must be malaria! Is the patient tired? Probably bubonic plague!

“Wait,” the professors say. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you must consider that it is most likely a duck.”

Even first year med students can be dense and cling tenaciously to their beliefs. So there’s another aphorism the professors teach to reinforce the same message: “If you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.”

Over the half decade I’ve been practicing medicine and observing people, I’ve seen how using the scientific process that physicians are taught guides them to the correct diagnosis, to the proper (and least harmful) treatment and succeeds in the vast majority of cases to reduce suffering and saves lives.

But I’ve also seen a slowly metastasizing disillusionment with the medical establishment. This has created a smoldering fire when both quacks and well-meaning but ill-informed people promote “alternative treatments.”

The result is that people can get fleeced financially and, sometimes, can actually hurt their health.

“This one weird trick will give you back the body you had at 25.”

“This easy hack will vanquish your arthritis.”

“This pill will prevent Alzheimer’s.”

The combination of the Covid pandemic and an anti-scientific federal administration has poured gasoline onto this smoldering fire.

Case # 1: A 25-year-old man decided to use an untested therapy for his ringworm. He injected mercury by vein. Three months later he ended up in an ER with multiple problems. An X-ray of his chest and abdomen lit up like a Christmas tree. The mercury was scattered throughout his body (New England Journal of Medicine).

Where, or from whom he got the idea to do this was not reported. But it was obviously horrible advice. Mercury poisoning is well documented and is a risk in extracting gold from ore. It was also used in hat making. Brain damage from this toxicity gave rise to the expression “mad as a hatter.”

Case # 2: A young woman, obviously intelligent, graduated from university at age 19. She went on to med school. Then enrolled in law school (by some reports, she said it was a “rebellion” against her father, a public health physician who wanted her to be a doctor).

In 2020, she formed an association called “America’s Frontline Doctors” (AFLDS). This organization promoted false information about Covid during the pandemic. Her messages included the promotion of hydroxychloroquine (in spite of evidence that it didn’t work and was dangerous), and opposing vaccination against Covid.

This misinformation (a nice little euphemism for “lies”) was so egregious and so hazardous to people’s health, that it was removed from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for violating their policies.

The harm done to people who chose to believe such quack opinions has been well documented. Deaths from the disease reached 20,000 a day in the U.S., the highest rate in the world, before widespread availability of vaccine (Reuters 4/11/2020).

By the time of the third wave (beginning in fall of 2020) vaccine acceptance varied greatly between the voters of the two major political parties. The death rates were significantly higher in counties where voting patterns tended toward one of the parties.

The correlation between higher vaccine rates and lower death rates is strong. But the widespread misinformation, even from a few medical people surely played a major role in discouraging vaccination, resulting in excess deaths. (Pew Research has graphs).

Ultimately, the U.S. paid a very steep price for this. We have had 1,219,487 Covid deaths so far. Adjusting to consider the country’s population (this was done for all countries in the world) expresses these deaths as a rate per 100,000 people. The U.S. death rate is 364.2. Only 13 countries have a higher rate. There are 218 countries that have lower death rates.

Now this young doctor is involved in back-and-forth lawsuits from her former partners at AFLDS alleging that she used hundreds of thousands of the organization’s funds for her personal use.

These examples of quack medicine and outright lies about various treatments including vaccines have not only hurt — or killed — thousands of Americans, but are now creating long-lasting damage to people’s faith in modern medicine.

The latest salvo attacking faith in medical science is found on the CDC website in the form of an asterisk. The wording that synopsizes data and information from multiple studies over time and reassures people that vaccines do not cause autism has been undermined.

The Robert F. Kennedy. Jr,-controlled agency has stuck on an asterisk that states that this “is not an evidence-based claim.”

This is not only a lie, it is expressed in doublespeak by using a phrase that scientists use to reassure people. “Evidence based” means that there has been testing, measuring, open and honest criticism of the results and conclusions that the evidence is as accurate as possible.

In the case of autism and vaccines, there have been dozens of rigorous studies that analyzed millions of patients and failed to find a connection between vaccines and autism. (New Yorker 11/30/2025 and CDC).

The quacks (chief among them RFK, Jr.) are now misusing the phrase “evidence-based” to trick people who have had faith in that term.

The very weak and distorted argument they use to counter the science behind this issue is that autism rates have risen in recent decades and so has the number of infant vaccinations. It is accurate that both rates have risen, but for many gullible people, this implies that one has caused the other. A lie is thus promoted by using the language of science.

If we ask ourselves (as medical scientists do and everyone else ought to do), “What else could explain these rising rates?” you’ll find several answers.

Perhaps autism rates are rising because we are now reporting and counting cases that previously were not reported. Perhaps we have changed the diagnostic criteria of autism to include more people than we did previously. Perhaps awareness of autism is increasing.

Just because two rates are rising at the same time does not prove that one causes the other. You could just as easily show that the rate of consumption of pumpkin-spice lattes rose at the same time as autism rates.

Does drinking the lattes cause autism? This is a trap that all scientists know, all physicians ought to know, and that everyone would be better protected if they knew it, too.

This misuse of a scientific phrase to express a lie about public health is an example of doublespeak — a term attributed to George Orwell from his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Doublespeak is defined by Orwell as political language which serves to distort and obscure reality.

For instance, helping the poor financially is called by some as “handouts” or “coddling the poor.” But when using millions of tax dollars to subsidize corporations and give non-competitive government contracts, they don’t use these demeaning words.

This doublespeak is the exact opposite of the scientific process which has brought us so much progress and convenience in modern life.

Doublespeak is currently being used not only to distort accurate public health information and trust in science itself, it is distorting much of the reality around us. Thinking for yourself and questioning official pronouncements will help clear your brain.

That and an occasional pumpkin-spice latte.

Dr. Charles Mosher, M.D., M.P.H., was Mariposa’s county health officer from 1988-2014. Prior to his work at Mariposa County, Mosher served in the Peace Corps, worked for the state of Georgia and served for 11 years with the Merced County Health Department. He can be reached at author@greaterstory.com.