Conspiracy wretch Marjorie Taylor Greene now says children are ‘fading into autism’ for one preposterous reason

A good rule of thumb to bear in mind: Anything Marjorie Taylor Greene claims to be scientific fact is 99.9% sure to be the exact opposite. Case in point, the reprehensible representative from Georgia has gotten herself a new high horse of low morals to clamber onto this week as she’s decided to fall back on that most dangerous of all far-right delusions, one which has become more and more mainstream.

You guessed it — Greene’s tiring Tirade of the Day this Dec. 6 saw her babble about the apparent dangers of vaccines, parroting the deeply offensive and frequently disproven link between vaccines and autism in the process. MTG warned against “dangerous vaccines being pushed on [children] by the government and Big Pharma.”

“Autism rates are off the charts,” MTG alleges in a video interview she posted to X. “It has risen and risen, it’s the most heartbreaking thing. Any parent, or family member, who has just witnessed their child just shut down, close up, and disappear as they fade into autism has been just horrified.”

Apart from anything else, this is disappointing stuff from Greene, as it’s such a hoary old trope of a conspiracy theory for her to share. We’re used to the queen of quackery taking traditional MAGA viewpoints and zhuzhing them up with a little of that evil Marj magic to give them her own insane spin — see her belief that democrats control the weather. This is just second, third, fourth-hand ignorance. Derivative derangement.

The origins of the erroneous link between autism and vaccines appear to derive from an article published in U.K. medical journal The Lancet in the late 1990s. In it, author Andrew Wakefield claimed that data he collected suggested children who had been administered the measles vaccine began displaying signs of autism shortly afterward. Although this was immediately discredited by the medical community at large, the notion was quickly picked up and inflated by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Never mind that The Lancet officially retracted this article in 2005 after it was found to be full of falsehoods, leading Wakefield to be disciplined.

Of course, as is all too apparent, fear and distrust of vaccines have only increased this decade in the wake of COVID, with countless public figures sharing anti-vaxx sentiments to their fanbases online — most recently, Zachary Levi espoused his bonkers belief that a vaccine may have killed fellow actor Gavin Creel. Again, Marjie’s letting us down by simply repeating the same pseudo-science we’ve been hearing for decades. She could’ve at least used her imagination and claimed that, say, vaccines contain nano-bots that will transform your kids into liberal LGBTQ cyborgs.

This tweet isn’t even an isolated case, as MTG seems to have given herself an honorary doctorate of late —she’s certainly sworn a Hypocritic Oath. Her favorite pastime recently has been to peddle all kinds of insidious disinformation about trans people, even parading around in front of the Supreme Court with a sign saying “Trust the Science.” We do, Marj, we do. Just not whatever far-right fiction you’re telling us is science.