The Obama Administration Makes Contact After Last Week's AoA Article

Last week, the Age of Autism ran stories on the upcoming meeting of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, and the vast  complaints from our community on the wasted time, money and lives that have been the result of the incompetence and malfeasance of Tom Insel and the Department of Health and Human Services in their "search of the real killers" in the autism epidemic, Age of Autism announced that members of the autism community would be showing up in DC on Tuesday to make their voices heard. At the time, we were planning on holding our press conference in front of the DHHS building, but changes to the IACC schedule necessitated holding it at the hotel, so that our families could participate in public comment and hear their reaction to our input.

I can finally report that after holding a press conference in New York in April, after a letter to Kathleen Sebelius voicing our demands for an appropriate response to the autism epidemic and the government failures that have only served to compound the problem, and after announcing our plans to come to DC, we were finally contacted by the administration last Friday.

But it was not the Department of Health and Human Services calling to find out how they can serve our children, it was the Department of Homeland Security calling to find out if we were planning on chaining ourselves to the building.  As one of the coordinators of the event, I then carried out the somewhat humiliating task of assuring the men with the guns that parents bringing their severely, neurologically injured children (who can barely tolerate traffic noise) to the DHHS building were not planning a violent protest.

Because apparently the administration is reading the Age of Autism, but rather than tasking DHHS with acting to protect our children, they chose to task DHS to protect DHHS from us.

It is clear that we have been heard, and that the Obama administration has decided that we are to be ignored.