During a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that the United States would know by September the cause of what he is calling an “autism epidemic.” Kennedy is well known for sharing misinformation, including the claims that there is a direct link between autism and vaccines, but that has repeatedly been discredited by in-depth scientific research. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 36 children has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
Kennedy Spreads Misinformation
Kennedy recently said, “The autism rates have gone from—our most recent numbers we think are going to be about 1 in 31, so they are going up again, from 1 in 10,000 when I was a kid.” However, Kennedy, 73, was born in 1952, way before autism was diagnosed, and testing for it was very limited.
Expert Chimes In
The clinical director at Seaver Autism Center for Research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dr. Alex Kolevzon, believes that the increases that have been recorded recently are caused partly by ‘new iterations of the diagnostic manual,” with diagnostic criteria “steadily broadening.”
“We are also diagnosing autism at younger ages due to effective screening based on recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics,” Kolevzon said. “Finally, there have been major changes in laws and cultural attitudes that have made educational accommodations and behavioral therapies more readily available to affected children, thereby driving diagnostic patterns.”
Group Says There Is No Epidemic
The non-profit, Autism Speaks, responded to Kennedy’s claims by stating, “The increase in ASD diagnoses among young adults suggests that people may be going undiagnosed in childhood, only receiving a diagnosis in early adulthood when challenges in daily life become too difficult to manage.”
An Autism Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) recently told Newsweek that, “there is no autism epidemic.” “We have come a long way in our understanding of autism, and a better understanding has led to higher rates of diagnosis. This is nothing to panic about, and it certainly isn’t proof of an environmental cause of autism,” the spokesperson said.
“At your direction, we are going to know by September. We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we will be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said on Thursday.
Donald Trump Responds
After hearing Kennedy’s comments, Donald Trump responded with “That’s a horrible statistic, isn’t it?” Trump then asked Kennedy, “There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this, so you think you’re gonna have a pretty good idea?”
“We will know by September,” Kennedy assured him. Trump stoked vaccine skepticism by saying that Kennedy’s findings will help inform people to “stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. Something’s causing it.”
“Stoking fears of an epidemic, especially with falsified claims about an association with childhood vaccines, is scientifically unfounded,” Kolevzon said.
Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisors, has spoken openly about being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.
What People Are Saying
“It’s highly likely given the fall-off in vaccination rates, the proliferation of anti-vax disinformation, and the apparent disassembly of a lot of federal public health capacity in the U.S. over the past month, that this outbreak will grow, and that we’ll see similar outbreaks elsewhere in Texas and the U.S.,” said David Fishman a physician and professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of public Health.
