Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday declared he will have an answer within five months to a question that has dogged medical research for decades:
What has caused the massive increase in autism?
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said during a televised meeting of President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
There’s no question the increase has been staggering.
Between 2000 and 2020 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the autism rate among children has increased from 1 in 150 to 1 in 36.
At Thursday’s cabinet meeting, Kennedy, 71, said the rate now is 1 in 31, compared to “1 in 10,000 when I was a kid.”
“We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world,” he said.
Trump clearly welcomed the prediction.
Do you think RFK Jr. will get to the bottom of this?
“There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this,” he said. “So you think you’re going to have a pretty good idea?” he asked.
“We will know by September,” Kennedy repeated.
“There will be no bigger news conference than that,” Trump said. “If you can come up with that answer where, you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it.”
One explanation for the increase involves changes in how a diagnosis of autism is reached.
Reporting on Kennedy’s prediction, The Associated Press noted that, “For decades, the diagnosis was given only to kids with severe problems communicating or socializing and those with unusual, repetitive behaviors. But around 30 years ago, the term became shorthand for a group of milder, related conditions known as ‘autism spectrum disorders.’ Milder autism cases are far more common than severe ones.”
The “autism spectrum” can even include undeniably successful individuals like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a top adviser to Trump, who has publicly stated he has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.
But its increase has been a topic of concern for decades.
In 1998, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study implicating the combined vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella with autism occurrence. The publication withdrew the report 12 years later.
According to a 2010 ABC News report, the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council found that the chief researcher involved in the study was “guilty of acting unethically during the time he conducted the famous case report of 12 children that questioned if a childhood vaccine caused a new form of autism.”
Kennedy has an established record as an iconoclast.
He is a well-known skeptic of established vaccination procedures, including the COVID-19 vaccine, and is an outspoken, vociferous critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
(In 2021, he published a book titled “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
He has vowed to use his position to study “formerly taboo” questions, including childhood vaccine schedules.
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