U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said today during a Trump administration Cabinet meeting that his agency is on track to announce the findings of an ongoing study on the causes of autism next month.
“We’re finding interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism, and we’re going to be able to address those in September,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy noted that in 1978, fewer than 1 in every 10,000 children had autism. Today, the numbers are about 1 in 31 nationally, he said.
President Donald Trump responded that “there has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something.”
Trump said that if Kennedy could get to the roots of the problem, the administration would be able to do something to address it. “I look forward to that press conference, he said. “That’s going to be a great thing.”
CDC using health data in ‘massive testing and research effort’ to find causes of autism
In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed it planned to study the possible link between vaccines and autism.
At a Cabinet meeting in April, Kennedy announced that the government had launched a “massive testing and research effort” to determine what causes autism.
He said the effort, which would involve hundreds of scientists globally, would be completed by September. Once the environmental causes of autism are identified, “We’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” he said.
Kennedy said the study, coordinated through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is not focused exclusively on vaccines. It is investigating a wide range of environmental exposures, including vaccines, the food system, water pollution and air contaminants.
He made the announcement days before the CDC announced that 1 in 31 children had autism in 2022 — up from 1 in 36 children in 2020, and 1 in 1,000 children in the 1990s.
Reporting on the announcement, mainstream media framed Kennedy as a longtime vaccine critic who has put forward the “discredited” and “debunked” theory that there is a link between vaccines and autism.
Later in April, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced the agency would use health records of Americans from multiple federal and commercial databases to study the causes of autism.
During a meeting of NIH advisers, Bhattacharya said the NIH’s autism study will combine records from pharmacy chains, lab testing and genomics data from patients treated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and fitness tracking apps and smartwatches.