During an Aug. 26 cabinet meeting, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to fulfill his April promise that the causes of autism will be revealed next month.
During a cabinet meeting in April, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to announce the causes of autism by September. Days before the calendar turns to that month, Kennedy reinforced that message.
Kennedy noted in a cabinet meeting on Aug. 26 that an autism study he initiated in April had uncovered “interventions” that are “almost certainly causing” the disorder.
President Donald Trump requested a progress report from Kennedy about autism during the cabinet meeting.
“Autism is such a tremendous horror show—what’s happening in our country and some other countries, but mostly our country,“ Trump said. ”How are you doing on that?”
Kennedy responded, “We are doing very well.”
“We will have announcements as promised in September, 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 continued.
A report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on April 15 showed that 1 in 31 children in America has autism.
The figures, which mark another jump in a long line of increases, stem from the CDC’s latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The report prompted Kennedy to say that “the autism epidemic is running rampant.”
“That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992,” Kennedy said in an April 15 statement.
“Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”
The previous Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring report released in 2023 discovered that 1 in 36 8-year-old American children had autism in 2020. The April 15 survey reflects a 16.1 percent increase in two years.
“The autism epidemic has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young,” Kennedy said in statement on April 15.
“The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago,” Kennedy added.
