Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unleashed a bizarre take on autism during a press conference Wednesday, describing the neurodevelopmental condition as a “preventable disease” caused by a mysterious environmental toxin.
Addressing rising autism diagnoses, the health secretary claimed many children were “fully functional” before they “regressed, because of some environmental exposure, into autism when they’re two years old.”
This contradicts the latest study on autism from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of his own agencies, which said the uptick “might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices.”
The CDC survey found autism prevalence in the U.S. increased from 1 in 36 children in 2020 to 1 in 31 in 2022. The figure was 1 in 44 in 2018.
Kennedy presented the survey as evidence that “the epidemic is real,” and called rising autism diagnoses “catastrophic” for the country, rattling off a dehumanizing vision of what life on the autism spectrum disorder entails.
“These are kids of who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,” he said, adding that autism “destroys families.
“More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are children,” he added.
According to the UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, around 80% autism cases can be linked to inherited genetic mutations. But Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, on Wednesday claimed, “Genes do not cause epidemics.”
“This is coming from an environmental toxin. Somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” he alleged, promising to announce a series of studies in the next two to three weeks to identify “precisely what the environmental toxins are.”
Kennedy has a history of falsely linking vaccines to autism. The Washington Post in January uncovered at least 36 instances of him making such claims. President Donald Trump has appeared to endorse his rhetoric, suggesting at a Cabinet meeting last week, “Maybe it’s a shot.”
The 71-year-old Kennedy scion, who last week claimed “the Deep State is real” in a speech to employees at the Food and Drug Administration, also railed against the mainstream media for engaging in what he called an “ideology of epidemic denial” around autism.
Christopher Banks, the president and CEO of the Autism Society of America told USA Today, “Claiming that autism is ‘preventable’ is not science-based, and places unnecessary blame on people, parents and families.”
“It is not an epidemic, nor should it be compared to the COVID-19 pandemic, and using language like that perpetuates falsehoods, stigma and stereotypes,” he added.
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