President Donald Trump is racing ahead of a stalled study of childhood vaccines led by top health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who has failed to deliver the bombshell findings he promised at the start.
Kennedy told the president he could pinpoint what’s driving the rise in autism diagnoses, but more than a year into the job, he hasn’t delivered — and Trump is growing impatient, reported CBS News.
Last August, Trump predicted it would be “such a big day” after Kennedy assured him he had identified factors causing autism “clearly, almost certainly,” but that day still hasn’t come.
Kennedy’s team has since blown past its own deadline for definitive answers, according to CBS News, leaving little to show beyond a research effort outside experts call unusually secretive. Helen Tager-Flusberg, who leads the Coalition of Autism Scientists, said she’s never encountered a project this closed off. “They’re treating it like the Manhattan Project in the 1940s,” she said. “This is as opaque as it could possibly be.”
During a recent Cabinet meeting, Trump directly asked Kennedy, “How are you doing on the autism research?” Kennedy replied only, “We will have an answer for you,” before Trump cut him off: “That is so important.”
Trump himself claimed childhood vaccines were tied to rising autism diagnoses during an Aug. 10 signing ceremony for an executive order scaling back shot recommendations, but Kennedy tried to manage expectations rather than announce a breakthrough, telling the president, “We have just over two years to finish the work, and I know you’re impatient.”
Kennedy’s specific theories haven’t held up. His claim that Tylenol use during pregnancy causes autism was contradicted by a major JAMA study. His suggestion that circumcision could be a factor was undercut by a JAMA Pediatrics study that found no such link, and his citation of a “hidden” CDC study tying the hepatitis B vaccine to a 1,135 percent autism increase misrepresented the actual research, according to the study’s own author.
Compounding the problem, Kennedy has largely excluded the scientific and advocacy communities best positioned to help.
Leading autism researchers and career federal scientists say they haven’t been consulted, and the Autism Society’s Delancy Allred said requests to meet with Kennedy directly have gone unanswered: “No one has gotten to Kennedy.” Instead, the effort has leaned on longtime allies like adviser Stefanie Spear and William “Reyn” Archer III, who has spent months collecting Americans’ medical records in search of a vaccine link.
Even Trump’s own NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, acknowledged on “Face the Nation” that he doesn’t know why autism rates have risen — undercutting the administration’s claims just a day before Trump signed his vaccine order anyway.
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