Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is already falling behind on his promise to get to the bottom of autism by September.
The Health Secretary, a longtime vaccine skeptic, vowed in April to undertake a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism. In a Thursday night interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, however, he sang a different tune.
“To get the most solid information, it will probably take us another six months,” he said.
Kennedy said he does expect new teams of scientists to have some studies completed by September, though “those studies will mainly be replication studies of studies that have already been done.”
“The only way you can get good science is through replication,” he argued. “If you don‘t have replication, you don‘t know whether other scientists are looking at the same data will arrive at the same conclusion… If you don‘t have replication, you have incentives to cheat. And there‘s a lot of cheating that goes on in science.”
During his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Kennedy refused to say that vaccines do not cause autism. Though there is scientific consensus that there is no link between the two, Kennedy cited a flawed paper in arguing that “there are other studies out there” supporting his debunked theory.
“I expect we will know the answers of the etiology of autism,” he told CNN of his new effort. “We‘re going to begin to have a lot of information by September. We‘re not going to stop the studies in September. We‘re going to be definitive. And the more definitive you are, the more it drives public policy.”
Earlier on Thursday, President Donald Trump echoed Kennedy’s dubious claims with his own bonkers statement about autism.
“When you hear 10,000, it was 1 in 10,000, and now it’s 1 in 31 for autism, I think that’s just a terrible thing,” Trump told reporters. “It has to be something on the outside, has to be artificially induced, has to be.”]
Medical experts have said, however, that the change can largely be attributed to improved autism screenings.
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