Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised during a cabinet meeting to disclose causes for autism in September.
“The autism is such a tremendous horror show, what’s happening in our country and some other countries, but mostly our country,” President Trump said to Kennedy during the meeting. “How are you doing on that?”
Kennedy responded by saying the investigation is doing “very well,” pledging to share the findings “as promised in September.”
“We’re finding certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly, causing autism. We’re going to be able to address those in September,” he said.
“It’s such a big day. I’m looking forward to that day because there’s something wrong, when you see the kind of numbers that you have today versus 20 years ago,” Trump added.
Kennedy noted that in 1970, the “biggest epidemiological study in history was done in Wisconsin. They looked at 900,000 children, and they were looking for autism. They knew what it looked like, and they were very, very precise about it. They found an incidence rate of 0.7—in other words, less than one for every 10,000 children.”
Today, nearly 1 in 31 children has autism.
“It’s probably actually much worse than that because California, which has the best collection system, is reporting one out of every 19 children—American children—as autistic,” Kennedy said. “One in every 12.5 boys. It’s gone from less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in 12.5 boys.”
“Think of those numbers,” Trump told reporters. “There has to be something artificially causing this. Meaning, a drug, or something, and I know you’re looking very strongly at different things.”
