Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the appointment of 21 new members to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group seeking to push the “fight against autism,” HHS declared.
“President Trump directed us to bring autism research into the 21st century,” Kennedy said in a statement. “We are doing that by appointing the most qualified experts—leaders with decades of experience studying, researching, and treating autism. These public servants will pursue rigorous science and deliver the answers Americans deserve.”
The members, who consist of practicing doctors, parents and advocates, organization directors, professors, and leaders in the field, will support “breakthrough innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention by bringing the nation’s understanding of and policies concerning autism into alignment with gold-standard science.”
An April report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detailed that 1 in 31 children has autism. The prevalence of autism was 4.8 times higher than when the survey was first conducted in 2002.
Tylenol has also been linked to an increased risk of autism. “Some studies have described that the risk may be most pronounced when acetaminophen is taken chronically throughout pregnancy to childbirth,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary wrote to physicians last year. “These concerns may be magnified by the fact that a very young child’s liver may still be developing and thus a child’s ability to metabolize the drug may be limited.”
Autism may also be linked to vaccines, the CDC said. “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” the agency noted in November, emphasizing that studies supporting this link “have been ignored by health authorities.”
