Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged he would uncover what caused the “autism epidemic” by September and release his findings to the public.
During a Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday, Kennedy said the HHS has launched a “massive” research effort involving “hundreds of scientists from around the world” to discover why autism rates have skyrocketed. By September, he said, the task force would know what caused the increases and target the factors driving the rising rates of autism.
“The autism rates have gone from now, most recent numbers, we think are going to be about 1-in-31. … So they’re going up again from one in 10,000 when I was a kid,” he said. “We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that is going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.”
Kennedy’s words come as data show there has been a dramatic rise in autism rates. Studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the United States found two to four cases of autism per 10,000 children. By 2002, the number reached six to seven cases of autism per 1,000 children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s latest data shows that around 1-in-36 children, or 27-per-1,000, have autism.
Trump applauded Kennedy’s efforts during the Cabinet meeting, calling the United States’s rate of autism “a horrible statistic.”
“There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this,” the president told the HHS secretary. “If you can come up with that answer — where you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot, but something’s causing it.”
Kennedy also touched on the Food and Drug Administration’s announcement on Thursday seeking to phase out animal testing and replace it with other methods, including artificial intelligence.
“We’re going to switch over to AI, which we’ve now found is much more precise in identifying the impacts of toxics in various products,” he told Trump and other Cabinet members.
FDA Commissioner Martin Makary touted the transition to AI as “a paradigm shift in drug evaluation [that] holds promise to accelerate cures and meaningful treatments for Americans while reducing animal use.”
“By leveraging AI-based computational modeling, human organ model-based lab testing, and real-world human data, we can get safer treatments to patients faster and more reliably, while also reducing R&D costs and drug prices. It is a win-win for public health and ethics,” he said in a statement.
Kennedy additionally commented during the Cabinet meeting Thursday on the measles outbreak in the U.S. that has taken two lives. While praising the CDC for doing “an amazing job at getting the measles outbreak under control,” Kennedy lamented what he described as an undue focus on measles when chronic disease has taken far more lives.
“We’ve had three measles deaths in this country over 20 years, and we’re trying to refocus the press, to get them to pay attention to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said. “Now, 38% of American youth are pre-diabetic. This was unknown 30 years ago. Every child that becomes diabetic, there should be a headline about them.”
RFK JR. SUGGESTS 20% OF HHS FIRINGS WERE MISTAKES AND WILL BE REINSTATED
Heart disease and cancer, both chronic diseases, are the top two causes of death in the U.S. Nearly half of Americans, or 129 million people, have at least one major chronic disease, including diabetes or obesity, according to a 2024 CDC study.
“Over the past 2 decades, prevalence has increased steadily, and this trend is expected to continue,” the study said of chronic disease rates. “An increasing proportion of people in America are dealing with multiple chronic conditions.”
