Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed on Wednesday to definitively identify what’s causing a rise in autism — and said the culprit must be environmental in origin, not genetic.
“Genes do not cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said at a press conference centered on autism rates. “This is coming from an environmental toxin, and somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food. And it’s in their benefit to normalize it.”
His remarks run counter to the current scientific consensus on the causes of autism. Scientists attribute a rise in autism diagnoses to a number of factors, including improved awareness of the disorder, better diagnostic criteria and environmental and genetic factors. They’ve warned that parsing out any single cause from the complex interplay of factors may be difficult.
But Kennedy, who has set a September deadline for determining the causes of autism, said that he wants to move away from the idea that an increase of autism diagnoses “are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria.”
“There are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures,” Kennedy said.
The rate of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses has increased since the 1960s and accelerated in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2000, the CDC estimated that 1 in every 150 children had been diagnosed with ASD. The new study found that one in 31 children have been diagnosed with ASD, which Kennedy called “shocking.”
“Autism destroys families, but more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children,” said Kennedy. “These are kids who, many of them were fully functional and regressed because of some developmental exposure into autism when they’re two years old.”
He said “most cases now are severe.” The CDC has found that around one in four children with an ASD diagnosis have what is categorized as “profound autism.”
“These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children,” said Kennedy.
In the past, Kennedy has proposed that vaccines may be behind the rise in autism, a well-debunked theory that he has sought to publicly distance himself from since becoming HHS secretary, while still hinting at its legitimacy. Scientists believe environmental triggers for autism could include prenatal exposure to air pollution or pesticides, but an NIH website states that “these factors alone are unlikely to cause autism. Rather, they appear to increase a child’s likelihood for developing autism when combined with genetic factors.”
Walter Zahorodny, an associate professor at Rutgers University and co-author of the study, also spoke at the press conference and echoed Kennedy’s belief that the rise in autism is the result of some unknown environmental factor.
“It’s not just that we’re more astute or perceptive,” said Zahorodny. “Whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami or a surge of autism, it’s a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental risk factors.”
Kennedy said that the department would soon embark on a series of studies to identify which environmental factors are responsible for the rise of autism.
“This has not been done before, and we’re going to do it in a thorough and comprehensive way, and we’re going to come back with an answer,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy didn’t elaborate on what environmental elements the new studies would investigate. But in an earlier Fox News interview, he said, “Everything is on the table, our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kinds of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”
When asked by a reporter if he believed that maternal and paternal age could be a factor in the rise of autism, Kennedy said the department would look at a variety of parental factors, including obesity, age and diabetes. He said that “because of AI and because of the digitization of health records and the mass health records that are now available,” HHS would be able to complete the research “much more quickly.” He reaffirmed his deadline, saying “we’re going to have some of the answers by September.”
Wednesday’s press conference was the first held at HHS’s headquarters since Kennedy was confirmed as health secretary. He was introduced by his principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, who also assisted Kennedy with selecting reporters to ask questions after his remarks. Spear, who has reportedly drawn criticism from the White House for restricting access to Kennedy and bottlenecking the department’s communications, called on reporters from Fox News and Epoch Times.
Kennedy said that once the environmental cause of autism was determined, “we’re going to figure out a way to make pressure on [industries] to remove it” from consumer products. But he added that “market pressure” would likely be enough to convince manufacturers to alter course.
“We’re going to follow the science no matter what it says,” said Kennedy. “The epidemic is real. All you have to do is start reading a little science because the answer is very clear.”
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.