RFK Jr. says U.S. will know cause of autism epidemic by September

I do wonder how RFk will even recognize a cause for autism, if indeed scientists do find a cause, because RFK routinely ignores science that is legit.

Who was the HHS head under Biden?

Xavier Becerra. A lawyer. Not a doctor.

Did you challenge his qualifications?

In other words, you cannot answer

Libs would lose their heads. Haha, I love it.

Oh yes, I can answer. Why go down this rabbit hole.

No I did not, but he was not declared crazy by the New York Post either. He deferred to the science experts when it came to major funding decisions, instead of neutering them. The difference is, RFK is masquerading as knowing something that all the scientists do not.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in-firefighters-and-super-gonorrhea-rfk-jr-s-cuts-halt-data-collection-00284828

RFK did say a while back that we should take a 10 year break in infectious disease research. I am sure that will end well.

nature.com

Vaccine sceptic RFK Jr is now a powerful force in US science: what will he do?

Kennedy has expressed support for some fields, but has also declared he’d like a ‘break’ in infectious-disease research.

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fortune.com

As RFK Jr. defends cuts to public health, experts warn of devastating effects that could haunt Americans for decades

Carolyn Barber

There is one area to which experts say Trump’s administration unquestionably has already done real damage: public health.

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"Robert F. Kennedy, though, has already noted that 20% of the 10,000 dismissals were made erroneously. “Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut. We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan,” Kennedy said."

npr.org

On top of layoffs, HHS ordered to cut 35% of spending on contracts

Federal health agencies have to slash their spending on contracts by more than a third, on top of the 10,000-person staffing cuts which started this week.

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forbes.com

RFK Jr. Expected To Lay Off Entire Office Of Infectious Disease And HIV/AIDS Policy

Bruce Y. Lee

Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly laying off the entire Office Of Infectious Disease And HIV/AIDS Policy. Here's the impact.

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It is ironic that RFK is sitting next the person who aims to remake elementary education - something she knows nothing about - with a tool that she also knows nothing about.

do you realize how ridiculous it is to give normal epidemiology a budget buzzcut while funding followup study on a subject where the wakefield study got retracted.

this country is starting to become orwellian. like if we had FDA hiring tobacco scientists to study whether smoking gives cancer, so that an administration who wanted that to not be true, could say that much.

just so people understand the playbook, as with finding 1 gay book in the library so rich people can get a tax cut and defund the libraries (while hiding behind a culture war excuse), the game here is that vaccines are often taxpayer subsidized and/or government required. you imply there is something wrong with the vaccines. you say based on the lame study we will no longer fund broad vaccination. you tell people they can take the thing if they want but no one is legally required to take it anymore.

and then people start dying of diseases that were gone decades ago, smallpox, measles, etc.

you can then try to survive unnecessary plagues by vaccinating yourself and your kids, but herd immunity no longer works, the immunocompromised are exposed, and we rack up dead people.

but you have your choice, and they have their excuse for tax cuts. and we then ignore the connection between, say, a bunch of workers out, the lack of food and goods on shelves, and everyone getting sick or dying of stuff. maybe even blame the lockdowns.

and then the irony will be most of the GOP will vaccinate their own kids, because they aren't stupid, they just don't like government or taxes, and wanted an excuse to get government out of the vaccine business.

just like, until this stupid gay book political nonsense, no sane person had much reason to hate a library.

example, you strain studies to try and say flouride costs your kid an IQ point, you then ignore the effects of rotten teeth, cavities, infections, etc. apparently weighing competing risks is not scientific.

and meanwhile government starts backing out of the water purifying business and gives someone a tax cut. and you can just deal with what comes out of the tap. or buy water from the market. what are you, a socialist, wanting cheap, clean water?

Antivaxxers: all studies are confounded and flawed, so we simply must ignore every result that shows vaccines are safe and effective (such as the Danish study showing no link to autism).

Antivaxxers: this n=29 study from an Iranian university that doesn’t actually exist PROVES vaccines are actually the devil!!!

It is easy to be antivaxx when you live in a Foxhole.

Let's see what RFK actually says.

U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today criticized mainstream media for pushing the narrative that rising autism rates are just a result of better diagnosis.
“One of the things that I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that autism diagnosis, that the autism prevalence increases, are simply artifacts of better diagnosis, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria,” Kennedy said at his first press conference since taking office.
HHS called the press conference to share results of the latest study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on autism prevalence, published yesterday.
An estimated 1 in 31 (3.22%) 8-year-old children had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis in 2022 — up from 1 in 36 (2.8%) in 2020, the CDC said in its latest report from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM), which is published every two years.
Overall, the prevalence of autism in U.S. children rose approximately 17% between 2020 and 2022, continuing a decades-long trend.
The mainstream media responded in lockstep to yesterday’s report by denying that autism is an epidemic and doubling down on the argument that rising rates are simply the outcome of better diagnosis. The Washington Post called the 17% increase “small,” and The Hill labeled it a “slight” increase.
Kennedy responded today, saying the rate increases “are real,” and that each year there has been “a steady, relentless increase.” Kennedy said that while some people may be genetically predisposed to autism, it takes an environmental exposure to trigger the condition.
He added:
“This epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media, and it’s based on an industry canard. Obviously, there are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures.”
Kennedy shared data from other previous studies on autism prevalence, including a 1987 study from North Dakota, in which researchers attempted to identify every child with autism in the state. In 1987, 330 out of every 1 million kids were diagnosed with autism. “Today there are 27,777 for every million,” he said.
“If you accept the epidemic denier’s narrative, you have to believe that researchers in North Dakota missed 98.8% of the children with autism,” Kennedy added. “Thousands of profoundly disabled children were somehow invisible to doctors, teachers and parents.”
“Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid,” Kennedy added. “They weren’t missing all these cases.”
Kennedy also underscored that a high and growing percentage of children diagnosed with autism were severe cases. In a press release Tuesday, HHS outlined specific numbers:
“The increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence cannot be solely attributed to the expansion of diagnoses to include higher functioning children. On the contrary, the percentage of ASD cases with higher IQs (> 85) has decreased steadily over the last six ADDM reports to 36.1% in the 2022 survey. Nearly two-thirds of children with ASD in the latest survey had either severe or borderline intellectual disability (ID).”
“So we know what the historic numbers are and we know what the numbers are today, and it’s time for everybody to stop attributing this to this ideology of epidemic denial,” Kennedy said today.
He called out the National Institutes of Health for spending 10 to 20 times more on research into genetic causes than into environmental ones, and pledged that under his leadership, that will change. He said HHS will make grants available to university scientists and others to research the environmental causes of autism.
“People will know they can research and they can follow the science no matter what it says, without any kind of fear that they’re going to be censored, that they’re going to be gaslighted, that they’re going to be silenced, or that they’re going to be delicensed.”
“This is a preventable disease,” Kennedy said. “We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics.”

Since RFK Jr's medical condition makes it hard to listen to him for 30 minutes, I used NoteGPT to create a transcript of RFK Jr's recent speech on autism. Then, I asked it to create a summary. Here it is. Some key points were...

1) The rise in autism is not due to changes in diagnosis criteria or increased reporting.

2) The rise in autism is not genetic.

3) The rise is speculated to relate to environmental toxins rather than being strictly genetic or a result of increased awareness.

4) There’s a call to action for further scientific investigations into environmental causes, with plans for new studies to identify potential toxins linked to autism.