RFK Jr. Slams Media for Ignoring ‘Tragedy’ of Autism ‘Epidemic’

The mainstream media has ignored the autism “epidemic,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday at his first press conference.

“This epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media,” Kennedy said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest study found that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses had increased from 1 in 36 eight-year-olds to 1 in 31 from 2020 to 2022, according to figures published by the CDC on Tuesday.

“Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid,” Kennedy said. “They weren’t missing all these cases. The epidemic is real.”

The environmental lawyer-turned presidential candidate-turned secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services said he ordered the National Institutes of Health to study environmental factors, exposures, and external factors that could cause autism. By September, we will know the cause of autism, he has said.

“This is an individual tragedy as well,” Kennedy said. “Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are children. These are children who should not be … suffering like this.”

“These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were 2 years old. And 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,” Kennedy said. “Many of them will never use a toilet without assistance. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we can’t put up with it.”

The HHS chief wants to investigate why autism is “only happening to young people.”

“Clearly, there are industries, 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, to say, oh, to normalize, to say, ‘Oh, this whole normal that’s always been here,’ but that’s not good for our country, and it’s not good for the press to not be more inquisitive and not be more skeptical,” Kennedy said.

In two to three weeks, HHS will announce a new series of studies to identify precisely what environmental toxins could be contributing to the surge in autism cases.

“The issue that we know is, genes don’t cause epidemics,” he said. “You need a toxin. And we’re going to look at all the potential culprits. We’re going to look at mold. We’re going to look at food additives. We’re going to look at pesticides. We’re going to look at air and water and medicines. We’re going to take a look at ultrasounds.”