In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
Even though HHS is cutting autism research, he claims he will identify the causes of autism next month.
Remarks: Donald Trump Leads a Cabinet Meeting at the White House - August 26, 2025
TRUMP: I don't want to go too long because we have a lot of people. But the autism is such a tremendous horror show, what's happening in our country and some other countries, but mostly our country. How are you doing on that?
KENNEDY: We are doing very well. We will have announcements, as promised, in September. We're finding interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism and we're going to be able to address those in September.
TRUMP: It's such a big day. I'm looking forward to that day because there's something wrong when you see the kind of numbers that you have today versus 20 years ago. And those numbers, what are those numbers, Bobby?
KENNEDY: Well, in 1970, the biggest epidemiological study in history was done in Wisconsin. They looked at 900,000 children and they were looking for autism. They knew what it looked like and they were very, very precise about it. And they found an incident rate of 0.7. In other words, less than one per every 10,000 children.
Today, our most recent numbers are one in every 31 kids. It's probably actually much worse than that because California, which has the best collection system, is reporting 1 out of every 19 children, American children, has autism, one in every 12.5 boys. So it's gone from less than 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 12.5 boys.
TRUMP: Look at those numbers, so there has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something. And I know you're looking very strongly at different things and I hope you can come out with that as soon as possible.
KENNEDY: we will.
TRUMP: So 1 in 10,000 and now it's 1 in 31 or 34, or 12, if it's a boy. Can you imagine that, 1 in 12? That's for a boy.
KENNEDY: One every 12.5 boys.
TRUMP: It's not even believable that that could be, and that was 1 in 10,000, not so long ago. I've been hearing these numbers and they get worse and worse every year. There's got to be something -- I think there's nothing including favored nations and everything else, there's nothing that can be -- if you can find out the reason that that's happening, and I know we're going to do some things.
TRUMP: I think it's --
KENNEDY: We're going to have some answers for you.
TRUMP: I think we -- I think we maybe know the reason and I look forward to that press conference, to be with you in that press conference. That's going to be a great thing. Thank you, Bobby. You're doing a great job.
