On Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the cause of the ‘autism epidemic’ would be identified by September. He linked the rising autism rates to environmental factors and vowed to eliminate such exposures.
Kennedy has pledged to “Make America Healthy Again” and he’s taking his vow seriously, including getting to the bottom of the drastic rise in autism.
“The autism rates have gone from—our most recent numbers we think are going to be about 1 in 31, so they are going up again, from 1 in 10,000 when I was a kid,” he declared.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 1 in 36 children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous data going back to 2000 shows that it used to be 1 in 150 children. So what has caused the drastic spike over the last 25 years?
🚨RFK Jr. says "we will know by September" the causes of autism.
"There will be no bigger news conference," Trump says. pic.twitter.com/9WDysYeFy2
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 10, 2025
Kennedy continued, “At your direction, we are going to know by September. We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s 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.”
“That’s a horrible statistic, isn’t it?” President Donald Trump responded to Kennedy’s vow. “There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this, so you think you’re gonna have a pretty good idea?”
Kennedy replied, “We will know by September.”
Trump added that what they uncover will inform people to “stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. Something’s causing it.”