National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya promised that answers and solutions regarding the United States’s surge of autism will come “within the next year,” marking a later date than the September deadline Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously announced.
On April 10, Kennedy revealed federal health agencies are launching “a massive testing and research effort” that would allow the public to know “what has caused the autism epidemic … and be able to eliminate those exposures” by September. His pledge came after the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed one out of every 36 children now faces autism diagnoses, up from one in 31 in 2020 and two to four per 10,000 in the 1960s.
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However, Bhattacharya extended that timeline in an update this week, saying that a “major conference with updates” on autism will come “within the next year,” according to CBS News.
There is no miscommunication with Kennedy about the timeline, Bhattacharya said. The HHS secretary is merely “enthusiastic to get the scientific process going.”
“He’s accurately communicating that we want to get moving on this as rapidly as we can,” the NIH director added.
Bhattacharya hopes to “cut the red tape without cutting the rigor” and accelerate the NIH grant proposal process, which will form the cornerstone of the key study Kennedy is planning to release on autism. Launching the new research grants spearheading the study will happen “hopefully by the end of the summer,” he said.
The NIH director said his goal is to start getting preliminary results from the “very rapid study by NIH’s normal standards” within a year.
“We’ll see. It’s hard to predict how long scientists — you know, nature has its say in how long the results take,” Bhattacharya said. “It’s hard to guarantee when science will make an advance. It depends on, you know, nature has its say.”
During a press conference alongside Kennedy on Tuesday, Bhattacharya revealed he was trying to eliminate a culture of censorship at the NIH, where he suggested scientists felt uncomfortable scrutinizing the surge in autism because it was “taboo.”
“So many parents across the country worried about their kids, and yet scientific progress on this has been slow because scientists are frankly scared to ask the question,” he said. “The goal of my leadership — the NIH is going to make it so that those questions are no longer taboo among scientists. Scientists need to work on the things that actually are at the top of the minds of the American people.”
The NIH study will seek to identify what external environmental factors could be helping to drive rising autism rates. Those studies will include scrutiny of food additives, air, water, and mold, as well as factors in mothers that could help trigger the disorder, such as their age and whether they were obese or had diabetes.
“We’re going to follow the science no matter what it says,” Kennedy said during an April 16 press conference where he said the HHS would have “some” of the answers about the rise of autism, scaling back his previous pledge. “It’s going to be an evolving process. … We’re going to issue grants the way that it’s always been done to university researchers and others.”
He added, “We’re going to remove the taboo that 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, they’re going to be defunded, delicensed and we’re going to give them permission to do this research and then we’re going to open it up to the research community.”