Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. renewed calls for the scientific community to examine correlations between rising autism rates and “environmental toxins,” revealing that he plans to announce new studies on the matter within weeks.  

Kennedy held a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C., highlighting the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing 1 out of every 36 children is diagnosed with autism, up from 1 in 31 in 2020 and 2 to 4 per 10,000 in the 1960s.

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He knocked critics who deny there is an autism “epidemic,” saying the data show there is an “unrelenting upward trend.” He warned that boys are particularly affected by autism, facing rates of 1 in 20 nationally. Boys in California face an even higher rate, 1 in 12.5, a data point the HHS secretary argued “probably” reflected national trends, given the state has “the best data collection” in the country. 

Kennedy spent the bulk of the press conference knocking down arguments that genetics, or neurodevelopmental differences, are solely responsible for the rise of autism. Although he agreed there is an abundance of research showing genetics is “linked” to autism, Kennedy said that the role environmental factors play has been long overlooked and suppressed.

Genes “do not cause epidemics,” Kennedy said, but rather “provide a vulnerability in environmental toxins” that can make children more susceptible to the disorder.

The HHS will have “some” of the answers regarding what is driving the surge in autism rates, Kennedy promised, by September, scaling back a pledge he made earlier this month. He hopes that within two or three weeks, federal health agencies will announce a series of new studies to identify precisely 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,” he said. “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.”

Kennedy’s points were reiterated by Dr. Walter Zahorodny, one of the co-authors of the CDC’s new autism study. 

“Autism deserves to be treated as a real public health phenomenon, and I would say is an urgent public health crisis. It’s not just that we’re more astute or perceptive,” he said. “I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether we call it an epidemic tsunami or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors.” 

“We need to address this question seriously because, in my opinion, for the last 20 years, we’ve collected but not made real progress in understanding what causes autism or how to effectively prevent it and treat it,” Zahorodny continued. “We need a correct perception, not a perception that allows us to just provide services without understanding the root causes or the true factors at play.” 

Some autism advocates have slammed Kennedy’s views that autism is preventable, saying it is false to suggest something other than genes could be triggering the disorder.

Kennedy’s approach to autism is “very damaging to autistic people, as it frames their differences as an illness and something that needs to be fixed,” Ciara Bogdanovic, a marriage and family therapist in California, previously told the Washington Examiner.

“Seeking to identify a ‘cause’ of autism ignores decades of previous research that has identified the complexity of the disorder and has shown autism to be a neurodevelopmental difference, not a ‘disease’ with a cure,” she said.

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Kennedy begged to differ on Wednesday, suggesting that looking at a timeline of the rise of autism demonstrated that an unknown external factor triggered the surge. 

“The issue that we know is genes don’t cause epidemics,” he said. “There’s a timeline. Something happened. In fact, Congress ordered the EPA to tell us what year the autism epidemic began. The EPA scientists came back and said it happened in 1989. So you have to find a toxin that became ubiquitous around that time period and that affected every demographic.”