RFK Jr.'s focus on autism draws the ire of researchers

The prevalence of autism diagnoses has been steadily increasing over recent years. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention backing up this trend has led Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to publicly insist autism is a "preventable disease" and an "epidemic" that should alarm Americans. However, his rhetoric is in direct opposition to the stance of many researchers and the lived experiences of autism advocates who are condemning his position.

Autism rates continue to rise

The latest report on autism from the CDC found that autism rates in 8-year-olds rose from 1 in 36 in 2020 to 1 in 31 in 2022, continuing a long-term uptick in diagnoses of the condition. That rate is nearly five times higher than in 2000, when the agency first began collecting data on the disorder.

The new data was collected by the CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which used the health and education records of more than 274,000 children at 16 sites across the country. The health agency attributed some of the increase in autism's prevalence to better awareness and screening for the condition, "not necessarily because autism itself was becoming more common," said The New York Times. Researchers have also identified other potential factors, including increased access to health services, later-in-life parenthood and broader definitions of the disorder.

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At a news conference shortly after the release of the CDC's new report, Kennedy responded to the latest findings with a litany of comments that have drawn the ire of autism researchers and advocates. Blaming the rise of diagnoses on possible environmental risk factors, he said the media and the public were succumbing to a "myth of epidemic denial" when it came to autism. Research that focuses on possible genetic factors for autism is a "dead end," he said. "Genes don't cause epidemics," he added. "You need an environmental toxin."

Kennedy also promised that under his leadership, the National Institutes of Health would oversee a study into substances like mold, food additives and parental obesity as potential sources of the rising autism rates. Autism "destroys families," and many children with the condition "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 on a date," he said.

For the comprehensive study on autism, the NIH will compile a trove of private medical records, according to an announcement from the NIH. The data will be sourced from federal agencies, pharmacy chains, fitness trackers and private insurers.

'They deserve better than being a rhetorical prop'

The "inescapable conclusion" of Kennedy's recent assertions about autism is that, under his leadership, the HHS is in the "grip of a pseudoscience revolution in which misinformation and disinformation are ascendant," said the Los Angeles Times. His public commentary raises questions about "whether he understands autism at all or is just using it as a stalking horse" to promote his belief that environmental toxins are the "root of chronic diseases."

Kennedy's rhetoric sets the discussion back to a time fraught with stigma — a stigma the autism community has fought to change, Zoe Gross, the director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said to CNN. Kennedy's statement "set up this litmus test of what it is to be a person and have a valuable life," said Gross, who is autistic. It is no longer acceptable to "talk that way because of the work we've done." Even if many people with autism can do the things Kennedy claims they cannot, those who do need additional support still deserve respect. If someone cannot do things because of their disability, it "doesn't mean they can't have a good life," Gross added. "They deserve better than being a rhetorical prop."

Kennedy's pronouncements "reflect an age-old perception of autism as an aberration, and many autistic people as 'ineducable' and beyond help," said The Guardian columnist John Harris, whose son is autistic. That idea "surely blurs into populists' loathing of modern ideas about human difference," he added. "Once you have declared war on diversity, an attack on the idea of neurodiversity will not be far away." Kennedy's claims about autism "chimes with one of the new right's most pernicious elements," which is the "constant insistence that everything is actually much simpler than it looks."