Another day, another opportunity for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to put his foot in his mouth. In an interview on Sunday, RFK Jr. continued to spread misinformation about autism spectrum disorder, while also taking the chance to insult the memory of covid-19 victims.
On Sunday morning, RFK Jr. was a guest of the WABC 770 AM radio show The Cats Roundtable, hosted by John Catsimatidis. Kennedy once again falsely claimed that autism is an epidemic, adding that its harms dwarfed the “COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people.” It’s only the latest bit of autism-related nonsense spewed by RFK Jr. in recent weeks.
RFK Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been on a whirlwind tour of autism misinformation.
In early April, during a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump, Kennedy stated that he would reveal the “cause” of autism by September. At a press conference last Wednesday, he announced the release of a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that rates of diagnosed autism had slightly increased between 2020 and 2022. In direct contradiction to the CDC report and other studies, Kennedy claimed that autism was a rapidly growing “epidemic” and that his HHS would soon launch studies to identify the “environmental toxin” behind this rise.
At the same conference, he further claimed that children with autism were irrevocably damaged by their condition, stating that they’ll “never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem.” These comments sparked an immediate backlash from members of the autism community and their families, not to mention autism researchers.
It’s true that the rate of diagnosed autism has significantly increased over time. It’s also possible that certain environmental factors, such as people having children at an older age, could be contributing to a genuine increase in autism cases. But experts have generally argued that most of this rise is tied to an increased awareness of autism symptoms as well as broader criteria in how autism is diagnosed. And despite what RFK Jr. has repeatedly insisted over the years, there’s absolutely no strong evidence linking vaccines to autism.
As its formal name indicates, autism is a spectrum, and some children (around 40%, per the CDC’s recent report) do experience intellectual disability, sometimes profoundly so. But many people with autism, including those with disability, are still able to live fulfilling lives, and yes, are even writing poetry.
RFK’s latest diatribe isn’t just demeaning to people with autism, it’s also an insult to people who lost loved ones to covid-19. Covid-19 was the deadliest pandemic seen in over a century, claiming over a million lives in the U.S. alone. And while it’s true that older adults were the most likely to die from it, no demographic was left unscathed.
In the first years of the pandemic, for instance, it was a top five (and at times first) leading cause of death among adults between their 30s and 50s, and it was still the eighth leading cause of death among children and teens. More than 10 million children worldwide are also estimated to have lost a parent or caregiver to the pandemic, including over 140,000 in the U.S.
There’s nothing positive to take away from RFK’s latest ramblings. He doesn’t understand autism, and it’s highly unlikely that his plans to find its “cause”—as if there’s only a single underlying cause behind this complex neurodevelopmental disorder—will yield anything useful.
English (US) ·