Kennedy first shared the central finding of the biennial surveillance report in a Cabinet meeting last week, during which he vowed to discover the causes of the condition and eliminate “those exposures.”
For years, Kennedy has linked the rising prevalence of autism to vaccines, despite voluminous scientific research that has debunked that claim. In a statement reacting to the report Tuesday, Kennedy said the “autism epidemic is running rampant.”
Responding to Kennedy in the Cabinet meeting, Trump described the 1 in 31 figure, compared with 1 in 36 in the previous report, as a “horrible statistic.” He posited that there’s “something artificial out there that’s doing this.” Kennedy later blamed the rising autism prevalence on “an environmental toxin.”
The CDC report undercuts claims by Kennedy and Trump, instead attributing the recent increase to better screening. The report used 2022 data to examine cohorts of 4-year-old and 8-year-old children in 16 communities. It focused on the prevalence of autism among 8-year-olds, who are more likely to have been diagnosed by that age, using 4-year-old children as a measure of early detection.
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