Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls autism an 'epidemic' and a tragedy. As an autistic journalist, I have some comments.
On Wednesday, Kennedy took to the stage of the Hubert Humphrey Building, which houses the Department of Health and Human Services, to talk about the Centers for Disease Control's latest numbers on children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
I made sure to get there as early as I could. As an autistic person and journalist who wrote a whole book entitled We're Not Broken, which sought to move discussion about autism beyond talking about vaccines and focusing on helping them live better lives, I wanted to be right in Kennedy's sights.
Kennedy, who has spent years promoting the widely-debunked lie that vaccines cause autism, began by complaining that he would speak on reporting of data about children with autism that began in 2022.
"These studies are two years later than they should be," he said. "I have to wait two years to react."
That likely frustrates Kennedy, whom President Donald Trump has tasked with finding out what is causing the "autism epidemic," by September.
But Kennedy took it a step further by comparing what he has called the "autism epidemic" to a measles epidemic and diabetes, even though autism does not kill people the way measles or diabetes can.
Kennedy proceeded to scaremonger about the increase in autism rates, which jumped from 1 in 36 in the last CDC report to 1 in 31 this year.
"There is an extreme risk for boys," he said, saying that the risk for boys to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one in 20.
Though, if Kennedy had bothered to "do his own research," as many in the anti-vaccine movement say, he'd know that this is not a problem unique to boys and if anything, girls and people assigned female at birth, are heavily underdiagnosed. So it is likely not an "extreme risk" for boys but a relative undercounting for girls.
Kennedy not only risks getting the facts wrong on gender. The day before, he talked about the fact that more Black, Asian-American and Pacific Islander and Hispanic children received an ASD diagnosis than white people or people in higher socioeconomic status.
But he did not seem to have taken in why this appears to be the case.
Read more here.
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