The nation’s top health agency will undertake a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday.
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine critic who has pushed a discredited theory that routine childhood shots cause the developmental disability, said the effort will be completed by September and involve hundreds of scientists. He shared the plans with President Donald Trump during a televised Cabinet meeting.
Trump suggested that vaccines could be to blame for autism rates, although decades of research have concluded there is no link between the two.
“There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this,” Trump told Kennedy. “If you can come up with that answer, where you stop taking something, eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it.”
Autism is a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain. It presents with a wide range of symptoms that can include delays in language, learning, and social or emotional skills.
There’s scientific consensus that childhood vaccines don’t cause autism. Leading autism advocacy groups, including Autism Speaks, agree.
Research, including studies of twins, shows genes play a large role. No single environmental factor has been deemed a culprit. The National Institutes of Health, which already spends more than $300 million yearly researching autism, lists some possible risk factors such as prenatal exposure to pesticides or air pollution, extreme prematurity or low birth weight, certain maternal health problems or parents conceiving at an older age.
Kennedy has offered no details on how his study will be different or what researchers will be involved. Leading autism organizations, such as the Autism Society of America, have not been included in discussions about the research, said ASA spokeswoman Kristyn Roth.
Roth said many agree that more research is needed to determine what causes autism, but Kennedy’s approach has raised alarms.
“There is a deep concern that we are going backward and evaluating debunked theories,” Roth said.
Trump and Kennedy have both expressed concerns about rising autism diagnoses rates.
Some of that increase is due to increased awareness and a change in how the disability is diagnosed. For decades, the diagnosis was given only to kids with severe problems communicating or socializing and those with unusual, repetitive behaviors. But around 30 years ago, the term became shorthand for a group of milder, related conditions known as “autism spectrum disorders.” Milder autism cases are far more common than severe ones.
With improved screening and autism services, diagnosis is increasingly happening at younger ages, too. And there’s been more awareness and advocacy for Black and Hispanic families, leading to an increase in autism diagnosed among those groups.
Still, anti-vaccine advocates, including Kennedy, have claimed that vaccines are to blame. The theory largely stems from a 1998 paper that was later retracted.
Scientists have since ruled out a link between vaccines and autism, finding no evidence of increased rates of autism among those who are vaccinated compared to those who are not.
Nevertheless, vaccination rates have declined in many communities, helping enable the spread of diseases like measles and polio, which had been virtually eliminated in the United States. A growing measles outbreak in West Texas this year has killed two children, both of whom were unvaccinated.
In an interview with CBS News this week, Kennedy offered his strongest endorsement yet for getting vaccinated, saying, “We encourage people to get the measles vaccine.”
“The federal government’s position, my position, is that people should get the measles vaccine,” he told CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook.
Yet Kennedy also continued to raise doubts, claiming that “right now, we don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested” — even though vaccines do in fact undergo extensive safety testing.
Kennedy has hired David Geier, a man who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the autism research effort. The hiring of Geier, who the state of Maryland found was practicing medicine on a child without a doctor’s license, was first reported by The Washington Post.
HHS did not immediately response to a request for comment.
