RFK Jr. Claims He’s Going to Study Vaccines, Mold, Food, Pesticides, Medicines, and ‘Everything’ to Solve Cause of Autism

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used a Thursday night Fox News appearance to outline his expansive — and sure to be controversial — autism research initiative that includes scientific studies into potential “causes” like: vaccines, food additives, and environmental toxins as key areas of study.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, Kennedy outlined his approach after President Donald Trump tapped him to lead an investigation into the causes of autism.

“I’m approaching that agnostically,” Kennedy told Hannity. “We’re going to be very transparent in how we design the studies. We’re going to farm the studies out to 15 premier research groups from all over the country.”

Kennedy laid out a sweeping list of areas under review: “We’re going to look at mold. We’re going to look at the age of parents. We’re going to look at food and food additives. We’re going to look at pesticides and toxic exposures. We’re going to look at medicines. We’re going to look at vaccines. We’re going to look at everything.”

Each study, he promised, would be “replicated,” with “transparency” around protocols and data.

“How long do you think it’ll take?” Hannity asked.

Kennedy replied: “I think we’ll have some preliminary answers in six months. But it’ll take us probably a year from then before we can have definitive answers, because a lot of these studies will not go out until the end of the summer.”

Research has supported multiple factors that can contribute to ASD including genetics, prenatal and perinatal factors (meaning factors during pregnancy or very early infancy) like maternal and paternal age, and abnormalities of the brain and nervous system anatomy — but vaccines are not on that list.

There is broad scientific consensus, from numerous peer-reviewed studies, that rejects claims that vaccines cause autism; the one paper that did make that claim included only 12 children, was declared “utterly false” and retracted, and the doctor lost his medical license for deliberately falsifying the data. What studies have shown is a strong genetic basis (“a highly heritable complex genetic disorder“), with siblings of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) “significantly more likely to meet criteria for this disorder than children in the general population,” as well as being “more likely to share some of the characteristic features, usually at a less severe level, of the ASD phenotype.”

Studies thus far have repeatedly been unable to prove a link between ASD and numerous environmental factors that Kennedy purports to study in a few months, including certain foods, alcohol, smoking, illegal drugs, prenatal stresses, and a wide variety of chemical products, solvents, cleaners, plastics, and flame retardants.

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This article has been updated with additional information.