Trump Pushes Wild Autism Claims During Cabinet Meeting With RFK Jr.: ‘A Drug or Something’ is ‘Causing This’
President Donald Trump insisted that there was “something artificial” causing autism in response to rising cases of the condition, despite years of studies concluding no links between autism and modern medicine. The topic has been hotly debated in recent decades and became an issue within the MAGA base as the Make America Healthy Again movement gained steam following the Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
During Trump’s cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked more about his crusade to cure autism. More specifically, Kennedy promised to find the cause of the disorder by September. Kennedy, a noted vaccine skeptic who is not a medical doctor, has amplified the long-debunked theory that vaccines are to blame.
After Kennedy revealed to the president how much more frequent reported cases of autism are, Trump wondered if there was an outside source causing it:
TRUMP: It’s such a, a big day. I’m looking forward to that day because there’s something wrong when you see the kind of numbers that you have today versus 20 years ago; and those numbers — what are those numbers, Bobby?
KENNEDY: Well in 1970, the biggest epidemiological study in history was done in Wisconsin. They looked at 900,000 children and they were looking for autism. They knew what it looked like and they were very, very precise about it; and they found an incident rate of 0.7% — in other words, less than 1 for every 10,000 children. Today, our most recent numbers are 1 in every 31 kids. It’s probably actually much worse than that because California, which has the best collection system, is reporting 1 out of every 19 children, American children, has autism. One in every 12.5 boys. So it’s gone from less than 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 12.5 boys.
TRUMP: Think of those numbers. So there has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something. And I know you’re looking very strongly at different things, and I hope you can come out with that as soon as possible. So 1 in 10,000, and now it’s 1 in 31, or 34, or 12 if it’s a boy. Can you imagine that? One in 12. That’s for a boy?
KENNEDY: One in every 12.5 boys.
TRUMP: It’s not even believable that that could be, and that was 1 in 10,000 not so long ago. I’ve been hearing these numbers and they get worse and worse every year. There’s gotta be something.
As noted by the CDC, studies have repeatedly shown there is no link between vaccines and autism. Additionally, the increase in cases is caused by a variety of factors, including “diagnostic practices and access to services in communities.”
Watch above via C-SPAN
