Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced during Thursday’s cabinet meeting that President Donald Trump’s administration will know the cause of the “autism epidemic” in the United States by September.
“At your direction, we are going to know by September. We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world,” Kennedy told Trump during Thursday’s cabinet meeting. “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.”
Following Kennedy’s announcement, Trump said that while one out of every 10,000 children used to be diagnosed with autism, one out of every 31 children is diagnosed with autism today. “That’s a horrible statistic,” the president said. “And there’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this.”
“There will be no bigger news conference than that,” Trump added. “If you can come up with that answer where you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot, but something’s causing it.”
Sharing a video on X, formerly Twitter, from the Trump administration’s cabinet meeting on Thursday, Kennedy thanked the president for “another productive Cabinet meeting.”
“Thanks to your MAHA Commission, we’ll soon identify the root causes of the autism epidemic,” Kennedy tweeted. “Eliminating those harmful exposures will bring us one step closer to fulfilling our Make America Healthy Again promise.”
In a Thursday interview with Fox News, Kennedy explained that the Department of Health and Human Services is going to “look at everything” as it tries to uncover the cause of the “autism epidemic.”
“Everything is on the table,” Kennedy said. “Our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”
READ MORE: Video: Huge job cuts at Health Department started by Trump admin
In his interview on Fox News, Kennedy emphasized that the increased rate of autism in the United States is an “epidemic” and noted that epidemics “are not caused by genes.”
“Genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin,” the Health and Human Services secretary said. “So we know that it is an environmental toxin that is causing this cataclysm, and we are going to identify it.”
Kennedy told Fox News that the Trump administration is going to use scientists from research centers and universities all across the globe to uncover the cause of the autism “epidemic.”
