RFK Jr: HHS Press Conference on Autism Rate, 2025-04-16

I’m going to go over some of the key numbers from the ADDM report.

Overall, the autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate.

The study tests eight-year-olds who were born in 2014.

And by the way, these studies are two years later than they should be.

And one of the things that we’re going to do as we move this function to the Administration for a Healthy America, to the new Chronic Disease Division, is we are going to have updated real-time data so that people can look at this, so Americans can understand what is happening with chronic disease in this country in real time.

We don’t have to wait two years to react.

We don’t wait two years to react to a measles epidemic or any kind of infectious disease.

You shouldn’t have to do that for diabetes or autism.

The ASD prevalence rate in eight-year-olds is now one in 31.

Shocking.

There is an extreme risk for boys.

Overall the risk for boys of getting an autism diagnosis in this country is now one in 20.

And it’s high in California, which has the best data collection.

It probably also reflects the national trend, one in 12.5 boys.

This is part of an unrelenting upward trend.

The prevalence two years ago was one in 36.

Since the first ADDM report in 1990, which was 1992 births, autism has increased by a factor of 4.8, that’s 480% I believe.

The first ADDM survey was 22 years ago when prevalence was one in 150 children.

In all the core states, the trend is consistently upward.

And most cases now are severe.

So about 25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet trained, and have other stereotypical features, headbanging, tactile and light sensitivities, stimming, toe-locking, et cetera.

One of the things that I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that the autism diagnosis, that the autism prevalence increases, the relentless increases, are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria.

If you look at Table 3 of the ADDM report, it’s clear that the rates are real, that they are increasing in the last 10 years, beginning with the first one.

Year by year there is a steady, relentless increase.

I want to, because this epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media, and it’s based on an industry canard, and obviously there are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures.

And so I want to just read you some of the little excerpts from some of the older studies.

The baseline for autism in this country was established with the biggest, largest epidemiological study in history, a study of all 900,000 children in the state of Wisconsin, children under the age of 12.

They found 0.7 percent, 0.7 children had autism in every 10,000.

That’s less than 1 in 10,000, today we’re at 1 in 31.

That study also confirmed the 4 to 1 male to female ratio.

There were at that time just over 60 children in Wisconsin with autism, and today it’s around 20,000.

In 1987, there was another exhaustive study, a peer-reviewed study in North Dakota set out to count every child in the state with a pervasive developmental disorder, including autism.

That study meticulously combed through every record, every diagnosis, and it even conducted the in-person assessments of the entire population of 180,000 children under 18.

The autism rate they found was 3.3 per 10,000.

So that’s in line with the 1 in 10,000 that was found in Wisconsin 17 years earlier.

For context, today the last number, 1 in 36, is 83 times higher.

In 1987, out of every 1 million kids, 330 were diagnosed with autism.

Today, there are 27,777 for every million.

If you accept the epidemic denier’s narrative, you have to believe that researchers in North Dakota missed 98.8% of the children with autism, and thousands of profoundly disabled children were somehow invisible to doctors, teachers, parents, and even their own study.

The same researchers who followed the original cohort for 12 years to double-check their number, they went back in 2000 and found that they had missed exactly one child.

Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid.

They weren’t missing all these cases.

The epidemic is real.

Between 1959 and 1965, researchers from 14 hospitals associated with major universities undertook a national collaborative perinatal project tracking 30,000 children from birth to age 8.

This was no half-baked survey-based analysis.

The study conducted nine separate screenings covering neurology, psychology, speech, language, hearing, and visual function.

Every developmental quirk, anomaly, and disorder was logged with painstaking detail.

Autism, a condition characterized by profound impairments in social communication and behavior, would have stood out like a neon sign.

There were 14 cases, that’s 4.7 per 10,000.

We know what the historic numbers are, and we know what the numbers are today, and it’s time for everybody to stop attributing this to this ideology of epidemic denial.

In 2009, the California State Legislature charged the MIND Institute at UC Davis with because this myth was already becoming pervasive, the myth of epidemic denial was already becoming pervasive in the mainstream media.

The California Legislature directed the MIND Institute at UC Davis to answer the question, and Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a highly esteemed, revered scientist, neurologist, and epidemiologist, came back with a definitive answer, the epidemic is real.

Only a very, very small portion of it can be charged a better recognition or better diagnostic criteria.

I want to say a couple of other things.

There are many, many other studies that affirm this, and instead of listening to this canard of epidemic denial, all you have to do is start reading a little science, because the answer is very clear, and this is catastrophic for our country.

There’s a recent study by Blaxill et al.

and a team of other researchers that said that the cost of treating autism in this country by 2035, so within 10 years, will be a trillion dollars a year.

This is added to already astronomical healthcare costs, and then there is an individual injury.

These are kids that, this is a preventable disease.

We know it’s an environmental exposure.

It has to be.

Genes do not cause epidemics.

It can provide a vulnerability.

You need an environmental toxin, and Irva Hertz-Picciotto pointed out that because of this mythology, that the amount of money and resources put into studying genetic causes, which is a dead end, has been historically 10 to 20 times the amount spent by NIH and other agencies to study environmental factors, to study exposures, to study external factors, and that’s where we’re going to find the answer.

This is an individual tragedy as well.

Autism destroys families.

More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children.

These are children who should not be suffering like this.

These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old, and these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.

Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted, and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it, and I think I’m going to have Walter Zahorodny, who is the most senior researcher for this project, for ADDM, and who’s been doing this for many years, to come up and say a little.