Misinformation alert RFK Jr. keeps peddling his detestable autism lies

Robert F.Kennedy Jr.

has spread many detestable theories in his life, but none is more detestable than his scaremongering over autism and vaccines.It’s not merely that the new Health and Human Services secretary has convinced thousands of Americans that they’re partially responsible for their children’s autism — a trend he once compared to a “holocaust.”It’s that he’s ensuring thousands more will put their children in needless danger for absolutely no scientific or rational reason.One of Kennedy’s claims is the lie that Americans have seen a huge spike in autism cases over the past 40 years.Autism rates, RFK said during his Senate confirmation hearings, “have gone from 1 in 10,000 [in 1980] ..

.and today in our children, it’s 1 in 34.”Kennedy repeated this statistic during his swearing-in ceremony.

“Who can believe that?” he added.“There’s something wrong.

There’s something wrong, and I think it’s something that can be found out.”President Trump repeated this statistic on Truth Social and in his executive order instituting the Make America Healthy Again Commission.Where the 1-in-10,000 number comes from, however, is a mystery.Even in 1966, when autism was diagnosed as a child being socially isolated and showing withdrawn behavior, researchers estimated that around 1 in 2,500 children were autistic. Maybe next Kennedy will go back to 1943, the year autism was first designated a condition, and only 1 in 100 million Americans were diagnosed.The idea that anyone had any useful handle on the number of autistic children in the past, much less used the same criterion we do, is preposterous.Autism wasn’t even a separate diagnosis from schizophrenia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, the year Kennedy said the affliction began rising.Before 1991, the federal government lumped children with autism in with other “intellectual disabilities.” In 1994, the definition of autism included Asperger ...