The Autism Epidemic That Never Was
RFK Jr.'s scientific illiteracy has led the ignorant down a dangerous path.
In 1970, the autism diagnosis rate was one in 5,000-10,000. In 2000 it had risen to 1 in 150. Just 20 years later, it had risen again to 1 in 36.
As of 2025, the Centers for Disease Control report “1 in 31 children will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by age 8.”
Clearly, rates are skyrocketing.
Clearly, this is an epidemic.
When you add in that children aren't diagnosed with autism at birth, but suddenly they have it at age 2?
Clearly, something that happens between birth and age 2 is causing children to catch autism.
Vaccines! It has to be vaccines!
Or fluoride in drinking water.
Or food dyes.
And now you know how people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jenny McCarthy—equally untrained and unqualified to head the Department of Health and Human Services—got from point A to point B in their conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
And unfortunately, they brought millions of desperate parents looking for someone to blame—as well as the ignorant looking for leaders to follow, and the disenfranchised looking for a cause to unite behind—along with them.
RFK Jr. Was Dangerous—Now He's Deadly
RFK Jr. spent his earlier life engaging in the kind of self-indulgence and out-of-control behavior that one can only get away with if their—or their family's—bank account is of a certain size.
Or if their last name is Kennedy and they're one of those Kennedys. The Kennedys of Massachusetts with three United States Senators, a President, a U.S. Attorney General, and three presidential candidates all in one generation.
RFK Jr. was born Democratic royalty.
Being named after a Democratic presidential candidate and political rising star who was assassinated at age 42? He was basically dipped in Teflon.
RFK Jr. has admitted he indulged in a lot of bad behavior and brain cell-killing self-destruction with both legal and illegal substances.
Somewhere between “what a promising future” and being made MAGA Republican President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, things went sideways.
Only RFK Jr. knows where his brain worms fall in this timeline.
But when he decided to run for President, the Kennedy family—his siblings and cousins—rallied together to say “Dear, God, no!” That's a pretty clear indication of his fitness for office.
When Trump decided to assemble the least competent presidential cabinet possible, health experts, medical ethicists, physicians, healthcare groups, and advocates for the disabled joined the Kennedy clan in sounding the alarm against RFK Jr. as a health expert.
The MAGA GOP ignored them, of course.
The United States's leader for public health is now a conspiracy theory-spewing anti-vaxxer.
In conjunction with his DOGE boss, Elon Musk, and our current White House resident, Trump, he's encouraged alternatives to vaccination in the midst of a measles outbreak, largely ignored the return of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases thought defeated thanks to childhood vaccination, canceled and unpublished valid research, and redirected the CDC and National Institutes of Health (NIH) away from “wokeness” and towards the pseudoscience based on scientific illiteracy he espouses.
People are dying thanks to his brand of misinformation and lies. More will follow thanks to his dismantling of our public health system.
And now RFK Jr. has set his sights on the autistic community.
On April 16, Kennedy dedicated his first official press conference to autism spectrum disorder and a new report from the CDC.
People were outraged by the level of ableism and ignorance he spewed for almost 30 minutes straight.
A few days later, it was revealed the NIH had been told to create a national registry of autistic people using whatever means necessary, HIPAA and patient consent be damned.
People are understandably upset by this latest Trump administration revelation.
But in Kennedy’s addled brain, finding a cause and cure for autism needs to be a major priority. Even if it requires trampling the U.S. Constitution and basic human rights.
After all, autistic people are family destroyers and a drain on the economy.
Trump's HHS Secretary stated:
"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."
But as has been evident in other statements by RFK Jr., much of what he spouts is based only on what he's seen personally.
In the ultimate “pics or it didn't happen,” our head of public health stated that people requiring extensive support due to autism never existed when he was a child because he never saw them. And they don’t exist now, because he doesn't know any that are his age.
The HHS head drew further backlash after making the same claim to erase people with Tourette's, ADD, ADHD, and other disorders based solely on his own ignorance of their existence.
And for—yet again—seeing humans as commodities to be exploited for financial gain.
During that press conference, RFK Jr. stated:
“It is bankrupting our nation. 74% of American kids cannot qualify for military service. How are we going to maintain our global leadership with such a sick population?”
Considering his own family’s history of institutionalizing, sterilizing, and lobotomizing a neurodivergent family member, only someone deliberately obtuse or lacking all self-awareness could make such statements.
FYI, Bobby, we can’t see what's hidden from view.
But You Can't Dispute The Numbers
While RFK Jr. looks at rising diagnosis rates and thinks “More kids are catching autism!”, the reality is, we are just finally seeing what has always existed.
The medical and scientific communities have long pointed to a drastic increase in diagnoses of autism due to a broader definition, understanding, and assessment, not a greater occurrence.
Yes, the latest figures show 1 in 31 children will be diagnosed with autism by age 8.
But only profound autism was diagnosed in the 1970s when the rate was 1 in 5,000-10,000. BIPOC and girls were almost never assessed for ASD until the 1990s.
Plus the rate of 1 in 34 diagnosed by age 4 remains unchanged since 2020.
This is the problem with showing just autism rates.
Does a reported figure capture total numbers including adults or just children or just specific age ranges?
Autism experts say the major factors that have contributed to the increase include:
improved detection and diagnostic criteria
better training in primary care doctors
broadened definition of autism, meaning disorders once counted as separate are now added to ASD totals
reduction in gender and racial biases, while White males are still the highest percentage population assessed, females and racial minority assessments and diagnoses have increased dramatically
increased awareness among caregivers and educators and early intervention leading to earlier and more frequent diagnosis
In 1970, most people with ASD were misdiagnosed or completely undiagnosed, leading to many people now being diagnosed in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or older.
Those are the people RFK Jr. never saw when he was a kid.
While it's impossible to know if rates of ASD in 1970 and 2025 are exactly the same, experts believe they are largely unchanged.
To place this in perspective, before medical science knew what epilepsy or type-1 diabetes were, there were no people with either condition. Once the existence of epilepsy and type-1 diabetes was discovered and diagnostic criteria established, many people were diagnosed.
This doesn't mean anyone spontaneously developed either condition or that there was an “epidemic.”
Our understanding of neurodivergence is still relatively new and assessment is more complex. There is no blood test or brain scan that tells doctors yes or no—yet.
We're still working on defining diagnostic criteria and establishing what disorders fall under which categories. But just because that process takes longer, it's still the same as recognizing epilepsy and type-1 diabetes when we didn't before.
But RFK Jr. and other armchair experts—with no education or training in medicine or the required scientific disciplines—blame "environmental factors" for a massive incidence increase—an autism epidemic—that doesn't actually exist.
They blame everything from vaccines, to high-fructose corn syrup, to fast food, to ultrasounds, to fluoridated water for "skyrocketing" numbers of children "developing" autism at age two.
But what's up with kids “catching” autism when they're 2 years old?
Unlike other disorders people are born with like blindness or deafness, autism is difficult to diagnose before age two. But that doesn't mean children spontaneously develop autism at that age, as untrained, scientifically illiterate individuals like RFK Jr. claim.
Instead, the standard developmental milestones for a two-year-old make the preexisting ASD easier for caregivers and medical providers to notice at that age.
It's a difference of not seeing, and then seeing, what's always been there.
Much like a speech impediment can't be diagnosed before a child learns to talk, in all but the most profound cases, ASD is exceptionally difficult to assess and diagnose until a child reaches the age where walking, talking, and other developmental milestones are expected to occur.
But RFK Jr. would rather draw attention to an autism epidemic that doesn't exist so he can further his agenda, rather than address the issues his decades of antivaxxer rhetoric created—like the measles outbreak his misinformation fueled in Samoa.
Put Down The Bottle Of Snake Oil
Knowing the difference between increases in incidence versus diagnoses is critical to understanding what is happening. And this lack of awareness is what conspiracy theorists who have made fortunes off the ill-informed exploit.
RFK Jr. said:
"[Autism] is a preventable disease. We know it's an environmental exposure."
Disputing research that points to genetics based on sound scientific principles but doesn't fit his narrative, Kennedy added:
"It has to be, genes do not cause epidemics."
Which makes clear the danger of untrained, ignorant individuals observing things they can't understand and then drawing conclusions. Like people who think a few YouTube videos and books by celebrities equate to doing their own research and fully negate decades of work by real scientists.
And now we have one of these individuals creating national health policy based on his own misunderstanding and imagination.
It's impossible to know if RFK Jr. believes what he peddles to the masses, but whether innocent ignorance or deliberate lies, it's been very lucrative for him for several decades.
During the pandemic, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense—which doubled his weekly salary in 2023—exploited people’s ignorance to bring in more than $23.5 million in donations.
And yet the leading cause of death for children in the United States is still gun violence—not vaccines or food dye or autism. It's a public health crisis RFK Jr. and the Trump administration could easily address if they chose to.
But this fact is not something the Trump administration wants to touch lest they anger the gun-owning members of MAGA or the lobbyists lining their pockets.
Instead…
…conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. want to weed out those they find undesirable and unprofitable, like autistic people.
Who will be next?
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Three gentlemen have requested "sourcing" be included.
There are two videos and over 50 hyperlinks for sourcing in this piece. And many of those links lead to further sourcing. That's not everything I looked at, but at some point there needs to be a cap on embedded links.
If anyone has something specific they don't understand or find unsupported, please comment here and I'll find sourcing for you.
Some things about RFK Jr.'s history are what I consider common knowledge. Therefore, sourcing is focused more on autism science and history than RFK Jr.'s personal life or parasites.
Thank you for making many good points. I, too, have only my personal experiences with which I can evaluate Kennedy's claims. First, my sister was born in 1961. By the time she was two (check) we could see that she was not developing normally (check). Because she developed language and did not need physical assistance, doctors at the time determined she did not have autism. Rather, they said she was "brain-damaged, not otherwise specified". This left her, and us her family, in a kind of limbo without support services (check).
It was not until 1995 when we learned of Asperger's Syndrome. Please look this up if you are unfamiliar with the term, and learn why Asperger's insights languished for fifty years. At some point, Asperger's Syndrome was folded into autism spectrum disorder. None of this changed my sister's behavior, of course, but it was reassuring to know there was a "diagnosis." And now, there ARE support systems for people like my sister, more awareness, less shaming, less shunning. The burden on our family was not because my sister was "unproductive"; it was because we were isolated by her differences and we literally feared for her survival.
Of course she was not visible in 1961, or even in 1990. Epidemic? Maybe. Maybe we literally understand neurodivergence better. Our diagnosis tools are better. Brain scans were not available until the last few decades, if they are helpful at all.
Regarding environmental causes, I do understand that there are far more chemicals surrounding us than there were since the 1950s, and I know that very few have been tested for toxicity. So it's very possible that environmental factors are causing illnesses in children. But I am aware that human beings are incredibly complex. You point out that Kennedy is untrained - and you are correct. We can't leave it up to him to improve our health.