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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Thursday during a cabinet meeting with President Trump and the administration that his agency would be taking a big step forward in determining why autism cases are rising in children nationwide.
Kennedy decried the rapid rise in autism cases in kids, stating that when he was a child, only one in 10,000 kids was diagnosed with autism. Now, he said the rates were, shockingly, “one in 31.”
“They’re going up again,” he said.
He told President Trump during the meeting that his agency would know by September what has been responsible for this horrible epidemic in America. “We’re going to launch a massive testing and research effort,” he said
Kennedy explained that this effort would include hundreds of scientists. “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” he declared.
Trump remarked on the new statistic of 1 in 31 children being diagnosed with autism, commenting, “That’s a horrible statistic…there’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this.”
Kennedy, whose Make America Healthy Again agenda has been implemented at the HHS at the direction of the president, also gave a brief update on his agency’s agenda items. He said he was currently working with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to assess the correlation between exposure to fluoride in drinking water and IQ loss, particularly in children.
Kennedy revealed that he was working with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and the governors in 24 states to advance MAHA legislation in terms of reassessing food stamp and SNAP programs.
Other directives included getting damaging chemicals out of baby formula, restricting cell phone usage in schools, cutting back on cruel animal testing and switching to artificial intelligence testing methodologies, as well as enhancing the healthy content of school lunches.