Exclusive: U.S. to Confront Autism Epidemic: A Turning Point for Environmental Health Science, Public Health and Medicine
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is calling the explosive rise in autism rates what the data clearly show it to be: a genuine epidemic of neurological and immunological injury in children, one that demands immediate, rigorous investigation.
APRIL 18, 2025
Editor’s note: This is the introduction to a series of articles by James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., on the autism epidemic. The series will dismantle the denialist narratives that have dominated public discourse, replacing them with a rigorous, testable and biologically coherent framework.
In a landmark press conference on April 16, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a sobering diagnosis — not of a child, but of an entire nation. Flanked by researchers, parents, and reporters, Kennedy declared that the United States is facing a public health crisis of staggering proportions: the autism epidemic.
The numbers he cited were not projections or hypothetical models. They were hard, government-issued statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): as of 2022, 1 in 31 American 8-year-olds — more than 3.2% — carry a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a sharp rise from 1 in 36 just two years prior.
Among boys, the rate is even more harrowing: 1 in 20 nationally, and in California, where tracking systems are most sophisticated, a staggering 1 in 12.5.
“This is not just a public health issue,” Kennedy stated. “It is a national emergency.”
These numbers are not outliers or isolated spikes. They reflect a long-standing, uninterrupted upward trajectory that began in the early 1990s and has continued through every revision of diagnostic criteria, every public awareness campaign, and every wave of technological advancement in health surveillance.
In 2000, the CDC estimated that 1 in 150 children had autism. In the 1970s, the rate was 1 in 10,000. This means the current figure represents more than a 300-fold increase over historical estimates — a climb far too steep to attribute to mere improvements in detection.
When challenged by a reporter if he denied that efforts to bring healthcare to “underserved populations” were contributing to the rise in autism cases, Kennedy estimated at least 85% of the increase is real.
And yet, that is precisely the line many public health officials and media outlets continue to promote. In a coordinated media response following the CDC’s 2025 report, major outlets such as The Washington Post, NPR, and The Hill characterized the rise as “slight” and credited the increase to “better screening” or expanded diagnostic definitions.
Kennedy forcefully rejected these explanations, calling them “industry canards” designed to deflect attention from a growing body of evidence pointing toward environmental causation.
He’s not alone. Joining him at the press conference was Dr. Walter Zahorodny, lead autism prevalence researcher at Rutgers University, and principal investigator for New Jersey’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) site.
Zahorodny emphasized that the rise in autism is not a diagnostic illusion: “There is better awareness of autism,” he said, “but better awareness cannot be driving a disability like autism to increase by 300% in 20 years.”
This moment marks a historic inflection point — what public philosophers of science might call an epistemic break. For the first time in modern history, a sitting HHS secretary is rejecting the dogmatic notion that autism’s explosive rise is an artifact of increased awareness.
Instead, Kennedy is calling it what the data clearly show it to be: a genuine epidemic of neurological and immunological injury in children, one that demands immediate, rigorous investigation.
To that end, Kennedy announced that HHS, in coordination with the CDC and independent global researchers, has launched a sweeping, agnostic inquiry into the environmental causes of autism.
This effort, involving hundreds of scientists, will not be limited to politically safe topics or agency-approved hypotheses. It will include the examination of pesticides, food additives, water and air pollution, pharmaceuticals, and — yes — vaccines and their ingredients.
“We are going to look at every plausible cause,” Kennedy said, “and we will follow the data wherever it leads.” The initiative promises preliminary results by September 2025.
This declaration is more than symbolic. It represents the potential end of a decades-long pattern in which environmental hypotheses — particularly those implicating iatrogenic exposures such as vaccine adjuvants or medical interventions — have been marginalized, censored, or defunded.
Kennedy’s announcement reflects a long-overdue course correction, not only for autism research but for the credibility of public health itself.
At stake is not merely scientific clarity, but a generation of children. The urgency could not be greater. As Kennedy warned, “We are losing our children. And we are doing it to ourselves.”
In a series of articles to follow, I will provide a detailed synthesis of Kennedy’s policy pivot and the scientific literature that supports it. This report will dismantle the denialist narratives that have dominated public discourse, replacing them with a rigorous, testable, and biologically coherent framework.
Autism is not a mystery. We have not failed to understand it. We have only failed to look where the truth resides.
And now, finally, that is beginning to change.
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