The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will study whether vaccines cause autism, despite numerous existing studies already showing there is no link.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon confirmed the effort in a statement overnight, saying the agency plans to leave “no stone unturned.”
“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” the statement said. “The American people expect high quality research and transparency and that is what CDC is delivering.”
Nixon did not answer questions about how the study would be conducted and how it would be different from the numerous peer-reviewed studies already published.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, has made money through books and speeches that disparage vaccine safety and he refused to say during his confirmation hearings that vaccines don’t cause autism despite many high-quality studies finding no such link.
He stated during the hearing that autism rates have “have gone from 1 in 10,000 … and today in our children, it’s one in 34.” His claims have been repeated by President Donald Trump on Truth Social.
It’s unclear where Kennedy got his 1 in 10,000 statistic. In 2000, approximately 1 in 150 children in the U.S. born in 1992 were diagnosed with autism compared with 2020, during which one in 36 children born in 2012 were diagnosed, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Just last month following his confirmation as HHS secretary, Kennedy said that he planned to “investigate” whether the timing of childhood vaccinations and anti-depression medications are among several “possible factors” in the nation’s problem with chronic diseases.
“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said at the time.
It is accurate that about 1 in 36 children in the U.S. have autism, and that the rates have been going up over time. There is likely a genuine increase in autism rates in the U.S., but another reason autism prevalence is increasing is because doctors and parents are getting better at identifying and diagnosing autism in children.
The causes of autism are complex and still being explored. Many children with autism that can be tied to genetic differences. Separately, the risk seems to be higher among children who experienced complications at birth, and those born to older parents. For others, the cause is not known.
ABC News’ Mary Kekatos contributed to this report.
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