Why should Secretary RFK, Jr stop talking about autism?
Maybe because he knows less about autism than he does about measles, if that is actually possible…
Secretary RFK, Jr Should Stop Talking About Autism
If you don’t believe me, just review some of misinformation RFK, Jr has promoted about autism (and measles) in the past.
And also consider all of the information that he conveniently leaves out of all of his talks, like the changes to DSM criteria, new laws that allowed autistic kids to go to school, and more screening, etc.
All the reasons why we are seeing more children and adults getting diagnosed with autism.
Reasons that have nothing to do with vaccines.
Instead, we have Secretary RFK, Jr talking about:
autism data being 12 years old - it’s not! CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network looks at kids when they are eight years old and then it takes a few years to process the data and publish a report. So the 2025 report was on kids who were eight years old in 2022. The data was not 12 years old! But why do you have to wait until kids are 8 years old? They actually look at kids who are 4 and 8 years old now (something else RFK, Jr didn’t mention…), but you can just look at much younger kids because many aren’t diagnosed with autism until they are a little older.
a 40-50% rise in autism - specifically, he said that “The recent data, which I just saw from three different sources that we all use, three different ways of counting it, and that data is, is… rises above 40 or 50 percent.”
“So it’s much worse than one in 31. It’s approaching one in five, 20 percent.”
Surprisingly, RFK, Jr is right about the 1 in 31 stat!
And that helps us figure out where he went wrong with everything else he said…
Although you can bet that he is wrong about the autism rates approaching 20% on the new CDC data he saw (if he is right, who us the data too!), but it is possible that he saw a 40-50% rise in some data and got confused.
How?
A 40-50% increase over 3.2% (1 in 31) would get us close to 5% (1 in 20), which RFK, Jr has likely confused with 20% (1 in 5).
And it could be that rates haven’t even increased, but that he was simply looking at the rates in California.
But why are autism rates higher in California?
Probably because they do a better job at identifying autistic kids! It’s not about vaccines, as Laredo, for example, has very good immunization rates too.
What else?
RFK, Jr has a proven track record of simply making things up…
So don’t believe what he is saying about autism rates.