Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Fierce Healthcare, in “RFK Jr. Attacks Environmental Toxins as Cause of Childhood Autism 'Epidemic', Stays Silent on Vaccines,” by Emma Beavins.
Following is an excerpt:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hosted a press conference on Wednesday to discuss data out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing the rate of autism had increased to one in 31 among 8-year-olds.
The findings from the new CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report are based on data collected in 2022 and mark an uptick from one in 36 children diagnosed with autism based on 2020 data. The study was conducted by the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM), which began tracking autism in 2000.
ADDM found a difference in autism prevalence between states, from 9.7 per 1,000 children at the site in Laredo, Texas to 53.1 per 1,000 children in California. The study also found that autism is 3.4 times as prevalent among boys as girls and that rates among Hispanic, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander and multiracial children were higher than in white children.
The report attributes much of that increase to improved screening and earlier detection.
Improvements in early identification of autism "have been apparent" the authors of the CDC report wrote.
"Research has not demonstrated that living in certain communities puts children at greater risk for developing ASD [autism spectrum disorder]. Differences in the prevalence of children identified with ASD across communities might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices," the authors wrote.
At the start of the event, Kennedy decried that the results of the ADDM study lagged by two years, saying that infectious disease data is reported in a timely fashion. He said the Department’s new Administration for a Healthy America – created during the recent overhaul of HHS – would make data on autism and diabetes prevalence available in real-time.
He attributed the rise in autism rates to environmental toxins and said HHS would commission studies in the next two to three weeks to find the toxin at large. “This is coming from an environmental toxin, and somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” Kennedy stated.
Kennedy said the studies would be supported by federal grant funding to university researchers. “People will know they can research and follow the science no matter what it says, without any kind of fear that can be censored and they're going to be gaslighted that they're going to be silenced, they're going to be defunded, de-licensed, and we're going to give them permission to do this research," he told reporters Wednesday.
This follows a commitment by Kennedy last week to find the cause of autism by September.
Autism researchers and advocates pushed back immediately on Kennedy's comments.
"The Autism Society of America finds the Administration’s claim—that 'we will know what has caused the Autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures'—to be harmful, misleading, and unrealistic," the organization said in a statement. "Autism is a complex developmental disability shaped by genetic, biological, and environmental factors. It is neither a chronic illness nor a contagion, that qualifies harmful language like 'epidemic,' and to do so is both inaccurate and stigmatizing."
Claims that Autism is solely caused by environmental exposures, parenting styles, or vaccines not only lack scientific evidence but are incredibly irresponsible, the Autism Society of America said.
“These misleading theories perpetuate harmful stigma, jeopardize public health, and distract from the critical needs of the Autism community including — access to quality care, early intervention, adult services, inclusive education, and long-term supports,” said Christopher Banks, President and CEO of the Autism Society of America in a statement.
Kennedy did not mention vaccines during the press conference, in contrast to his confirmation hearings before the Senate in January, where he expressed that the two could be linked.
Kennedy claimed that industries are profiting off the environmental toxin and causing an “epidemic of autism.” He claimed that while genetics may predispose children to autism, they are not the underlying factor in rising autism rates.
Kennedy strongly urged the public not to attribute the findings to better diagnostics and pressed for more widespread understanding of autism, what he calls “epidemic denial.”
“Epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media,” Kennedy said. “And based on industry canard, obviously, are people who don't want us to look at environmental exposures.”
In response to a question posed by Fierce Healthcare, Kennedy said the industries responsible for the toxins will likely be pressured by the government and market forces to stop producing them.
Kennedy continued: “We’re going to look at mold. We’re going to look at food additives, air and water and medicines. You know, we're going to look at ultrasound ... I don't think that’s probably a factor, but it is one of the exposures that became ubiquitous during that period.”
Richard H. Hughes IV, a partner at law firm Epstein, Becker & Green and a national thought leader on vaccines, attributes the rise in autism to changing diagnostic criteria.
“The so-called ‘autism epidemic’ was driven primarily by changes in diagnostic criteria in the DSM-III-R (1987) and DSM-IV (1994), which broadened the definition of autism,” Hughes wrote in Health Affairs. “These changes lead to more autism diagnoses and the reclassification of individuals previously diagnosed with other conditions.”
Kennedy said at the press conference that researchers needed to look for a ubiquitous environmental toxin introduced in 1989 to find the cause of autism. Hughes wrote in an email to Fierce Healthcare that the recommendation for a second MMR vaccine was introduced in 1989, which fueled the now-disputed Wakefield study linking the vaccine to autism.
Kennedy also said HHS would consider age, obesity and diabetes status of parents as factors for the disease.
“Because of AI and because of the digitalization of health records and the mass health records that are now available to us, we can do this much more quickly than it’s been done in the past,” he said.
Kennedy cited “exhaustive” historical studies in Wisconsin (1970) and North Dakota that showed autism rates in the states were roughly 1 in 10,000. “If you accept the epidemic deniers narrative, you have to believe that research in North Dakota has 98.8% of the children with autism, thousands of profoundly disabled children were somehow invisible, doctors, teachers, parents and even their own study … Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid,” he said.
Kennedy also presented a steadily rising bar graph that showed the results of ADDM Network autism, starting with data from children born in 1992, of which one in 150 had autism. The graph showed a steeper rise in rates for children born from 2008 to 2014, which reflects the birth year of the latest cohort of children in the MMWR report.
“Other childhood disabilities, neurologic disorders do not increase or change over time, but somehow, for some reason, with autism, everything was different,” Walter Zahorodny, one of the authors of the study and a clinical psychologist, said at the press conference. “Autism went from being a very unusual, rare disability … to being known in every community, every school district, every center that cares for children with disabilities.”
He also suggested that while the country is at a high point in autism prevalence, the rates will continue to grow. “Autism deserves to be treated as a real public health phenomenon,” Zahorodny said.
Doreen Samelson, chief clinical officer at Catalight, a non-profit behavioral health network, said autism is complex. “Although today’s CDC report provides an essential snapshot of autism rates, this is a complex issue,” Samelson said in a statement. “The autism spectrum is very diverse, making an accurate diagnosis complex. Among the tens of thousands of children my organization has cared for over the past decade plus, many came to us with an incorrect diagnosis of autism, while others had not received an autism diagnosis despite showing clear signs.”
