By Louis Jacobson, PolitiFact, KFF Health News
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attracted notice — and in some quarters, outrage — for remarks about autism, a topic he’s clashed with scientists about for years.
Kennedy held an April 16 press conference pegged to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that found the prevalence of autism rising to 1 in 31 among 8-year-olds, the latest in a series of increases in recent decades.
Kennedy said “autism destroys families” and is an “individual tragedy as well.”
Kennedy said many autistic children were “fully functional” and had “regressed” into autism “when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
He also said: “Most cases now are severe. Twenty-five percent of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, and have other stereotypical features.”
Medical experts, along with people on the autism spectrum, told PolitiFact that Kennedy’s portrayal was skewed. A 2023 study written by CDC officials and university researchers found that one-quarter of people on the autism spectrum have severe limitations. But this is on the high end of studies, and many people in that one-quarter of the autism population do not have the limitations Kennedy mentioned.
The vast majority of people on the spectrum do not have those severe challenges.
“I wish he would spend some time with parents of other autistic children, and well-regarded scientists who have studied this condition for decades,” said David Mandell, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health. “He has a fixed, myopic view.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not provide data on what share of people…
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