RFK Jr.’s Autism Quackery is Harrowing

April is Autism Acceptance Month. So how is our nation’s top health official marking the occasion? By setting the movement for autism acceptance back by…oh, just several decades.

On Wednesday, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a news conference about a new report by the Centers for Disease Control, which showed a continued rise in childhood autism diagnoses in the United States in 2022. The researchers behind the report found that growth is due in large part to increased screening for and greater identification of “previously underidentified groups.” But rather than cosigning those findings, Kennedy undermined them entirely.

Casting autism as an “epidemic,” he dismissed the notion that increased diagnosis plays a role in these trends as a “myth of epidemic denial.” Kennedy called research into autism’s genetic origins “a dead end,” and instead vowed to get to the bottom of its alleged environmental cause by—you heard it here, folks!—September.

To back up his point (which scientists involved in the CDC’s report immediately refuted), Kennedy pointed to only the latest cutting-edge research…of the 1960s. In one study conducted between 1959 and 1965, Kennedy said, scientists found rates of autism as low as 4.7 in every 10,000 kids. As of 2022, the CDC’s new report showed the rate of autism in kids under 8 was 1 in 31. “Autism condition characterized by profound impairments in social communication and behavior would have stood out like a neon sign,” Kennedy said as if pointing to a smoking gun.

But the point Kennedy is so obviously eliding is that, in the 1960s, autism was characterized by “profound impairments,” and now, it’s, well, not—hence the CDC’s findings. The definition of autism has changed several times over since the 1980s and now includes kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, a social disorder that Elon Musk himself has said he was diagnosed with, and ADHD.

“The more you look for it, the more you find,” Dr. Maureen Durkin, one of the authors of the CDC report, told The New York Times. There are also other known factors that contribute to rising autism rates, like the fact that people are having kids later in life.

Beyond his ideas about the origins of autism, Kennedy also appears to hold a dangerously archaic view of autistic people themselves. On Wednesday, he said autism “destroys” children, who he argued would grow up to “never pay taxes, never hold a job, never play baseball, never write a poem, never go out on a date.” (Tell that to Darryl Hannah) In one particularly harrowing moment, he described autistic kids as a strain on the country’s ballooning healthcare costs.

Kennedy’s darkly antiquated address Wednesday was received as a setback not just for medical research, but also for autistic people themselves. “It’s like saying, ‘You’re not good enough and we’re going to change you for our own comfort.’ And we find that it’s a message that is very detrimental to the self-concept, self-esteem of young autistic people,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, told Axios.

This, of course, was always where Kennedy’s journey as HHS secretary was going to lead. The man whose vaccine quackery once got his non-profit banned from Facebook tried to sanewash his own views during confirmation hearings in January. But as one of his fellow anti-vaccine crusaders told Stat News, “He’s the same Bobby Kennedy.” Just now, with a lot more power.