VOX – Let’s start with one unambiguous fact: More children are diagnosed with autism today than in the early 1990s.
According to a sweeping 2000 analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a range of 2–7 per 1,000, or roughly 0.5 percent of US children, were diagnosed with autism in the 1990s. That figure has risen to 1 in 35 kids, or roughly 3 percent.
The apparent rapid increase caught the attention of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who assumed that something had to be changing in the environment to drive it.
[OUR VIEW: A major driver of in the increase in the number of children supposedly having autism is the federal dollars attached to special education. ‘SPED’ budgets bring millions of dollars into school districts without the need for local taxation. It is not uncommon for districts to ‘code’ as many as twenty percent of children as autistic or otherwise ‘learning disabled.’ Districts cumulatively spent $38.8 billion on special education in FY20. – HEADLINE HEALTH]
In 2005, Kennedy, a lawyer and environmental activist at the time, authored an infamous essay in Rolling Stone that primarily placed the blame for the increased prevalence of autism on vaccines. (The article was retracted in 2011 as more studies debunked the vaccine-autism connection.)
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More recently, he has theorized that a mysterious toxin introduced in the late 1980s must be responsible.
Now, as the nation’s top health official leading the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has declared autism an “epidemic.”
And, in April, he launched a massive federal effort to find the culprit for the rise in autism rates, calling for researchers to examine a range of suspects: chemicals, molds, vaccines, and perhaps even ultrasounds given to pregnant mothers.
“Genes don’t cause epidemics. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said in April when announcing his department’s new autism research project.
He argued that too much money had been put into genetic research — “a dead end,” in his words — and his project would be a correction to focus on environmental causes. “That’s where we’re going to find an answer.”
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But according to many autism scientists I spoke to for this story, Kennedy is looking in exactly the wrong place …