The Trump administration is pushing back its timeline on finding the root cause of autism. However, President Donald Trump has recently pointed to toxins as the potential cause of autism.
The president concluded as much in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission meeting that followed the release of the commission’s first report. The document spells out how a coalition of the executive branch views the state of pediatric health in the U.S. and the potential causes of worsening health.
In it, the commission states that several types of behavioral health-related medications are worsening the health of children who take them. Overall, the “overmedicalization” of American children is one of four categories the report focused on. However, it was light on articulating the causes of autism. Rather, it just noted the rapid increase of its diagnosis in recent years.
“This is, to me, the one that gets me every time, and it seems to be getting worse: just a few decades ago, one in 10,000 children had autism. Today it’s one in 31,” Trump said on Thursday. “I think that’s just a terrible thing. It has to be something on the outside, has to be artificially induced, has to be. We’ll not allow our public health system to be captured by the very industries it’s supposed to oversee. So we’re demanding the answers. The public is demanding the answers, and that’s why we’re here.”
The president also vowed that his administration “will not be silenced or intimidated by the corporate lobbyists or special interests.”
He continued, “And I want this group to do what they have to do. We have to spell it out. In some cases, it won’t be nice or won’t be pretty, but we have to do it.”
Much of the comments made by Trump, other members of the MAHA Commission and the initial report itself — the secretaries and top leaders of several executive branch entities — focused on disentangling industry experts from developing research and safety standards.
Trump’s comments establish the administration’s views on toxins as the root cause of autism. They also reflect previous comments made by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RFK Jr. is the chairman of the MAHA Commission.
Despite establishing the rhetorical predicate that autism is caused by toxins, a predicate that’s at least disputed by research, the administration is delaying the previously announced deadline to release research that will reveal the cause of autism. RFK Jr. said on April 10 during a televised cabinet meeting with Trump that the research and a plan to eliminate the causes of autism would come out in September.
In an interview on CNN, RFK Jr. on Thursday said that some studies on the causes of autism will be released in September and that others will be released six months after that. In three weeks, HHS will release “bids” for grants for scientists to replicate previous studies. He did not specify which studies would be replicated.
After the release of the second raft of research, RFK Jr. said, “we will know the answers of the etiology of autism.”
Etiology is the description of the causes of a disease, according to the National Library of Medicine’s website.
Several autism therapy stakeholders have decried the administration’s treatment of autism as a chronic disease. There has also been a mixed reaction to the creation of an autism data bank. The administration initially announced a registry of autistic people’s health data. It has since tried to distance itself from its effort to compile health data and other data sources about autistic people and other measures of the condition.
A week before the release of the MAHA commission’s initial report, RFK Jr. told a congressional committee that federally backed research on autism purposefully backed off the study of environmental toxins as a cause of autism because “they were scared of what they found.”
