President Donald Trump noted in his order establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission that "autism spectrum disorder now affects 1 in 36 children in the United States — a staggering increase from rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children identified with the condition during the 1980s."
The MAHA Commission's chairman, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., subsequently indicated that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show that the rate of autism among American children has gotten even worse.
"The autism epidemic is running rampant," Kennedy said. "One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That's up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20, and in California it's 1 in 12.5."
'So taking Tylenol is not good.'
Kennedy promised during a Cabinet meeting in April that "by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures" — an ambition the Autism Society of America said was "harmful, misleading, and unrealistic."
