Whopper of the Week: RFK Jr.'s Secretive Autism Crusade Endangers People With Autism

THIS WEEK'S WHOPPER:

RFK JR.'S SECRETIVE AUTISM CRUSADE ENDANGERS PEOPLE WITH AUTISM
 

“The Maha strategy drives now more than 120 initiatives across the federal government. And those initiatives, most of them from my department, those initiatives represent more than a list of government actions. They represent a revolutionary change in direction." -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., September 17, 2026 
 

SUMMARY

In September 2026, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kennedy spoke at a Children Health Defense (CHD) conference, the anti-vaccine organization he led for 15 years. He said he was making a “revolutionary change in direction” in autism initiatives at HHS. After praising anti-vaccine activist and disbarred physician Lyn Redwood and Andrew Wakefield, who he said had “courageously” posed questions about the role of vaccines in autism, Kennedy said he now had the “privilege and responsibility of leading the department that can put the full weight of the federal government behind answering these questions.” Kennedy confidently and wrongly declared “environmental exposures” were related to the “epidemic” of autism, and that “it's an easy thing to do for my agency… to identify exactly what those potential culprits are and then eliminate them with science.” That’s a whopper.

Kennedy made several broad and harmful claims about autism at the CHD conference, which Defend Public Health and others have repeatedly debunked.  It’s a whopper to claim environmental exposures are the “culprits” of autism and another to claim that there were no studies of autism because it was “taboo.” It’s a whopper for Kennedy to say autistic kids as “so damaged that their lives are just focused on their illness or their injury”  or that autism is “a real epidemic” and “the greatest urgency in the world.” What is new is that the HHS Secretary is anti-vaccine and he is drastically changing the direction of the government’s autism policies. 
 

WHY ITS A WHOPPER

Kennedy promised and failed to find the cause of autism in his first year in office. Now, in year two, Kennedy has made big changes to the kinds of autism research the federal government funds and the kinds of therapies and interventions it supports. Kennedy is using hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to accomplish something --“eliminating” the causes of autism – that is impossible without addressing genetics. Worse, making a policy goal of eliminating a common neurodevelopmental condition whose presentation varies from mild to severe borders on eugenics.

Kennedy originally wanted to have a $5 billion federal autism research program, the equivalent of having one in 10 National Institutes of Health (NIH) research dollars dedicated to autism. Congress did not agree, and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya argued that they could make progress in 2025 by funding 13 external scientific studies totaling $50 million. This Autism Data Science Initiative includes seven projects on the causes of autism, six of which specifically explore environmental risk factors, plus two on the rising frequency of autism diagnoses which consider “early life factors” or “genetic and environmental factors” that lead to an autism diagnosis. These projects appear to be serious, well-designed studies, and may help elucidate the modest but poorly understood contribution of environmental exposures. However, it is important to note just how much Kennedy’s personal priorities are driving NIH’s autism research projects.    

Kennedy’s relentless quest to manufacture a link between vaccines and increases in autism is often hidden from public view. In April 2026, the New York Times reported that Martin Kulldorff, the chief science and data officer at HHS, is in charge of vaccine data projects at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control that have not been made public. One project, apparently, compares the health status of vaccinated children to those who are not vaccinated (i.e. the "non-specific effects" of vaccines); while another questions the well-studied safety of thimerosal as a vaccine preservative. These studies rely on access to millions of American’s medical records. After public outcry against creating an “autism registry” in 2025, HHS tried to access identifiable electronic medical records from select state-run health information exchange systems, like Nebraska, and identifiable patient records from the Vaccine Safety Data Link. It’s unclear whose data is being accessed by HHS for what studies, and at what cost.

Some projects are more open about their plans to collect data on autism. An HHS health research agency created in 2022 (ARPA-H) is launching a $100-250 million project called SPECTRA to collect different types of data about autistic people, including genetic, environmental, metabolic, immune and microbiome data, in order to create a “trajectory” of the condition over time and an AI platform to query this data. According to StatNews, the goal is to develop earlier diagnostics for autism and new technologies for treating or managing autism. 

Kennedy has tried to legitimize his autism agenda by overhauling an interagency committee that advises on the federal government’s autism research funding and support services. In January 2026, Kennedy replaced the entire public membership of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) with 21 new members, at least eight of which have formal links to anti-vaccine organizations while others have promoted controversial autism treatments, like chelation therapy, leucovorin and fecal microbial transplants. Under new leadership, the IACC issued a 2026-2028 Strategic Plan which recommended that the federal government spend $747 million a year on autism by fiscal year 2028 (nearly doubling current expenditures), shift research priorities toward environmental and biological risk factors for autism and the development of “precision therapeutics.” The IACC recommendations echo Kennedy’s unsupported autism policy priorities. 

The Autism Society, a coalition of 13 autism advocacy organizations, objected that the IACC failed “to develop and approve the plan in a manner that is transparent, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and responsive to public input.” It apparently did not consider public comments from autistic people, families, researchers, clinicians or other federal agencies. The slap-dash process by which the recommendations were developed “undermines the credibility of [the IACC] and the Strategic Plan” and might even be illegal, according to the Autism Society. Meanwhile, the Autism Science Foundation argued against the IACC's focus on environmental causes, and instead said focusing on genetics of autism was "the most promising route(s) to understanding biological subtypes and developing precision treatments.” Finally, an independent organization of prominent autism experts created after Kennedy’s purge of the IACC, also voiced their objections to the plan and called for transparent, high quality research that addresses the priority needs of the autism community.


WHY IT MATTERS

Kennedy is launching a dizzying, expensive array of initiatives to find environmental causes of autism, while NIH research has been slashed. His false claims of an autism “epidemic” makes autism seem frightful, and he repeatedly calls autistic people damaged. The autism community, which includes over 2% of the U.S. population, understandably objects to his dehumanizing language and worries about how politically motivated research will be used to divide the community or cause them harm. People with autism and their families deserve better: help, respect and the truth.

As usual, Kennedy wants a quick fix, a simple exposure that can be blamed, or an unproven therapy that can be peddled. The fact that Kennedy is directing hundreds of millions of dollars toward finding evironmental causes of autism should be proof enough that it is not “an easy thing” to find “culprits” and “eliminate them.”

While increasing funding for research and programs on autism may be justified for a condition that affects so many, it is concerning that the process by which research projects are selected and funded is hidden from scientists, clinicians and patient advocacy groups.

Helen Tager-Flusberg, a psychologist at Boston University and founding member of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, said about the HHS autism initiatives under Kennedy, “they’re treating it like the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. This is as opaque as it could possibly be.”
 

Contributors to this post are: Benedicte Callan, Ph.D., Aurora Horstkamp, M.D., Bruce Mirkin, Mary K. Canales, R.N, Ph.D.