Autism is a bigger scourge than Covid-19 was because the latter “killed old people,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a radio interview that aired Sunday.
Days after angering autism advocates by claiming at a press conference those with autism were incapable of holding jobs, dating, paying taxes, or being fully toilet trained, RFK Jr. again sounded off on autism in an interview on “The Cats Roundtable” with radio host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM.
“This is an epidemic,” RFK claimed. “It dwarfs the COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people. Autism affects children and affects them at the beginning of their lives, the beginning of their productivity. And it’s absolutely debilitating for them, their families, their communities.”
He also claimed autism diagnoses were escalating and thus jacking up health care costs, predicting autism would cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion a year by 2035; he did not elaborate on how he came to that estimate.
Kennedy delivered his initial remarks last week at his first press conference since being confirmed as HHS secretary, prompted by new statistics the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that autism affected 1 in every 31 children in 2022. The previous estimate, in 2020, was 1 in 36.
Overall, the number of children diagnosed with the neurodevelopmental disorder has increased over the years. While autism experts have said the uptick is due to better diagnostic techniques, RFK said Sunday he wasn’t buying it. In addition, he told Catsimatidis, those numbers probably did not reflect the true total.
“The data’s gathered state-by-state, and there’s a state that actually does the best at counting the autism population, California,” Kennedy said in the radio interview. “So we can assume that California’s numbers probably prevail across the United States, and that number is much more alarming — one in every 20 kids, one in every 12.5 boys.”
Covid-19 has killed more than a million people in the U.S., and at least 6 million worldwide. It continues to take hundreds of lives per week in this country, according to the World Health Organization. The pandemic has cost the U.S. economy at least $18 trillion to date, the conservative Heritage Foundation estimated in a report released last summer.
RFK has vowed to find by Septement the cause of autism — which autism advocates and experts say is a complex set of genetic, environmental and other circumstances.
With News Wire Services
