President Trump said this weekend that his administration will have something “very important” to say about autism on Monday.
I think it’s going to be a very important announcement, and I think it’s going to be one of the most important things that we are going to do,” Trump said at a dinner Saturday hosted by the conservative American Cornerstone Institute.
Trump’s announcement comes after the Wall Street Journal wrote recently that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will release a report suggesting that the use of the over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol by pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, contrary to medical guidelines that say it is safe to use.
Autism diagnoses in the United States have increased greatly since 2000, which has elevated public concern. By 2020, the U.S. autism rate in 8-year-olds was 1 in 36, or 2.77%, up from 2.27% in 2018 and 0.66% in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy has asserted that the U.S. is in the grip of an “autism epidemic” fueled by “environmental toxins.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intends to award the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute a contract for investigating the association between vaccines and autism prevalence, Reuters reported on Sept. 12.
The notice of award, posted Sept. 11 to the government’s official website, SAM.gov, was made by the CDC Office of Acquisition Services. It was for a single-source contract and can be issued without a competitive bidding process, Reuters wrote.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Trump and Kennedy have publicly made statements linking autism to vaccines and other medicines despite a lack of research to support their claims, according to The Hill.
“So 30 years ago, we had, I’ve heard numbers of like one in 200,000, one in 100,000,” Trump, the then president-elect, told reporters at a press conference in December.
“And now I’m hearing numbers of one in 100. So something’s wrong,” he continued. “There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it.”