Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on July 31 that an answer is coming regarding what causes autism, a disorder that has risen in prevalence among American children in recent years.
“How are you doing on the autism research?” President Donald Trump asked Kennedy during a Cabinet meeting in Maryland.
“We will have an answer for you,” Kennedy responded.
“That’s so important,” Trump said. “We’ll be talking about that. Such an important thing.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
More and more children in America are being diagnosed with autism, symptoms of which can include difficulty speaking and dealing with loud sounds. One in 31 children have autism, up from one in 150 in 2000, according to data
released in 2025 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy, in April 2025,
announced an effort to identify the causes of autism, promising results by September 2025. “We are doing very well. We will have announcements as promised in September,” he told Trump during a Cabinet meeting in August 2025.
Health officials have not said since then what they think is causing autism, although the CDC under Kennedy’s direction did
update a webpage to say that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
Some doctors and scientists say that vaccines do not cause autism, pointing to research on the matter such as a 2015
paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Others maintain it’s an open question or highlight other research, such as a 2026
preprint, that indicates a link.
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,
told The Epoch Times in February that research into autism was ongoing.
“We’ve invested a tremendous amount of money in trying to understand the etiology of autism, because there’s millions of families around the country that have children that … they would love to be able to help, but we don’t really have great answers, both for the cause and how to sort of reverse whatever problems there are,” he said at the time.
The federal government’s autism advisory panel in a draft strategic plan
released in July said that it wanted to support research related to the causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of autism.
“The Working Draft Strategic Plan does not claim that autism or regression has one cause,” Dr. Sylvia Fogel, chair of the panel, said on X. “It calls for rigorous study of meaningful subgroups and possible genetic, immune, mitochondrial, metabolic, neurological, gastrointestinal, environmental, and other pathways.”
