On April 15 a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC") showed that 1 in 31 children in America has autism.  The figures, which mark another jump in a long line of increases, stem from the CDC’s latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commented on the report that “the autism epidemic is running rampant."

“We need to move away from this ideology that the prevalence of autism increases are simply from better diagnosis, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria," RFK Jr said in his address to the participants of the meetings. 

The previous ADDM report released in 2023 discovered that 1 in 36 8-year-old American children had autism in 2020. The April 15 survey reflects a 16.1 percent increase in two years. What is causing this? Why is this not a top question for researchers? The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in 14 states and surveyed 8-year-old children born in 2014.

Even more surprisingly, the new autism prevalence is also 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when 1 in 150 children had autism. Going back even further, In the early 1990s, only 1 in 10,000 children were diagnosed with autism. In the the first decade of the 2000s, the estimate rose to 1 in 150. In 2018, and it was 1 in 44 before reaching 1 in 36 in 2020.

Kennedy has been consistent over the years in his belief that childhood vaccines are the likely cause of the rampant increase in Autism.