If I lost the car keys, I don’t promise my partner to find them in the kitchen.

Clearly, RFK is either confidently stupid, or confident he can eventually produce and put something vaguely resembling a key in the kitchen in the alloted timeframe.

I would be surprised if they don't already have the document drafted up and are just... engineering the results they want to justify the conclusion.

He's going to blame vaccines.

As an autistic person: please no.

But I guess that's just a part of the war on science this administration is waging. Getting rid of the population overrepresented in sciences will get them there fast.

They're already sending the browns to a concentration camp, it won't be long before they work their way through the list.

"Kennedy also claimed most autism cases are severe before citing a statistic from the report that said 25 percent of children with autism are nonverbal. HHS did not respond to a question as to whether the 25 percent statistic accounts for all severe cases."

The tricky thing about a (probably misleading) statistic like that is 0% of the autistic people I know are nonverbal, but I suppose if I know them in any real capacity, they have to be verbal. Anyway, this freakout about autism seems overblown to me. Can any RFK championers explain this one to me?

> this freakout about autism seems overblown to me.

That's the point. It's a distraction with no possible verifiable result. His supporters will see this on the news and say: "Wow, Kennedy is finally really doing something about that scary Autism stuff, he's great!"

At some point he can just misrepresent some existing research and blame microplastics (or something else) for autism and proudly talk about this in the media.

> He promised to look at all possibilities “agnostically” and “follow the science no matter what it says.”

Great talk! Let’s check in on the walk in a year.

Kennedy already knows the answer, this is just a pretense to justify his unscientific views. No real scientific research on a topic like this can be done on that insane timeline (until September). And of course he put a well-known crank in charge of that study.

They'll blame vaccines, and maybe some other random environmental factors that fit their existing worldview.

RFK Jr is a crank, misinformation peddler, and conspiracy theorist as well-documented and referenced on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr .

So this needs a big pinch of salt. Especially as the "vaccines cause autism" crowd is a base of his.

> "One of the things that I think we need to move away from today is this ideology that the autism prevalence increases — the relentless increases — are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria,”

If I remember rightly, doesn't this explain the effect at least partly? The question is how much of an effect is there after this is taken into account. I'm guessing we don't have a solid answer to that - if RFK's funding leads to one then that's a silver lining I guess. Nevertheless, is it a leap to go from there to environmental effects like vaccines and toxins? What if it's the amount of screen time, social media, or changes to education that are causing autism?

> Kennedy also claimed most autism cases are severe before citing a statistic from the report that said 25 percent of children with autism are nonverbal.

As the article notes, it's a sleight of hand to conflate "nonverbal" with severe. Presumably there are nonverbal people without autism. Moreover, does the cited study account for selection bias in autism severity?