The Vigilant Fox

They say autism is rising because of “better diagnosis”—but RFK Jr. just blew that narrative wide open. He brought the hard data and dropped one undeniable truth the denialists can’t explain.

HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. appeared on Hannity Thursday evening and unloaded on the predominant autism narrative. It started with a bombshell reveal from Kennedy’s own childhood.

Hannity asked: “What was the number when you were a kid—and what do you think is going on?”

Kennedy replied: “There’s really good data on that.”

He pointed to one of the largest studies ever conducted—900,000 children in Wisconsin, published in a top-tier medical journal.

“It looked at 900,000 kids. It was published in a high-gravitas journal, peer-reviewed study, and they found the rate to be 0.7 out of 10,000.”

That’s less than 1 in 10,000. Today? It’s around 1 in 31.

Let that sink in.

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That’s when Kennedy sounded the alarm on what’s happening now—and why it’s so catastrophic. He said the rise isn’t just in frequency—it’s in severity.

“Two years ago, it was 1 in 36. The CDC data we released this week shows 1 in 31,” Kennedy said.

“The worst state is California,” Kennedy continued, “which actually has the best collection methodologies. So they actually, probably reflect what we’re seeing nationwide.”

“In California, it’s 1 in every 20 kids, and 1 in every 12.5 boys,” he explained.

Even worse, he said the numbers are likely underreported in minority communities. And for many kids, the symptoms are devastating:

“About 25% of the population of those kids with autism, about 25% of them are nonverbal, nontoilet trained,” Kennedy explained.

“They have all of these stereotypical behaviors, the head banging, biting, toe walking, stimming, and that population is growing higher and higher.”

“It’s becoming a larger percentage, so we’re seeing many more cases that are now linked to severe intellectual disability.”

He says it’s a glaring red warning sign—and it’s past time to start acting on it.

And this was the moment that Kennedy took a flamethrower to the media narrative about autism. He shattered the core excuse we’ve all been fed—that this epidemic isn’t real, that it’s just a change in how we count it.

He’s not buying it.

“The media has bought into this industry canard, this mythology, that we’re just seeing more autism because we’re noticing it more. We’re better at recognizing it or there’s been changing diagnostic criteria.”

But the scientific literature, Kennedy said, says otherwise.

“There is study after study in the scientific literature going back, and they decided that the literature going back says decades that says that’s not true.”

He then cited a major investigation by California’s own lawmakers.

“In fact, the California legislature… asked the Mind Institute at UC Davis to look exactly at that topic. They [asked], is it real or are we just noticing it more? The Mind Institute came back and said, ‘Absolutely this is a real epidemic. This is something we’ve never seen before.’”

And he made it painfully clear:

“Anybody with common sense, Sean, would notice that, because the autism—this epidemic is only happening in our children. It’s not happening in people who are our age. And if it was better recognition, you’d see it in 70-year-old men.”

But we don’t.

And after laying out the data, dismantling the media narrative, and exposing the severity of the crisis, Kennedy concluded with a clarion call to get to the bottom of this epidemic.

That’s why he says it’s time to dig deeper—leave no stone unturned, and we may have answers sooner than you think.

“President Trump asked me to find out what’s causing it,” he told Hannity.

“And I am approaching that agnostically. We are looking at everything, we are going to do, we’re going to be very transparent in how we design the studies.”

To get real answers, he’s farming the research out to top institutions across the country—with full transparency from day one.

“We’re going to farm the studies out to 15 premier research groups from all over the country. And we’re going to be transparent about our protocols, about the data sets, and then every study will have to be replicated.”

The list of possible factors is long—and nothing is being ruled out, Kennedy explained.

“We’re going to look at mold. We’re going to look at the age of parents. We’re going to look at food and food additives. We’re going to look at pesticides and toxic exposures. We’re going to look at medicines. We’re going to look at vaccines. We’re going to look at everything.”

When asked how long it would take, Kennedy didn’t miss a beat.

“I think we’ll have some preliminary answers in six months. It will take us probably a year from then before we can have definitive answers because a lot of the studies will not go out until the end of the summer.”

For the first time in decades, someone is asking the hard questions—and demanding real answers.

This time, nothing is off-limits.

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Autism rates are exploding. The “experts” say they’re clueless. But Kennedy believes he knows exactly where to look.

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. just held a press conference to respond to the CDC’s latest numbers on autism rates in the United States.

The findings were impossible to ignore, and Kennedy didn’t sugarcoat just how dire the situation had become.

He revealed that 1 in 31 American children are now diagnosed with autism.

For boys, the numbers are even worse—1 in 20.

And in California, where data tracking is considered the most thorough in the country, the rate may be as high as 1 in 12.5 boys. According to Kennedy, that figure likely reflects a national trend.

Just two years ago, the national rate was 1 in 36. Now, it’s jumped dramatically—and Kennedy says he’s determined to find out why.

“The ASD prevalence rate in 8-year-olds is now 1 in 31. Shocking. There is an extreme risk for boys. Overall, the risk for boys of getting an autism diagnosis in this country is now 1 in 20.

“And as high in California, which has the best data collection.

“So it probably also reflects the national trend—1 in 12.5 boys. This is part of an unrelenting upward trend. The prevalence two years ago was 1 in 36,” Kennedy lamented.

He didn’t hold back in calling out the media and powerful industries, accusing them of covering up environmental factors that are contributing to the crisis.

Kennedy blasted the “epidemic denialists,” pointing to a 1992 ADDM report as proof that autism rates have exploded nearly fivefold in just three decades. Back then, the rate was 1 in 150. Today, it’s 1 in 31.

“It’s clear that the rates are real,” Kennedy stressed.

“Year by year there is a steady, relentless increase. I want it because this epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media and it’s based on an industry canard.

“Obviously there are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures,” he said.

He also took direct aim at the claim that today’s rising autism rates are simply the result of better awareness or improved diagnosis.

To prove his point, Kennedy cited a peer-reviewed 1987 study from North Dakota, where researchers attempted to identify every child in the state with a developmental disorder.

They didn’t cut corners. They analyzed medical records, confirmed diagnoses, and even conducted in-person evaluations across a population of 180,000 children. Then, they followed that same group for 12 years.

If you still believe autism rates are only rising because doctors are “getting better at diagnosing it,” Kennedy said, you’d have to believe that the original researchers somehow missed nearly all the cases—98.8 percent of them.

But that’s not what happened.

“They went back in 2000 and found that they had missed exactly one child,” he said.

“They weren’t missing all these cases. The epidemic is real.”

Then came one of the most infuriating parts of the press conference: Kennedy revealed how autism research funding has been misdirected for years.

He said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has pumped 10 to 20 times more money into studying genetic causes of autism than into researching environmental ones.

That, Kennedy said, is a dead end.

“This is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics,” he argued.

That’s why Kennedy says he’s redirecting resources toward the kind of research that’s long been neglected—into environmental factors.

“And that’s where we’re going to find the answer,” he added.

The most emotional moment came at the end, when Kennedy spoke from the heart about what this epidemic is doing to children—and to families.

“These are children who should not be suffering like this,” he said.

“These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re two years old. These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.

Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

“We have to recognize we are doing this to our children and we need to put an end to it,” Kennedy declared.

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