Washington (AP) – The main health agency of the Nation will make a “massive effort of evidence and research” to determine the cause of the Secretary of Autism, Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced Thursday.
Kennedy, a vaccine critic for a long time that has promoted a discredited theory that routine childhood shots cause the disability of development, said the effort will be completed in September and will involve the sinks of scientists. He shared the plans with President Donald Trump duration of a televised cabinet meeting.
Trump suggested that vaccines could be the fault of autism rates, although decades of research have concluded that there is no link between the two.
“There must be something artificial to be doing this,” Trump told Kennedy. “If you think of that answer, where you stop turning something, you eat something or maybe it’s a shot. But something is causing it.”
Autism is a disability of development caused by differences in the brain. It occurs with a wide range of symptoms that may include delays in language, learning and social or emotional skills.
There is a scientific consensus that children’s vaccines do not cause autism. The main autism defense groups, including the speech of autism, agree.
Research, including twin studies, shows that genes play an important role. No guilty unique environmental factor has been considered. The National Health Institutes, which already spends more than $ 300 million in the annual autism research, lists some possible risk factors, such as prenatal to pesticides or air pollution, extreme health of health, the domestic launch of premature premature at a higher age.
Trump and Kennedy have expressed Conns about the increase in autism diagnosis rates.
Part of that increase is due to greater awareness and a change in how disability is diagnosed. For decades, the diagnosis was only given to children with serious communication or socialization problems and those with unusual and repetitive behaviors. But about 30 years ago, the term became a tachigraphy for a group of related related conditions and known as autistic spectrum disorders. The softest autism cases are much more common than serious.
With better detection and autism services, the diagnosis also occurs more and more at earlier ages. And there is more awareness and defense of the legs for black and Hispanic families, which leads to an increase in autism diagnosed between those slimming.
Even so, antivacamic defenders, including Kennedy, have affirmed that vaccines are to blame. The theory is largely derived from a 1998 article that was later retracted.
Scientists have extended a link between vaccines and autism, not finding evidence of higher autism rates among vaccinated compared to those who are not.
Kennedy has hired David Geier, a man who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the autism research effort. Washington Post reported for the first time that Geier’s hiring, whom Maryland was practicing medicine in a child without a doctor’s license.
The HHS did not respond immediately to a request for comments.