Posted on 04/16/2025 3:13:24 PM PDT by ransomnote
ransomnote: The transcript below contains RFK Jr's remarks made in the first 12 minutes of the recording. Full video is 30 minutes in length.
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. : I'm going to go over some of the key numbers from the report.
Overall, the autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate. The study tests 8-year-olds who were born in 2014. And by the way, these studies are two years later than they should be. And one of the things that we're going to do as we move this function to the Administration For A Healthy America to the chronic disease -- the new chronic disease division, is we are going to have updated real-time data so that people can look at this, Americans can understand what is happening with chronic disease in this country in real-time. (ransomnote: Otherwise) I'd have to wait two years to react. We don't wait two years to react to a measles epidemic and we should not-- or any kind of infectious disease. We shouldn't have to do that for diabetes or autism.
The A.S.D. Prevalence rate in 8-year-olds is now one in 31. Shocking. There's an extreme risk for boys, overall the risk for boys of getting an autism diagnosis in this country is now one in 20. And as high in California, which has the best data collection, so it probably also reflects the national trend, one in 12.5 boys. This is part of an unrelenting, upward trend. The prevalence two years ago was one in 36. Since the first ADDM report in 1990 -- which was 1992 births, autism has increased by a factor of 4.8, that's 480%, I believe.
The first ADDM survey was 22 years ago, when prevalence was one in 150 children. In all the core states, the trend is consistently upward, and most cases now are severe. So about 25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet trained and have other stereotypical features. Head banging, tactile and light sensitivities, stimming and toe-walking, etc.
One of the things that I think that we need to move away from today is this ideology that this ideology that the autism diagnosis, that the autism prevalence increase, the relentless increases are simply artifacts of better diagnosis, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria. If you look at table three of the ADDM report, it's clear that the rates are real. That they are increasing in the last 10 years, year by which is the -- beginning with the first one, year by year there is a steady, relentless increase.
I want to -- because this 'epidemic denial' has become a feature in the mainstream media, and it's based on an industry cannard, obviously there are people who don't want us to look at environmental exposures. And so I want to just read you some of the -- a little excerpt from some of the older studies.
The baseline for autism in this country was established with the largest study in history. A study of all 900,000 children in the state of Wisconsin. Children under the age of 12. They found .7 children had autism in every 10,000. That's less than 1 in 10,000. Today we're at one in 31. That study also confirmed the four-to-one male-to-female ratio. There were at that time just over 60 children in Wisconsin with autism. And today it's around 20,000.
In 1987, there was another exhaustive study, a peer-reviewed study in North Dakota set out to count every child in the state with a pervasive developmental disorder, including autism. That study meticulously combed through every record, every diagnosis, and even conducted in-person assessments of the entire population of 180,000 children under 18. The autism rate, they found, was 3.3 per 10,000. So that's in line with the one in 10,000 that was found in Wisconsin 17 years earlier. For context, today -- the last number of one in 36 is 83 times higher.
In 1987, out of every one million kids, 330 were diagnosed with autism. Today there are 27,777 for every million. If you accept the epidemic deniers' narrative, you have to believe that researchers in North Dakota missed 98.8% of the children with autism. Thousands of profoundly disabled children were somehow invisible to doctors, teachers, parents and even their own study. The same researchers who followed the original cohort for 12 years double checked their number, they went back in 2000 and found that they had missed exactly one child.
Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid, they weren't missing all these cases. The epidemic is real. Between 1959 and 1965, researchers from 14 hospitals associated with major universities undertook a national collaborative perinatal project, tracking 30,000 children from birth to age 8. This was no half-baked survey-based analysis. The study conducted nine separate screenings, covering neurology, psychology, speech, language, hearing and visual function. Every developmental quirk, anomaly and disorder was logged with painstaking detail.
Autism condition characterized by profound impairments in social communication, behavior would have stood out like a neon sign. There were 14 cases, that's 4.7 per 10,000. So we know what the historic numbers are. And we know what the numbers are today. And it's time for everybody to stop attributing this to this ideology of 'epidemic denial'.
In 2009, the California state legislature charged the Mind Institute at U.C. Davis with -- because this myth was already becoming pervasive, the myth of 'epidemic denial', was already becoming pervasive in the mainstream media, the California legislature directed the Mind Institute at U.C.-Davis to answer the question, and Irva Hertz-Picciotto is a highly esteemed, revered scientist, neurology and epidemiologist, came back with a definitive answer, the epidemic is real. Only a very, very small portion of it can be changed -- can be charged to better recognition or better diagnostic criteria.
I want to say a couple of other things. There are many, many other studies that affirm this.
ransomnote: The X.com content ends here. The remaining remarks RFK Jr. made is present in other recordings of the press conference.
RFK Jr: And instead of listening to this cannard of 'epidemic denial', all you have to do is start reading a little science. Because the answer is very clear. And this is catastrophic for our country.
There's a recent study by Blaxill et. al., and a team of other researchers that said that the cost of treating autism in this country by 2035, so within 10 years, will be $1 trillion a year. This is added to already astronomical healthcare costs. And then there is an individual injury, these are kids that -- this is a preventable disease. We know it's environmental exposure. It has to be. Genes do not cause epidemics. It's an epidemic. It can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.
And Irva Hertz-Picciotto pointed out that because of this mythology, that the amount of money and resources put into studying genetic causes, which is a dead end, has been historically 10 to 20 times the amount spent by N.I.H. and other agencies, the study -- to study environmental factors, to study exposures, to study external factors and this is where we're going to find the answer. This is an individual tragedy as well. Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children.
These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they're 2 years old. And 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. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children. And we need to put an end to it. And I think I'm going to have Walter Zahorodny, who is the most senior researcher for this project, and has been doing this for many years, to come up and say a little. Applause
END OF TRANSCRIPT AT THE 13:05 minute mark in the video which continues for another 17 minutes.
ransomnote: Use the link below to continue watching the video when researcher Walter Zahorodny begins his presentation.
The ridiculous number of vaccines crammed into children at a rate many times that of children in my era.
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