The Autism Diagnosis Problem

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Once primarily limited to severely disabled people, autism began to be viewed as a spectrum that included children and adults far less impaired. Along the way, the disorder also became an identity, embraced by college graduates and even by some of the world’s most successful people, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called the steep rise in autism cases “an epidemic.” He blames theories of causality that mainstream scientists reject — like vaccines and, more recently, Tylenol — and even instructed the C.D.C. to abandon its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism. Today, Azeen Ghorayshi explains what’s really driving the increase in diagnoses.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.
0:09.6	Robert of Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly cited the skyrocketing autism rates as central to his mission as Health and Human Services Secretary.
0:17.8	He's laid the blame at the feet of everything from Tylenol to vaccines, and he recently
0:22.4	instructed the CDC to abandon its long-standing position that the latter do not cause autism.
0:28.8	But while the rates of autism have increased in recent decades, the reasons are more complicated
0:34.3	than what Kennedy has presented.
0:37.2	Today, Azine Gerasi explains what's really driving the increase in diagnoses.
0:45.5	It's Monday, November 24th.
0:54.0	So Azeen, the Make America Healthy Again Movement and RFK in particular have really put autism in the spotlight.
1:01.0	RFK Jr., of course, is called autism an epidemic. And I think it is fair to say that he has instilled a lot of fear in people about what the root causes of autism are.
1:10.7	And you've spent a lot of time
1:12.1	thinking about this as part of your reporting. And so that's where I'd like to start. And in
1:16.3	particular, I want to talk about the numbers. Yeah. So autism diagnoses among children in the United
1:23.3	States have been rising pretty consistently for decades. In the year 2000, which is the first year
1:31.1	that the CDC started collecting data on this question, they found that one in 158-year-olds in
1:37.7	the United States had an autism diagnosis. That number has risen consistently every year that they
1:43.6	have published their report.
1:45.3	And the most recent data that they published, which came out this year, found that one in 31 eight-year-olds has an autism diagnosis.
1:53.1	So it goes from one in 150 to one in every 31 children.
1:58.9	Yeah. And I mean, that's a huge increase, right?
2:02.0	And RFK really frames this as an epidemic.
2:07.0	He says, you know, there's something in our environment that is causing autism to spread like
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