RFK Jr. Wildly Defends Terrifying Idea for Registry of Autistic People
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s idea was so bad that the Department of Health and Human Services walked it back.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still advocating for the creation of a disease registry that tracks people diagnosed with autism.
During an appearance Monday night on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, Kennedy tried to explain why the government would need to collate citizens’ private medical records into a massive database—a plan that was announced last month by the National Institutes of Health, and then reportedly abandoned two days later after severe backlash.
“One in every 31 kids today. In California, which has the best database, it’s one in every 20 children, one in every 12.5 boys,” Kennedy claimed.
“This is an existential disease,” Kennedy continued. “Every other disease like this has a registry so that—and its voluntary—public health officials can monitor the numbers. It’s not private information, it’s not information that is gonna go out to other agencies, it’s a voluntary system where your privacy is protected. Just a system for keeping track of a disease that is now becoming debilitating to the American public.”
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published last month found that one in 31 children aged eight years old have been identified with autism spectrum disorder. Days before that report had come out, Donald Trump was already spouting those exact numbers before claiming that autism could potentially be caused by vaccines.
While the CDC has documented an increase in diagnoses from 2000, when only one in 150 children born in 1992 were diagnosed with autism, experts have attributed some of the rise in diagnoses to a widening definition of autism spectrum disorder, which encapsulates a broader range of symptoms, as well as people being more aware of and willing to get diagnostic testing, according to ABC News.
Under Kennedy’s guidance, the CDC has launched a study on connections between vaccines and autism, despite extensive research debunking the conspiracy theory.