Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised that by September, we'd know "what has caused the autism epidemic," but the National Institutes of Health on Tuesday said it won't quite be that quick. "We're going to get hopefully grants out the door by the end of the summer. And people will get to work. We'll have a major conference, with updates, within the next year," said NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Tuesday. He described the effort as "a very rapid study by NIH's normal standards," emphasizing a balance between speed and scientific rigor, CBS News reports. He added, "It's hard to guarantee when science will make an advance. It depends on, you know, nature has its say." Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, previously vowed that with the knowledge gained by September, "we'll be able to eliminate" whatever "exposures" cause autism.
Bhattacharya attributed the timeline discrepancy to scientific unpredictability and said Kennedy is "accurately communicating that we want to get moving on this as rapidly as we can." The NIH is expected to award grants to between 10 and 20 research groups, with funding totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, to carry out the research. Bhattacharya stressed that privacy would be protected: "The identifiers will be hidden from the researchers themselves. There will be systems in place where they can't pull down the data and look at any individual patient. They'll be looking at statistical aggregates." He also confirmed that Kennedy would not influence the selection or funding process. Kennedy, who is famously anti-vaccine, recently appointed another anti-vaccine advocate to be a data analyst, Yahoo News reports. (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)
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