RFK Jr. drops autism bombshell on Tucker Carlson as he says he's found the 'leading culprit'
Kennedy made the stunning allegation during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, days after promising to re-evaluate the recommended schedule for vaccines for children and teenagers, including for measles and hepatitis B.
During the conversation, Kennedy claimed that babies who received hepatitis vaccines during their first 30 days of life had a '1,135 percent elevated risk of autism' compared to those who received the vaccine later or not at all.
'[The] CDC did that study in 1999,' he told the former Fox News host. The 2003 study he had been referring to found no evidence of such a link.
'They looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within the first 30 days of life and compared those children to children who had received the vaccine later or not at all,' Kennedy continued. 'And they found an 1135 percent elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children.
'And it shocked them,' he went on, ultimately declaring, 'They kept the study secret.
'And then they manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link,' he said. 'And you know we know how they did it? They got rid of all the older children.'
The study he had been referring to, published in November 2003 in Pediatrics, tracked more than 140,000 US children born between 1992 and 1999 for several years.
Kennedy claimed the study's final version 'just had younger children who were too young to be diagnosed.
'And they stratified that - stratified the data,' he said. 'And they did a lot of other tricks, and all of those studies were the subject of that kind of trickery.'
The secretary went on to claim he was stomping out such purported corruption and would soon find said link Kennedy erroneously claimed was supported by 'over a hundred [nongovernment] studies'.
'But, um, what we're going to do now, is we're going to do all the kind of studies that the Institute of Medicine originally recommended,' he said.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee, part of the National Academy of Sciences, found in 2001 that a link between popular vaccine ingredient thimerosal and increased rates of autism was 'biologically plausible.'
At the time, the committee acknowledged a lack of clear evidence to support the link and recommended a series of studies be conducted by the CDC.
'CDC never did those,' Kennedy then claimed - alleging the agency instead commissioned the creation of six epidemiological studies that all 'use[d] fraudulent techniques.
'You know, they say statistics don't lie, but statisticians do,' Kennedy said, framing epidemiological studies as 'very easy to manipulate.'
'None of those studies did what you would do if you wanted to find the answer, which is to compare outcomes in a fully vaccinated group to health outcomes in an unvaccinated group.
'And CDC did that study in 1999,' he said, referring to the study published in 2023 that was led by former CDC researcher Dr. Thomas Verstraeten.
'Within 6 months we'll have definitive answers, after September,' Kennedy promised, when it came to the still-absent statistics.
The Daily Mail has reached out to the CDC for clarification into some of Kennedy's comments.
The agency and many others maintain no links have been found between any vaccine ingredients and autism spectrum disorders.
A new panel of vaccine advisers appointed by Kennedy will re-evaluate the recommended schedule for vaccines for children and teenagers after meeting in Atlanta Wednesday, its new chairman, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, said Wednesday.
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