Peter MacDonald
At the recent White House meeting on autism, Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr revisited a topic they say has occupied them for more than 20 years. Their first discussion, long before politics, took place in Trump’s New York real estate office. The two men were alarmed at what they saw as an epidemic of autism spreading among American children and the reluctance of official institutions to examine it fully.
Trump cited data showing roughly one in 31 children in the United States now diagnosed with autism, an astonishing rise from the one in 10,000–20,000 rate recorded only a few decades ago. Both men insist this increase cannot be explained away as better diagnosis alone. In their view, something in the modern environment, whether medical, chemical or pharmaceutical is driving it.
One of their most controversial claims concerned what they describe as an “accidental study group”: the Amish. Because Amish families traditionally avoid many modern medical interventions, including most vaccines, Trump and Kennedy claim (as well as some medical researchers who have studied Amish populations) that autism among Amish children is extremely rare. They argue that this population provides a natural comparison to the wider US public. According to them, federal researchers and major journals have repeatedly declined to study this contrast, while mainstream outlets dismiss it as ‘debunked’, which Trump and Kennedy say demonstrates how tightly Big Pharma and allied institutions control the narrative.
Trump also raised concerns about the use of common painkillers during pregnancy. And so the media seized on this point. Major outlets and government statements, including New Zealand’s Minister of Health, Simeon Brown, debunked the painkiller claim. As a result, coverage overwhelmingly focused on acetaminophen, effectively turning the conversation into a sensationalised “Tylenol controversy”.
From Trump and Kennedy’s perspective, this was no accident. By ring fencing the discussion around the painkiller claim, the media buried the broader argument about autism prevalence, environmental factors, and vaccine related questions. The focus on a single, controversial point served to ridicule and dismiss their larger message, while the numbers and patterns they presented 1 in 31 nationally and 1 in 12.5 in California received little to zero attention. In essence, the framing allowed the mainstream to control the narrative and limit public engagement with the underlying issues.
This dynamic reflects what I see as the Upton Sinclair effect: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ Many researchers, health professionals and journalists, dependent on pharmaceutical funding or institutional support, have every incentive to avoid pursuing or amplifying questions that could threaten their livelihoods. The silence that results is not always conspiracy – it is a form of economic self-preservation.
However, in raising this issue so publicly, Trump may have cleverly let the genie out of the bottle. Once released, such a subject can never truly be put back in. The question of what lies behind the soaring rates of autism will continue to haunt public discussion and no amount of media spin or institutional denial can hide it forever.
In my opinion, what will happen now, perhaps over the next few decades or even sooner, is that modern researchers and whistleblowers with a conscience will eventually bring the causes of autism into full view. When that happens, the world will be forced to face uncomfortable truths and only then will genuine solutions emerge. Until that day, the story of autism remains both a scientific and moral test: of whether our societies value truth over profit and transparency over silence.
