RFK Jr. Defends Focus On Autism And Food Dyes In His First Weeks As HHS Secretary

At a press briefing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his priorities since taking his position.

Transcript

00:00So, Secretary Kennedy, you have a lot of issues on the Maha agenda, obviously. And

00:13I'm very curious if you could share some of the logic of choosing, for example, autism

00:18and food dives and things as some of the kind of inaugural issues that you're coming forward

00:23with.

00:24I would say, you know, we're, I mean, we're in a triage situation now. So we're, we're

00:31choosing our priorities based upon the issues that I mean, the food diet is just a no brainer.

00:39Nobody wants to eat petroleum. Everybody knows there's enough science out there that we know

00:43it's terrible for you, cause health problems, but also behavioral problems. And so we can

00:51act on that. Now, anything that we can act on, we're going to act on immediately. Some

00:55stuff we need science for, we just need to do more science. But a lot of times you hear

01:01people say, Oh, we're going to do more science on that. And then 10 years go by, that's not

01:06going to happen. President Trump wants dramatic change. President Trump wants dramatic change

01:14change in the next two years. And we're going to deliver that for him. In terms of autism,

01:19autism is a priority. We've gone from one in 10,000 now to one in 31, one in every 20 boys.

01:27This is, this is 1000 times more impactful to our country from an economic point of view,

01:32from a moral point of view. Um, uh, from just a, uh, um, the perspective of just our national

01:41well-being that, uh, it has to be, it's caused it by 2035. It's going to cost us autism alone.

01:49Just one of these chronic disease will cost our country a trillion dollars a year. We have

01:55to end that. And we have to end that because the children and the families are suffering so,

01:59so terribly. So that was, that has been a priority for me for 20 years. And it will continue to be a

02:07priority. And we are going to find the answer very, very quickly. And we're going to eliminate

02:11the exposures that are caught.