Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a new interview, said autism was an epidemic with an impact that surpasses the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is an epidemic. It dwarfs the COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people. Autism affects children and affects them at the beginning of their lives, the beginning of their productivity,” Kennedy said during a Sunday interview with radio host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM’s “The Cats Roundtable.”

“And it’s absolutely debilitating for them, their families, their communities,” he added.

His statements come after the secretary faced scrutiny earlier this week for claiming “autism destroys families” at a Wednesday press conference.

In the past, Kennedy has also promoted anti-vaccine rhetoric with unproven theories that vaccinations are linked to autism. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), children have a greater risk for autism if there’s a family history of the disorder, if the mother experiences complications at birth or if chromosomal conditions pose a threat to their development.

Kennedy’s comments to Catsimatidis insinuated that the rate of autism was rapidly increasing and causing an uptick in health costs. 

“For our country, just the pure economic cost of autism is, will be by 2035, $1 trillion a year. That’s just the beginning because many of these kids are aging out and their parents worry every day. And I’m talking about people with severe autism, what’s called profound autism, which is about, which is about 26 percent of the total people who are diagnosed with autism,” he said. 

“Those families, those children are non-verbal, they’re non-toilet trained. They have all this stereotypical features of autism, head banging, toe walking, stimming, agonizing gut pain and head banging. Those kids are kids that will not hold jobs. And many kids with autism, many of the higher functioning autism actually can, have tremendous potential to live independently, to get jobs, take care of themselves,” he continued. 

However, CDC experts disagree and have noted autism cases are increasing due to better screening. 

Minnesota’s first lady, Gwen Walz recently called out Kennedy’s comments surrounding autism and criticized the leader for downplaying the contributions of individuals diagnosed with the disorder.

​​“This is deeply upsetting, especially coming from our nation’s highest-ranking health official,” Gwen Walz said in her post Thursday on X. “Individuals with autism are family, neighbors, students, and coworkers and they contribute more to this nation than this man ever will.”

Kennedy’s comments about autism have also been condemned as “disrespectful,” “unrealistic and misleading” by lawmakers and awareness groups that have raised concerns over the secretary’s announcement last week launching a “massive testing and research effort” for the disorder.

“Referring to autism as a chronic disease…and using medical terminology like ‘epidemic’ are really dehumanizes autistic individuals and perpetuates stigma and stereotypes,”The Autism Society of America’s Chief Marketing Officer Kristyn Roth told The Hill in previous comments. “It really reverses a lot of progress that has been made over the last decades.” 

She said the rate at which Kennedy is promising to provide the cause of the disability is alarming. 

“It’s giving people a lot of false hope,” she said. “True, rigorous, peer-reviewed science takes time to find quality answers.”

In his Sunday interview with Catsimatidis, Kennedy touted his proposed research by slamming the National Institute of Health (NIH) and CDC for researching gene linkage to autism instead of more environmental contributors.

“The problem is that NIH and CDC have blocked all the studies that would determine the environmental exposure. So we don’t know. And instead they’ve studied genes and genes contribute to autism, but they, you know, like I said, you need an environmental toxin. And that’s what we’re, that’s what we are now going to look for,” Kennedy said.

“And we’re going to identify it and using AI [artificial intelligence] and the best scientific protocols, all of it, very transparent. We’re deploying 15 teams to look at all the potential exposures and that could be mold. It could be food additives. It could be pesticides. It could be vaccines. It could be ultrasound,” he proposed.