Daily Mail
4/11/2025

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a 40-minute off-the-cuff speech where he nonchalantly announced a project very similar to president Trump's 'Operation Warp Speed' COVID-19 vaccine effort. The goal of Kennedy's project will be to find the cause of the country's autism epidemic by September of this year.

His unexpected remarks during his visit to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, which were meant to be a welcome from the new FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, got several staffers to walk out of the room, two anonymous employees told Politico.

This comes a little over a week after Kennedy fired thousands of HHS employees, 3,500 of whom were employed at the FDA. Kennedy's goal is to reduce the government health workforce from 82,000 down to a total of 62,000. 

Among many other things he said that upset his audience, Kennedy accused FDA employees of being 'sock puppets' of the industries they regulated.

However, it was his use of a word now considered to be a slur among democrats, that shocked far-left attendees the most.

'Because of my family's commitment to the autism issue, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school,' Kennedy said, in a reference to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded in Wassaic, New York.

The school closed in 2013 and was once an institution that accepted people with developmental disabilities.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave an unorthodox speech on Friday to employees at Food and Drug Administration, an agency he gutted in early April
Among the most focused-on parts of his remarks was when he re-announced his new autism project, in reference to a now closed school in New York that accepted people with developmental disabilities

He made the reference while talking about rising autism diagnoses in children, asserting that on his visits to Wassaic he 'never saw anybody with autism.' 

Kennedy recently made the bold claim when he told President Donald Trump on Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services has launched a 'massive testing and research effort' involving hundreds of scientists to find out why autism rates have surged in the US. 

The Secretary claimed that 'within less than six months, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures.'

Kennedy's announcement comes as one in 36 US children in the US have autism, adding up to just under 2 million. 

In the early 2000s, this number was closer to one in 142, a four-fold rise. And the US rates are now higher than many peer nations.

Kennedy suggested newer numbers show rates 'are going up again,' creeping toward one in 31. Kennedy said he’d soon be releasing those numbers from the CDC’s autism monitoring network.

Trump and Kennedy have targeted autism in their 'Make America Healthy Plan.' The president expressed shock at a medical trend that has puzzled doctors for decades: why are autism rates rising so quickly in the US? In a late night Truth Social post Tuesday, the president wrote: "20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 1,000. NOW IT'S 1 in 34. WOW! Something's really wrong. We need BOBBY!!!"

The post was referencing Robert F Kennedy Jr, who was at the time on the verge of being confirmed as head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The Trump administration said Thursday Americans will know the 'cause' of rising autism rates by September. President Trump is pictured here this week

DailyMail.com approached the Department of Health and Human Services for comment about Kennedy's speech to the FDA. A spokesperson from the department has told other outlets that he wasn't using the r-word in a derogatory way.

Kennedy also addressed what the Democrats and the far-left call the deep state "conspiracy theory". Trump and his closest allies have spent the last eight years talking about how to dismantle it.

'President Trump always talks about the Deep State, and the fake media disparages him and says that he's paranoid,' Kennedy told FDA staffers according to a transcript obtained by Politico.

'But the Deep State is real. And it's not what the fake media want you to believe, which is just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the destruction of humanity.'

Kennedy made little mention of his recent layoffs during his FDA speech (Pictured: HHS staffers hugging and shedding tears after receiving notice of dismissal on April 1)

He said “every institution that’s created by human beings” is inevitably captured by powerful interests, and urged FDA employees to take advantage of a four-year period ahead, under his leadership, where the deep state has been disempowered now that he and Trump are in charge of federal institutions.

In an apparent effort to encourage FDA employees to stay true to their mission of making Americans healthier, Kennedy later also referenced the CIA’s Project MKUltra — a notorious human experimentation program from the 1960s — and the Milgram experiment, a well-known study meant to test people’s willingness to obey authority even if it meant inflicting pain on others.

He vowed that the Department of Health and Human Services would not be subjected to undue influence and would listen to “dissidents.” 'All of us are subject to those gravities of agency capture,' he said. "We want to break away from this so we can improve our citizens' health."

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told Politico that Kennedy was 'telling the truth that many Americans already know: for too long, the FDA has been captured by the very industries it is supposed to regulate.'

'Calling this out and encouraging radical transparency is not controversial — it's leadership,' Nixon said. 'The era of rubber-stamping and silence is over.'

He made little mention of the recent layoffs at HHS during his speech, insteadfocusing more on his project to find the cause of autism.

“The information is out there,” he said. “But those studies aren’t done because they may offend the financial interests of powerful entities.”