(The Epoch Times)—A report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 15 showed that 1 in 31 children in America has autism.
The figures, which mark another jump in a long line of increases, stem from the CDC’s latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The report prompted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to say that “the autism epidemic is running rampant.”
“That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992,” Kennedy said in an April 15 statement.
“Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”
The previous ADDM report released in 2023 discovered that 1 in 36 8-year-old American children had autism in 2020. The April 15 survey reflects a 16.1 percent increase in two years.
The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in 14 states and surveyed 8-year-old children born in 2014.
The new autism prevalence is also 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when 1 in 150 children had autism.
“The autism epidemic has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young,” Kennedy said in his April 15 statement.
“The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago,” Kennedy added.
Autism Society of America spokeswoman Kristyn Roth told the Associated Press that more research is needed to find what causes autism, but she is alarmed about Kennedy’s approach.
“There is a deep concern that we are going backward and evaluating debunked theories,” Roth said.
Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech, and nonverbal communication, according to Autism Speaks.
“There are many different factors that have been identified that may make a child more likely to have ASD, including environmental, biologic, and genetic factors,” the HHS website reads.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault system for compensating individuals injured by certain vaccines.
This eliminated the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury claims.
In the early 1990s, just 1 in 10,000 children were diagnosed with autism. In the first decade of this century, the estimate rose to 1 in 150. In 2018, it was 1 in 44 before reaching 1 in 36 in 2020.
Last December, President Donald Trump said that he would also give Kennedy the freedom to investigate the potential link between vaccines and autism.
“When you look at some of the problems, when you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said in December.
“I think somebody has to find out. If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism.”
Kennedy has said for years that autism is likely tied to childhood vaccines. The NIH supports and funds research into autism, as well as potential new vaccines.
Kennedy told The Epoch Times in September that he would revamp the NIH to focus on the causes of autism, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopmental diseases instead of developing drugs and serving as an incubator for pharmaceutical products.
In February, after the Senate confirmed Kennedy as health secretary, Trump established the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which the White House stated would investigate the “root causes of America’s escalating health crisis.”
At Trump’s April 10 cabinet meeting, Kennedy announced that HHS has “launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world” to determine what has caused autism rates to spike in recent years.
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” he noted.
For parents and vaccine safety advocates such as Scott Shoemaker and MaryJo Perry, extensively studying potential links between childhood vaccines and autism is long overdue.
Shoemaker told The Epoch Times that his son was diagnosed with autism at the age of 15 months.
“The bottom line is we want the truth,” said Shoemaker, who is president of Health Freedom Ohio. “We want safe products for our kids. We don’t want big pharma to just say vaccines are safe and effective.”
According to Children’s Health Defense, there has not been a double-blind placebo-controlled safety study on infant vaccines.
“That needs to happen,” Perry told The Epoch Times. “There is no liability and no accountability for pharmaceutical companies. That needs to change.”
Perry, who is president of Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights, said that all vaccines should undergo extensive safety studies and results should be “accurate and transparent.”
“If it’s good and safe, parents will use it,” she said. “You won’t have to coerce parents if it’s good and safe.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.