
President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the rise in autism rates in the United States may be caused by artificial or external factors, reigniting fears among medical professionals that the White House is lending credence to widely debunked conspiracy theories.
"It was 1 in 10,000, now it's 1 in 31. I think that's just a terrible thing," Trump said while hosting the White House's Make American Healthy Again (MAHA) commission. "It has to be something on the outside. It has to be artificially induced, it has to be."