The Trump administration’s health leaders came before reporters this week in an attempt to show how united they are in advancing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
Instead, they revealed divisions over whether or not that agenda is realistic.
The most stark example came over an issue Kennedy has publicly prioritized: autism. National Institutes of Health director Jayanta Bhattacharya contradicted Kennedy’s timeline for determining the causes of autism when speaking to reporters after Tuesday’s event at HHS headquarters. Bhattacharya, who was previously a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford, said that he would like researchers to “start to put out the preliminary results” within a year. He said such a timeline would constitute a “very rapid study by NIH normal standards.”