National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya promised that answers and solutions regarding the United States’s surge of autism will come “within the next year,” marking a later date than the September deadline Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously announced.

On April 10, Kennedy revealed federal health agencies are launching “a massive testing and research effort” that would allow the public to know “what has caused the autism epidemic … and be able to eliminate those exposures” by September. His pledge came after the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed one out of every 36 children now faces autism diagnoses, up from one in 31 in 2020 and two to four per 10,000 in the 1960s.