Trump falsely claims Amish 'have essentially no autism'
- Published on September 24, 2025 at 23:11
- 4 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"I think I can say that there are certain groups of people that don't take vaccines and don't take any pills that have no autism -- that have no autism. Does that tell you something?" Trump said during the September 22, 2025 press conference.
The president turned to his vaccine-skeptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and asked if that was true. Kennedy replied that "some studies" pointed to the Amish.
"See, Bobby wants to be very careful with what he says, and he should, but I'm not so careful with what I say," Trump continued. "But you have certain groups. The Amish, as an example, they have essentially no autism."
Social media posts and articles parroting Trump's claim quickly rocketed across X and other platforms.
The president's claim came as he argued against Tylenol use during pregnancy, misleadingly linking the painkiller to autism, and pushed major changes to the routine vaccine schedule given to infants (archived here). The remarks were rife with talking points popular among supporters of the anti-vaccine movement.
Identifying the cause of autism -- a complex condition connected to brain development that many experts believe occurs for predominantly genetic reasons -- has been a pet cause for Kennedy, who has a long history of spreading misinformation about vaccines.
The World Health Organization said September 23 that neither acetaminophen -- the primary ingredient in Tylenol, known as paracetamol in Europe -- nor vaccines have been shown to cause autism, a point echoed in statements from medical groups dedicated to autism (archived here and here).
Experts similarly refuted Trump's claim that autism is absent among the Amish.
"Autism is not a new phenomena and impacts all communities," the Coalition of Autism Scientists, an organization comprising over 250 US autism researchers, said in a September 23 statement to AFP.
"There is autism among the Amish, but very likely underdiagnosis because they do not access medical care."
Autism among Amish
There are about 411,000 Amish people living across the United States and Canada, with some of the largest settlements in the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
Experts said data is limited on the prevalence of autism in Amish communities, but there is no question the condition exists.
"We have asked some Amish folks if there is any autism in the community," said epidemiologist Braxton Mitchell, co-director of the University of Maryland's Amish Research Clinic, in a September 23 email (archived here). "The answer is yes. We don't know how much."
A preliminary evaluation in 2010 sent clinicians door-to-door in counties in Ohio and Indiana, where they screened 1,899 Amish children using a standardized questionnaire and other diagnostic tools (archived here).
The researchers reported the presence of autism "at a rate of approximately 1 in 271 children," but they wrote that further studies would need to address "the cultural norms and customs that may be playing a role in the reporting style of caregivers."
Mitchell, whose team has been working with the Amish for over 30 years, told AFP it is difficult to compare the paper's findings to non-Amish populations, because a direct comparison would require replicating the same methods.
"Bottom line: yes, autism does exist in the Amish," Mitchell said. "We do not know how its frequency compares to non-Amish."
Alycia Halladay, chief science officer for the Autism Science Foundation, agreed that Amish communities "definitely have autism" (archived here).
"Because Amish tend to be a little consanguineous, they have a higher rate of genetic disorders, some of which lead to autism," she said in a September 23, 2025 email.
Halladay pointed to additional research mentioning autism among the Amish, including one case report from 2009 on "an Amish girl with autism and seizures" who was found to have a rare genetic mutation (archived here and here).
Steven Nolt, professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County -- home to one of the largest Amish settlements in the US -- said anecdotal evidence also disproves Trump's statement (archived here).
"Amish parents sometimes write in Amish publications about their children with autism, and use that term," he told AFP in a September 24, 2025 email.
Vaccines and Tylenol
Research also shows the Amish vaccinate, albeit at lower rates than the general population -- a trend Nolt attributed to geography and culture (archived here).
One 2011 study surveyed Amish parents in one Ohio county and found only 14 percent had not given any of their children a single immunization (archived here).
In 2017, researchers mailed questionnaires to Amish families in another Ohio county, and nearly 98 percent of the respondents had vaccinated their children in whole or in part (archived here).
Experts also rejected Trump's suggestion that the Amish avoid Tylenol.
"I can tell you that Tylenol is used by many Lancaster Amish," Mitchell said.
Nolt added: "Anecdotally, I can tell you that Amish people I know take aspirin, Tylenol, or other over the counter pain reliever."
Well-worn falsehood
US fact-checking organizations have repeatedly debunked claims that autism is absent in Amish communities.
The claims have a long history but resurfaced in 2023 when anti-vaccine advocate Steve Kirsch, whom AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for spreading health misinformation, said during a Pennsylvania State Senate panel that the Amish "are largely unvaccinated and there's no autism."
AFP previously debunked Kirsch's claim that the Amish died from Covid-19 at a significantly lower rate than the general population.
AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about vaccines here.
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