RFK Jr. pushes back target date for autism report

• "The most solid information, it will probably take us another six months," Kennedy told CNN's Kaitlan Collins.
• Kennedy laid out the new timeline the same day his Make America Healthy Again Commission released a 68-page report on childhood chronic illness.
• Kennedy tapped David Geier, a vaccine denier who practiced medicine without a license in Maryland, to conduct a study into the links between vaccines and autism.

State of play: Replication studies will be completed by September, and further research will be completed by March, Kennedy said Thursday.

• "We're going to begin to have a lot of information by September," he said. "We're not going to stop the studies in September. We're going to be definitive. The more definitive you are, the more it drives public policy."

Driving the news: Kennedy has maintained that vaccines or other environmental factors lead to increased autism diagnoses in children, despite research debunking the link.

• Research shows that autism can be attributed to multiple factors, with about 80% of cases linked to inherited genetic mutations.
• An April report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that autism diagnoses are on the rise and attributed the increase to improvement in early detection and evaluation services.
• Kennedy publicly contradicted his own agency, repeating that environmental factors caused the spike.

Go deeper: People with autism seek dignity where RFK seeks a cure