CHICAGO, Illinois —Since 1900, the mortality rate in America and other first-world countries has declined by roughly 74%, creating a dramatic improvement in quality of life and life expectancy for Americans.

The simple question: “How did this happen?”

Why did the mortality rate decline so precipitously? If you listen to vaccine promoters, the answer is simple: vaccines saved us. What’s crazy about this narrative is how easy it is to disprove, the data is hiding in plain sight. The fact that this easily-proven-false narrative persists, however, tells us a lot about the world we live in, and I hope will encourage parents to reconsider the veracity of many of the narratives they’ve been fed about vaccines, and do their own primary research.

1970, Dr. Edward H. Kass

Standing before his colleagues in Chicago on October 19, 1970, Harvard’s Dr. Edward H. Kass gave a speech to the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America that would likely get him run out of this same profession today. At the time, Dr. Kass was actually the President of the organization, which made the things he had to say about vaccines and their impact on the reduction in American mortality rates even more shocking, at least by today’s standards. Fifty-four years after Dr. Kass’ speech, vaccines have taken on a mythological status in many corners of our world, hyped up by the people who benefit the most from their use. Of course vaccines saved the world. Of course every child should get  every vaccine. If you don’t vaccinate, you will enable the return of deadly childhood diseases. If you don’t vaccinate, your child will die. If you question vaccines, even a little, you’re an “anti-vaxxer” who should be shunned and dismissed!

But what if most of the history about the role vaccines played in declining mortality isn’t even true?

In his famous speech, Dr. Kass took his infectious disease colleagues to task, warning them that drawing false conclusions about WHY mortality rates had declined so much could cause them to focus on the wrong things. As he explained:

“…we had accepted some half truths and had stopped searching for the whole truths. The principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past —tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc. —and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy, thus providing the American people with the highest level of health available in the world. That these are half truths is known but is perhaps not as well known as it should be.”

Dr. Kass then shared some eye-opening charts with his colleagues. I’m trying to imagine a President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America sharing one of these charts today at a meeting of public health officials. I picture someone turning the power off for the room where he’s presenting and then he gets tackled and carried off the stage…here’s the first example of a chart Dr. Kass shared in 1970:

But wait a minute, Dr. Kass’ chart doesn’t even include the measles vaccine…what gives? Well, in 1970, the measles vaccine was just beginning to be rolled out, and as you can clearly see, measles had long since experienced a dramatic decline in mortality. With Pertussis (Whooping Cough), he produced a similar chart:

In this case, you can actually see when the Pertussis vaccine was introduced. He also showed a chart for Scarlett Fever, which furthers the confusion about the role of vaccines, because there’s never been a Scarlett Fever vaccine, and yet the chart of a huge decline in mortality from Scarlett Fever looks very similar to measles and pertussis:

What’s the point?

Dr. Kass was trying to make a simple point to his colleagues, but one with profound implications for public health. His point was so important, I’m going to quote him in really big font to try and drive it home:

Dr. Kass pled with his colleagues to be open to understanding WHY infectious diseases had declined so dramatically in the U.S. (as well as other first world countries). Was it nutrition? Sanitary methods? A reduction in home crowding? (We’ve since learned the answer to all three questions is, “Yes.”) He encouraged his colleagues to be careful not to jump to conclusions prematurely and to maintain objectivity and “devote ourselves to new possibilities.”

Luckily for us, Dr. Kass’ speech that day has been saved for posterity, as it was printed in its entirety in a medical journal. In fact, it’s a journal that Dr. Kass himself founded, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, and his speech is called, “Infectious Disease and Social Change.” There are a number of things about Dr. Kass’ speech that I found breathtaking, especially given that he was the President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Namely:

1.    He never referred to vaccines as “mankind’s greatest invention” or one of the other many hyperbolic ways vaccines are described all the time by vaccine promoters in the press today. Vaccines weren’t responsible for saving “millions of lives” in the United States, as Dr. Kass well knew.

2.    In fact, he never gave vaccines much credit AT ALL for the developed world’s dramatic mortality decline. Which makes sense, because none of the data he had would have supported that view. Which made me wonder, “has anyone tried to put the contribution of vaccines to the decline in human mortality in the 20th century in context?” Said differently, is there any data that measures exactly how much impact vaccines had in saving humanity? Yes, indeed there is. Read on.

1977: McKinlay & McKinlay: The most famous study you’ve never heard of

It won’t be the world’s easiest read, but I hope you take the time to read every word. In 1977, Boston University epidemiologists (and husband and wife) John and Sonja McKinlay published the seminal work on the role vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive decline in mortality seen in the twentieth century, that 74% number I talked about in my opening paragraph. Not only that, but their study warned against the very behavior we are now seeing in the world of vaccines. Namely, they warned that a group of profiteers might take more credit for the results of an intervention (vaccines) than the intervention deserves, and then use those fake results to create a world where their product must be used by everyone. Seriously, they predicted that this would happen. (It’s worth noting that the McKinlay Study used to be required reading at every medical school.)

…they warned that a group of profiteers might take more credit for the results of an intervention (vaccines) than the intervention deserves, and then use those fake results to create a world where their product must be used by everyone. 

Published in 1977 in The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, the McKinlay’s study was titled, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century.” The study clearly proved, with data, something that the McKinlay’s acknowledged might be viewed by some as medical “heresy.” Namely:

By “medical measures,” the McKinlay’s really meant ANYTHING modern medicine had come up with, whether that was antibiotics, vaccines, new prescription drugs, whatever. The McKinlay’s 23-page study really should be read cover to cover, but in a nutshell the McKinlay’s sought to analyze how much of an impact medical interventions (antibiotics, surgery, vaccines) had on this massive decline in mortality rates between 1900 and 1970:

Here are some of the major points their paper made:

·       92.3% of the mortality rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950 [before most vaccines existed]

·       Medical measures “appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in the United States since about 1900–having in many instances been introduced several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no detectable influence in most instances.”

And, here’s the two doozies…

The paper makes two points that I really want to highlight, because they are so important. The first one concerns vaccines. They write:

“Even if it were assumed that this change was entirely due to the vaccines, then only about one percent of the decline following interventions for the diseases considered here could be attributed to medical measures. Rather more conservatively, if we attribute some of the subsequent fall in the death rates for pneumonia, influenza, whooping cough, and diphtheria to medical measures, then perhaps 3.5 percent of the fall in the overall death rate can be explained through medical intervention in the major infectious diseases considered here. Indeed, given that it is precisely for these diseases that medicine claims most success in lowering mortality, 3.5 percent probably represents a reasonable upper-limit estimate of the total contribution of medical measures to the decline in mortality in the United States since 1900.”

In plain English: of the total decline in mortality since 1900, that 74% number I keep mentioning, vaccines (and other medical interventions like antibiotics) were responsible for somewhere between 1% and 3.5% of that decline. Said differently, at least 96.5% of the decline (and likely more than that since their numbers included ALL medical interventions, not ONLY vaccines) had nothing to do with vaccines.

You don’t get to say you saved humanity if, at most, you were responsible for 3.5% of the decline in mortality rates since 1900 (and probably closer to 1%).

And then the McKinlay’s wrote something that made me laugh out loud, because it’s the thing we are seeing every day in today’s vaccine-hyped world:

Sound familiar?

2000: the CDC puts the final nail in the coffin

In 1970, Dr. Kass raised the idea that public health officials need to be careful to not give the wrong things credit for the twentieth century’s massive mortality rate decline in the developed world. In 1977, Drs. McKinlay & McKinlay put data around Dr. Kass’ ideas, and showed that vaccines (and other medical interventions) were responsible for between 1-3.5% of the total decline in mortality since 1900. In 2000, CDC scientists reconfirmed all this data, but also provided more insight into the things that actually have led to declines in mortality.

Published in September 2000 in the journal Pediatrics and titled, “Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th Century,” epidemiologists from both Johns Hopkins and the Centers for Disease Control reaffirmed what we had already learned from McKinlay and McKinlay:

The study went on to explain the things that actually were responsible for a massive decline in mortality:

“water treatment, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices.” Also, “improvements in crowding in US cities” played a major role. Clean water. Safe food. Nutrition. Plumbing. Hygiene. These were the primary reasons mortality declined so precipitously. At least according to the data and published science.

Recent history

I get really strong reactions when I share this chart, compiled from CDC data:

This chart is compiled from this dataset provided by the CDC. You can see that nine vaccines we give children today didn’t even exist in the mid-1980s.Moreover, the vaccination rates for the three vaccines that did exist were hovering near 60% or less as late as the mid-1980s. Today, vaccination rates are all well north of 90% for American children. I think it’s fair to ask, “why so much panic”? If you think about this chart for long enough, it makes you realize how silly the oft-invoked notion of “herd immunity” really is, since we obviously couldn’t have been anywhere near vaccine-induced herd immunity in the mid-1980s. In fact, we’re really no closer today, because adult vaccination rates remain so low, and vaccines wane over time.

Author’s note: the original dataset that I used to link from the CDC has been removed so I’m pasting the details here for posterity.

Why the truth matters

As McKinlay and McKinlay warned, if the wrong intervention (like vaccines) is singled out as the reason Americans and the rest of the first world experienced such a dramatic decrease in mortality in the 20th century, that misinformation can be abused to do things like:

·       Rapidly expanding the number of vaccines given to children

·       Browbeating parents who chose to follow a different vaccine schedule and making them feel guilty

·       Making vaccines mandatory

·       Speaking about vaccines in such reverential terms that even questioning them (like I’m doing in this article) is viewed as sacreligious and irresponsible.

·       And, denying that vaccines injuries happen at high rates, to keep the whole machine moving in the right direction. (By the way, the best guess of vaccine injury rate is about 2% of people who receive vaccines, according to this study commissioned and paid for by the CDC when they actually automated the tracking of vaccine injuries. The “one in a million” figure thrown around by vaccine promoters is simply an unsupportable lie.)

Africa, and other third world countries

Vaccine promoters will often quote statistics about present-day deaths from infectious diseases that sound deeply alarming. Using examples of a disease like measles, they might explain how many children still die from measles every year, and therefore its gravely important that EVERY American parent vaccinate their child for measles. Of course, what they don’t mention is that these infectious disease deaths are happening in places that still have quality of life conditions akin to American children of the early 1900s. Poor nutrition. No plumbing or refrigeration. Bad hygiene practices. Crowded living conditions. All the things that ACTUALLY impacted the mortality rate the most haven’t yet been addressed in certain parts of Africa and other third world countries, and JUST implementing vaccines won’t change the facts. This was Dr. Kass’ point in the first place: know what actually led to the mortality rate decline, and do more of that!

In fact, we now have some data that shows vaccinating children living in situations where they have poor nutrition and lack of sanitation can actually do more harm than good:

The “Aaby Study”

Published in the peer-reviewed journal EBioMedicine in 2017, the study is titled, “The Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural Experiment.” Researchers from the Research Center for Vitamins and Vaccines, Statens Serum Institut (Denmark), and Bandim Health Project looked closely at data from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The scientists in this study closely explored the concept of NSEs, “nonspecific effects” of vaccines, which is a fancy way of saying vaccines may make a child more susceptible to other infections. They found that the data for African children who had been vaccinated with the DTP vaccine:

“was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DTP. . . . DTP is the most widely used vaccine. . . . All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus, or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease, it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.”

In lay terms, this means that giving an African child the DTP vaccine may make the child sick from other infections. It appears that in Africa, the living conditions are more important than the vaccine (as you would very much expect from Dr. Kass’ and the Drs. McKinlay’s work), and the DTP vaccine did indeed do more harm than good. (It’s worth noting that Dr. Aaby was a highly regarded vaccine researcher until he published this study in 2017. It’s my understanding that he has since lost his funding sources. Welcome to today’s world of vaccine “science.”)

Every Second Child

We have another real world example of this phenomenon from the late 1970s. Dr. Archie Kalokerinos made a simple discovery, as he explains:

“At first it was just a simple clinical observation. I observed that many infants, after they received routine vaccines like tetanus, diphtheria, polio, whooping cough or whatever, became ill. Some became extremely ill, and in fact some died. It was an observation, It was not a theory. So my first reaction was to look at the reasons why this happened. Of course I found it was more likely to happen in infants who were ill at the time of receiving a vaccine, or infants who had been ill recently, or infants who were incubating an infection. Of course in the early stages of incubation there is no way whatsoever that anyone can detect the disease. They turn up later on. Furthermore, some of the reactions to the vaccines were not those that were listed in the standard literature.

They were very strange reactions indeed. A third observation was that with some of these reactions which normally resulted in death I found that I could reverse them by giving large amounts of vitamin C intramuscularly or intravenously. One would have expected, of course, that the authorities would take an interest in these observations that resulted in a dramatic drop in the death rate of infants in the area under my control, a very dramatic drop. But instead of taking an interest their reaction was one of extreme hostility. This forced me to look into the question of vaccination further, and the further I looked into it the more shocked I became. I found that the whole vaccine business was indeed a gigantic hoax. Most doctors are convinced that they are useful, but if you look at the proper statistics and study the instance of these diseases you will realise that this is not so.”

Dr Kalokerinos also said something in 1995 that it appears Dr. Aaby’s study was able to corroborate in 2017:

“And if you want to see what harm vaccines do, don’t come to Australia or New Zealand or any place, go to Africa and you will see it there.”

We actually knew the truth in the early 1900s, even before the rapid decline in mortality Well ahead of his time, Englishman John Thomas Biggs was the sanitary engineer for his town of Leicester and had to actively respond to outbreaks of smallpox. He quickly learned that the public health outcomes from sanitation vastly outweighed the impact of vaccination (where he saw dramatic vaccine injury and ineffectiveness). He wrote a definitive work in 1912, Leicester: Sanitation versus Vaccination. More than one hundred years ago, Mr. Biggs discovered what the CDC reaffirmed in 2000: Nothing protects from infectious disease like proper sanitation. He explained:

Dr. Andrew Weil, the oft-quoted celebrity doctor, reenforces the point, explaining that “medicine has taken credit it does not deserve for some advances in health. Most people believe that victory over the infectious diseases of the last century came with the invention of immunizations. In fact, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough, and the others were in decline before vaccines for them became available — the result of better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal, and distribution of food and water.”

Finally

Vaccines didn’t save humanity. Their impact was somewhere between 1-3.5% of the total decline in mortality rates. Improvement in sanitation and standards of living really did (nutrition, living conditions, etc.).

Did vaccines contribute to a small decrease of certain acute illnesses? Yes, but their relative benefit is often exaggerated to an extreme, and then used to browbeat, guilt, and scare parents.

So am I saying no one should vaccinate? No, I’m not. Vaccines provide temporary protection from certain acute illnesses. Some matter more than others. I personally think we give way too many vaccines, and I think the risk/benefit equation of each vaccine is often obscured. Worse, the lie that vaccines saved humanity in the twentieth century has turned many vaccine promoters into zealots, even though their narratives are simply not supported by the facts. But, by all means, get as many vaccines as you want.

I respect your right to make your own medical care choices.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

— George Sarton, founder, History of Science Society

(I’m not a doctor, this is my opinion.)

LAFAYETTE, California—The message that vaccines are safe and effective made perfect sense to my wife Lisa and me. Our beautiful boys would be fully vaccinated. I’d been vaccinated, and my wife had been vaccinated. It was the easiest decision two parents could make. You even get to kill two birds with one stone: protect your babies from infectious disease and contribute to herd immunity, and so protect others. What was the risk of something bad happening from a vaccine? The number thrown around—and still in wide use today—was “one in a million.”

Losing faith in my pediatrician and ultimately the entire medical establishment triggered a massive case of cognitive dissonance for me, as it does for so many parents who trusted their pediatricians with their children’s lives. Could my pediatrician be leading me astray? Could these vaccines really be harming my son? Are those crazy parents actually right? It’s an alienating, disturbing, troubling path that many autism parents must walk. In many cases the parents of children with autism were the most compliant when it came to mainstream medical care—our children typically received every vaccine and medical intervention recommended to us by our trusted doctors. We’re not “anti-vaxxers”; we’re mostly “ex-vaxxers,” the compliant parents who learned the hard way.

Few parents know how recent our high-volume vaccine program really is (I certainly didn’t), how different the US vaccine schedule is from many other first-world countries, how low US vaccination rates for children were as late as the 1980s (without any deadly epidemics), the wide range of side effects (“vaccine injury”) vaccines can create, the straightforward published science that shows vaccines are the culprit of an epidemic of autoimmune conditions (asthma, food allergies, etc.), or the fact that public health officials are well aware that clean water, sanitation, plumbing, and refrigeration had a much larger impact on infectious disease prevention than vaccines. There were so many things I didn’t know when I let my boys get all their vaccines; it’s hard to shake feelings of guilt for not doing my homework.

The 70s most vaccinated child? Me.

I grew up a "Military Brat" and always figured I must have been one of the most vaccinated kids of the 1970s. Born in May of 1969, I lived in Singapore (where I was born), Laos, Mexico, and Korea before I was ten and also traveled to Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines during this same time period.

If you took a travel itinerary like that to your pediatrician today, he'd back up the vaccine truck and start pumping you and your child full of every vaccine he had in inventory and probably special order some unique ones, too.

I often heard my own son's pediatrician talk about "deadly foreign diseases" being "only a plane ride away" as he sought to allay our concerns over the volume of vaccines being given to our own kids.

I've never been able to find a vaccine schedule before 1983, but you'd sure think my own experience would be at the extreme upper end of vaccines given to a child. Not only did I live in multiple foreign countries, but I was also part of the tight military healthcare system where mandatory doctor visits are part of any overseas travel protocol. They could never miss me!

So, here's my schedule, my parents still had it.

To keep it simple, I am only listing my vaccines from birth to age 6 so I can compare it to today's schedule:

March 1970:   Oral Polio
July 1970:      Measles (Rubeola)
Sep. 1970:     DPT
April 1974:     Oral Polio
April 1974:     Typhoid

That's it. I got 5 vaccines.

Today's kids get 36 in the same time period. And, these are typical American kids who may never leave this country. I had lived in or visited nine countries, a number of them third world!

Notable that my first vaccine was given when I was 10 months old. Once, I got 2 vaccines in the same visit. Otherwise, they were a minimum of 4 months apart, and in some cases YEARS apart.

What can we learn from one kid's vaccine schedule? The insane US vaccine schedule is something very, very new. (If a child of the 1970s can survive nine foreign countries with 5 vaccines, surely we can reduce the number of vaccines being given without putting our children and military at risk.)

Safe and effective, or profitable and who knows?

I’ve personally studied the US vaccination program for more than twenty years, looking for clues that might help me better understand what exactly happened to my son. After all, how can I help him get better if I don’t know what hurt him? Mind you, even saying that confuses some people; there’s just not a lot of awareness of the extreme and long-term side effects vaccines can cause in certain children. Much of what you hear in the mainstream media is actually public relations and spin expertly placed there by vaccine makers.

The “safe and effective” message repeated over and over again is a marketing message, but is not fully fact based. Consider the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), an organization typically quoted anytime a discussion of vaccines takes place. Is the AAP a benevolent, objective advocate for your baby? No, they are a trade union for pediatricians, and pediatricians generate the majority of their income from, you guessed it, vaccines. What about the nation’s keeper of the vaccine program, the CDC? Do they give parents objective information about the risks and benefits of vaccines? Or do they feel entitled to scare the heck out of the public to induce them to get vaccinated?

Most people have at least a little bit of cynicism when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry. Approval ratings for “Big Pharma” aren’t much higher than for members of Congress. A journal study published in 2013 titled, “Undue industry influences that distort healthcare research, strategy, expenditure and practice: a review” by University College London researchers looked carefully at how the pharmaceutical industry influences medical research, policy, and practice. What they found won’t surprise you too much:

To serve its interests, the industry masterfully influences evidence base production, evidence synthesis, understanding of harms issues, cost-effectiveness evaluations, clinical practice guidelines and healthcare professional education and also exerts direct influences on professional decisions and health consumers. . . . As a result of these interferences, the benefits of drugs and other products are often exaggerated and their potential harms are downplayed, and clinical guidelines, medical practice, and healthcare expenditure decisions are biased.

Some people mistakenly think vaccines don’t produce the same profit motivation as other products for pharmaceutical companies, but they do. What if I told you that the market for vaccines was worth $60 billion in 2020, up from $170 million in the early 1980s? That’s a 350-fold increase in revenues for vaccine makers in the last thirty years! And it’s not just vaccine makers who will manipulate the facts to serve their interests; they are joined by a federal agency that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has described as a “captive agency” of the pharmaceutical industry, the CDC.

Inducing Fear, Anxiety, and Worry

On April 14, 2004, Glen Nowak, an employee of the CDC, addressed his public health colleagues at the National Influenza Vaccine Summit in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference, cosponsored by the CDC and the American Medical Association, was filled to capacity in the Noble Ballroom of the tony Crowne Plaza Buckhead with public health officials, doctors, and representatives of the world’s largest vaccine makers.

Mr. Nowak’s presentation, entitled “Increasing Awareness and Uptake of Influenza Immunization,” provided insight into the mind-set of American public health officials.As the director of media relations for the CDC, Mr. Nowak told the crowd he considered his job to be to promote “concern, anxiety, and worry” amongst the general population, especially with people who “don’t routinely receive an annual influenza vaccination.” Want more people to get vaccinated? Demand will come from a “perception or sense of vulnerability to contracting or experiencing bad illness,” Mr. Nowak explained. During his speech Mr. Nowak made it clear that without provoking anxiety you won’t get the behavior you want:

The belief that you can inform and warn people, and get them to take appropriate actions or precautions with respect to a health threat or risk without actually making them anxious or concerned. This is not possible. . . . This is like breaking up with your boyfriend without hurting his feelings. It can’t be done.

Mr. Nowak’s presentation included a “recipe” for creating high vaccine demand. Step #3 of Mr. Nowak’s seven-step recipe stressed the importance of medical experts and public health officials stating “concern and alarm” and predicting “dire outcomes” if people don’t get vaccinated. It’s critical spokespeople frame the flu season in ways that motivate behavior, Mr. Nowak explained, like “very severe” and “deadly.” References to “pandemic influenza” from the early 1900s might also help scare the populace into acting, he noted.

A few years later GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a London-based vaccine maker, would brag to this same crowd that they had invested more than two billion dollars in flu vaccine manufacturing for the US market. Mitch Johnson, executive director of the Influenza Franchise for GSK, told the crowd that GSK is “committed to working with the government, public health agencies and healthcare providers to raise awareness surrounding the importance of flu vaccination.”

Lost in Mr. Nowak’s seventeen-slide presentation that day was the acknowledgment that some of the messaging Mr. Nowak was encouraging, and that GSK would later sponsor, looked a lot like lying. Just nine months after Mr. Nowak’s presentation, in an article published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Dr. Peter Doshi asked (and answered) a question that put Mr. Nowak’s recommendations under intense scrutiny. Dr. Doshi’s article, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” explained that the CDC’s claims of thirty-six thousand annual deaths from flu were “surely exaggerated” and that “until corrected and until unbiased statistics are developed, the chances for sound discussion and public health policy are limited.” In an unusually tough critique, Dr. Doshi (who today serves as editor of the BMJ) even called Mr. Nowak out by name and cited his seven-step recipe as proof of the willingness of the CDC to cite figures and outcomes that science can’t support, all in the name of getting more people vaccinated:

At the 2004 “National Influenza Vaccine Summit,” co-sponsored by CDC and the American Medical Association, Glen Nowak, associate director for communications at the NIP, spoke on using the media to boost demand for the vaccine. One step of a “Seven-Step ‘Recipe’ for Generating Interest in, and Demand for, Flu (or any other) Vaccination” occurs when “medical experts and public health authorities publicly . . . state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)— and urge influenza vaccination.” Another step entails “continued reports . . . that influenza is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people, helping foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza.”

Preceding the summit, demand had been low early into the 2003 flu season. “At that point, the manufacturers were telling us that they weren’t receiving a lot of orders for vaccine for use in November or even December,” recalled Dr Nowak on National Public Radio. “It really did look like we needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot.”

A year after Dr. Doshi’s critique, in 2006 Dr. Tom Jefferson of the highly esteemed and independent Cochrane Collaboration issued a blistering report about the flu vaccine, again in the BMJ. Cochrane’s goal as an organization is to provide consumers with “health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of interest,” and Dr. Jefferson’s article, “Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence,” not only supported Dr. Doshi’s arguments but also challenged the entirety of Mr. Nowak’s messaging (and therefore the CDC’s).

Dr. Jefferson found a “large gap between policy and what the data tell us” and “a gross overestimation of the impact of influenza” and also felt that “the optimistic and confident tone of some predictions of viral circulation and of the impact of inactivated vaccines, which are at odds with the evidence, is striking.” Said differently, he was astonished by how much public health officials were lying, and they urged that a “re-evaluation [of the entire use of flu vaccine] should be urgently undertaken.” It’s rare to see a scientific beat down administered in such striking tones, but neither Dr. Doshi nor Dr. Jefferson held back in their critique that the evidence supporting the flu vaccine recommendations was grossly inadequate.

Dr. Doshi, by now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, took another swing at the flu vaccine in 2013. His essay (once again in the BMJ), “Influenza: marketing vaccine by marketing disease,” should make the CEO of Walgreens, Rite Aid, and any of the other drug stores pushing flu shots every winter season blush with embarrassment. His words were incisive:

Promotion of influenza vaccines is one of the most visible and aggressive public health policies today. Twenty years ago, in 1990, 32 million doses of influenza vaccine were available in the United States. Today around 135 million doses of influenza vaccine annually enter the US market, with vaccinations administered in drug stores, supermarkets—even some drive-throughs. This enormous growth has not been fueled by popular demand but instead by a public health campaign that delivers a straightforward, who-in-their-right-mind-could-possibly-disagree message: influenza is a serious disease, we are all at risk of complications from influenza, the flu shot is virtually risk free, and vaccination saves lives. Through this lens, the lack of influenza vaccine availability for all 315 million US citizens seems to border on the unethical. Yet across the country, mandatory influenza vaccination policies have cropped up, particularly in healthcare facilities, precisely because not everyone wants the vaccination, and compulsion appears the only way to achieve high vaccination rates. Closer examination of influenza vaccine policies shows that although proponents employ the rhetoric of science, the studies underlying the policy are often of low quality, and do not substantiate officials’ claims. The vaccine might be less beneficial and less safe than has been claimed, and the threat of influenza appears overstated.

A reasonable question to ask if you read Dr. Doshi’s essay from start to finish would be, “How does the flu vaccine survive such pointed criticism?” Yet look around today, and nothing has changed. The “36,000 flu deaths per year” unsupportable statistic is still routinely cited, and marketing for the flu shot remains driven by doctors and public health officials predicting dire outcomes that never come to pass, with much of the marketing funded by vaccine makers, who have now combined their marketing message with Covid shots. Head over to the CDC’s website in the fall and winter, and you’ll be greeted with encouragement to get your flu vaccine today, to “protect” both you and your family. When it comes to the flu vaccine, or really any vaccine, the CDC serves as both judge and jury. There is no check, there is no balance. There’s one agency. Many CDC employees end up on the payroll of Big Pharma, like Dr. Julie Gerberding, who parlayed her position as head of the CDC into president of Merck’s vaccine division.

In late 2017 Science Magazine further exposed the limitations and false assumptions behind the flu vaccine in an article titled, “Why flu vaccines so often fail.” It turns out the reason is more complicated than the oft-repeated claim that it’s hard to guess what the primary strain of flu will be next season:

For many decades, researchers believed the flu vaccine offered solid protection if it was a good match to the circulating strains; studies from the 1940s through the 1960s routinely showed an efficacy of 70% to 90%. But those studies relied on a misleading methodology. Without a simple way to detect the virus in the blood, researchers measured antibody levels, looking for a spike that occurs after infection. Then in the 1990s, sensitive polymerase chain reaction tests enabled researchers to actually measure viral levels, and they told a different story. It turned out that some people who did not have the big antibody spike after exposure—and were therefore counted as a vaccine success—actually did show a jump in viral levels, signaling infection. Earlier assessments had exaggerated vaccine efficacy. What’s more, efficacy was sometimes low even when the vaccine and circulating strains appeared well matched.

In 2012 the news got worse for the flu vaccine with the publication of a study in Clinical Infectious Diseases that found that children who had received the flu vaccine didn’t have a lower risk of getting the flu, but they had a more than four times higher risk of getting other respiratory infections, causing the researchers to conclude that “the protection against influenza virus infection conferred by TIV [flu vaccine] was offset by an increased risk of other respiratory virus infection,” which they attributed to the flu vaccine’s “viral interference” with the natural immune system.

How come the public is never told about all this new information? We can learn a lot from the unwillingness of public health officials to amend their story when called out in esteemed medical journals. From Mr. Nowak’s “recipe” we know that public health officials are willing to exaggerate, spin, and lie when appropriate as a matter of policy.

Vaccines Didn’t Save Humanity

Hiding in plain sight and published in the AAP’s own journal, Pediatrics, is a study from 2000 by public health scientists from both the CDC and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health that singularly refutes the oft-told lie that vaccines saved humanity. As anyone who studies public health can tell you, clean water, sanitation, plumbing, refrigeration, and proper food handling are far more important to reducing the spread of infectious disease, and it was the gains in these standards of living in the United States that lead to a dramatic drop in death from infectious disease. How big a drop? In the study, “Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends in the Health of Americans During the 20th Century,” the scientists explain that “vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century…Nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccine were available.

What did contribute to a massive decline in child mortality from the early 1900s to the end of the twentieth century? The study cites a number of things, including local health departments being created in every state, water treatment, food safety, waste disposal, decreased crowding in urban housing, and “public education about hygienic practices.” What’s particularly odd is that many other infectious diseases also declined precipitously, despite the fact that no vaccine ever existed for them—how can both be true? As Dr. Jayne Donegan explains:

It was a received “article of faith” for me and my contemporaries, that vaccination was the single most useful health intervention that had ever been introduced. . . . I was taught that vaccines were the reason children and adults stopped dying from diseases for which there are vaccines. . . . We were told that other diseases, such as scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera, and so on, for which there were no vaccines at the time, diminished both in incidence and mortality due to better social conditions. You would think that some of us would have asked, “But if deaths from these diseases decreased due to improved social condition, why mightn’t the ones for which there are vaccines also have decreased at the same time for the same reason?”

By the way, I found this topic so fascinating, I wrote an article about it:

Smallpox and John Thomas Biggs

Well ahead of his time, Englishman John Thomas Biggs was the sanitary engineer for his town of Leicester and had to actively respond to outbreaks of smallpox. He quickly learned that the public health outcomes from sanitation vastly outweighed the impact of vaccination (where he saw dramatic vaccine injury and ineffectiveness). He wrote a definitive work in 1912, Leicester: Sanitation versus Vaccination.More than one hundred years ago, Mr. Biggs had discovered what the CDC reaffirmed in 2000: Nothing protects from infectious disease like proper sanitation. He explained:

Leicester has furnished, both by precept and example, irrefutable proof of the capability and influence of Sanitation, not only in combating and controlling, but also in practically banishing infectious diseases from its midst. . . . A town newly planned on the most up-to-date principles of space and air, and adopting the “Leicester Method” of Sanitation, could bid defiance not to small-pox only, but to other infectious, if not to nearly all zymotic, diseases.

Dr. Andrew Weil, the oft-quoted celebrity doctor, reenforces the point, explaining that “medicine has taken credit it does not deserve for some advances in health. Most people believe that victory over the infectious diseases of the last century came with the invention of immunizations. In fact, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough, and the others were in decline before vaccines for them became available — the result of better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal, and distribution of food and water.”

Vaccines didn’t save humanity. Improvement in sanitation and standards of living really did. Did vaccines contribute to a small decrease of certain acute illnesses? Yes, but their relative benefit is often exaggerated to an extreme. Consider this: In late 2017 it was reported that Emory University scientists were developing a common cold vaccine. Professor Martin Moore bragged that his research “takes 50 strains of the common cold and puts it into one shot” and that the monkeys who served as test subjects “responded very well.” You should expect to see this vaccine at your pediatrician’s office in the next five years, which will likely be rolled out soon after the stories start to appear in the media about the common cold causing childhood deaths.

The Myth of Herd Immunity? They Forgot to Count Adults

If you still need more convincing that public health officials and vaccine makers will mislead the public, consider the fable of “herd immunity,” the oft-cited reason that everyone needs to be vaccinated. If most people (“the herd”) are vaccinated against an illness, the story goes, then the herd is protected from that disease. In many cases pediatricians and talking heads will get very specific about herd immunity, citing important-sounding statistics that say vaccination rates on certain diseases must stay above a certain percentage of people to have herd immunity. Drop below that threshold? It’s a recipe for disaster. When there was an “epidemic” of measles (it wasn’t actually an epidemic, just a minor and typical outbreak) at Disneyland a few years ago, experts were quoted on TV saying the herd immunity threshold for measles vaccine was 95 percent, meaning 95 percent of the population needed to be vaccinated against measles to prevent “epidemics.”

Perhaps no one has beaten the herd immunity drum more loudly than California State Senator Richard Pan, the author and sponsor of SB277, a bill that made California the third state in the union (Mississippi and West Virginia are the other two) to make vaccinations mandatory for children’s school attendance. In fact, he used the Disneyland measles outbreak as the reason his bill needed to be passed. In a recent missive to his constituents, Senator Pan noted that his 2015 bill was raising kindergarten vaccination rates and bragged, “This success is a first step toward reducing the number of unimmunized people putting our families at-risk for preventable diseases, thereby restoring community immunity throughout our state in the coming years.”

Let’s look at Senator Pan’s words carefully. “Restoring community immunity” has several implications. Firstly, it implies that California had somehow “lost” community immunity (which is a nonscientific synonym for herd immunity) at some point. Secondly, “restoring” community immunity implies that until vaccination rates hit a certain threshold, grave risks will be present—restoration of safety is a top priority! The absurdity of Senator Pan’s convictions about the importance of herd immunity and of hitting certain vaccination targets is that the United States has never been close to achieving herd immunity for any vaccine-preventable disease for two simple reasons: (1) The overwhelming majority of adults in the United States are not up to date on their vaccines, and (2) The efficacy of vaccines to prevent disease wanes over time, meaning protection from a vaccine “wears off,” typically in ten years or less. (It’s called “protection waning.”)

Slovak scientists realize MMR protection wears off fast

A recent study in 2023 provided details for how quickly immunity was lost from the vaccine considered to provide the most long-term protection: MMR> The scientists discovered that most people lost measles protection from the vaccine in 10 years, meaning most people over the age of 15 have no vaccine-derived protection to measles. The scientists concluded: “from a long-term perspective, waning immunity may have a significant impact on the population’s susceptibility to measles, and it is important to explore this phenomenon.”

To put this in perspective, there are roughly 150 million adults in the United States walking around with no vaccine-provided protection from many diseases that we are supposed to have met herd immunity thresholds for. The CDC surveys adults every year, so it’s easy enough to find vaccination coverage rates. Here are just a few: hepatitis A (9 percent), hepatitis B (24.5 percent), pneumococcal (20.4 percent), and influenza (43.2 percent). These adults work in schools (where they don’t have the same immunization requirements as children), work in restaurants, work in stores, and are in every community, which means we are nowhere close to herd immunity and never have been. In fact, I don’t think most adults even realize the CDC maintains an adult immunization schedule. When people like Senator Pan pat themselves on the back for protecting society by reestablishing herd immunity, it has no basis in fact. With so many people unvaccinated, where are all the crippling epidemics?

In an article in the congressional newspaper The Hill titled, “If only half of America is properly vaccinated, where are the epidemics?” written by Gretchen DuBeau, the executive director of the Alliance for Natural Health, she explains this logic gap, writing:

While herd immunity may not exist, herd mentality most definitely does. Health authorities, media commentators, and schools and their parent–teacher associations waste no opportunity in perpetuating this myth. Proponents have done such a thorough job of convincing the public that a parent who questions it is treated like someone who thinks the earth is flat or believes climate change is a conspiracy. On the contrary: an unprejudiced view of the science about vaccines, and an examination of history, clearly show that the herd immunity theory is—and always has been—flawed.

Vaccination rates among American children for the three primary vaccines given in the 1960s and 1970s were far lower than today’s vaccination rates. For example, in 1973 the first year the CDC tracked polio vaccination rates, the vaccination rates for DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis or whooping cough), polio, and MMR were 72 percent, 59 percent, and 61 percent, respectively. In 1985 those numbers were 63 percent, 53 percent, and 61 percent (see image). Much as the question is asked of adults today, where were all the childhood epidemics in 1973 and 1985 with such “low” vaccination rates? They didn’t exist.

Politicians stand up in front of their colleagues, pound the table, and advocate passing mandatory vaccination laws to “preserve herd immunity.” Pediatricians get on TV and explain how critical it is that we all “maintain herd immunity.”

The notion of herd immunity is nonsense. The truth is out there for any parent willing to look at the facts.

Vaccine Makers Are Indemnified

On October 20, 1986, the Los Angeles Times ran a story regarding a controversial bill making its way through Congress. The headline shouted, “Vaccine Injury Fund Bill Approved but Faces Veto.” The story went on to explain the divisive nature of the bill, intended to shield vaccine makers from liability if their product caused harm, and the Reagan administration was speaking out to express their opposition:

In a strongly worded letter to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Otis R. Bowen said, “The bill is likely to do little to assure the vaccine supply or to improve our childhood immunization efforts.” Assistant Attorney General John R. Bolton, writing to the head of the House Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Department of Justice, said the White House opposed the legislation because it was creating, “a major new entitlement program for which no legitimate need has been demonstrated.” President Reagan was troubled by the vaccine compensation bill and was quoted as saying, “Although the goal of compensating those persons is a worthy one, the program has . . . serious deficiencies.”

The Reagan administration seemed to be particularly concerned with two issues: who was going to pay for the compensation required for vaccine injury and the precedent of the federal government indemnifying private companies from liability. As the New York Times reported, “The program would be ‘administered not by the executive branch, but by the Federal judiciary,’ Mr. Reagan said, calling it an ‘unprecedented arrangement’ that was inconsistent with the constitutional requirement for separation of powers among the branches of the Federal Government.’”

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was actually part of a larger bill, the Omnibus Health Bill (S. 1744), that was introduced in the waning days of the Ninety-Ninth Congress in late 1986. Leading a four-year effort to pass the controversial legislation on vaccine liability was a congressman from California, Henry Waxman. Waxman’s bill was supported by vaccine manufacturers, who were lobbying hard on its behalf, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

To be fair, like many pieces of legislation, the bill had some reasonable intentions. Unbeknownst to most parents today, an older version of the DPT shot was causing severe brain damage in many children, and parental lawsuits against vaccine makers were mounting. There was genuine fear that pharmaceutical companies might get out of the vaccine business altogether, because the risks were too high (not very comforting). And the bill proposed the establishment of VAERS—today’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System—which beat the nonexistent safety monitoring system in place at the time.

With only days to go before the congressional recess, the bill’s passage was up in the air, with the White House declaring plans to veto the entire omnibus package, due almost exclusively to the provisions in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Congressman Waxman, the bill’s author, was unyielding and worked the press to his advantage in the final days, declaring:

This bill is the first step to taking care of children hurt in the process of protecting society from epidemics, and to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines. . . . If the President vetoes it, he will leave these children to fend for themselves and leave the country with risks or shortages or skyrocketing prices. . . . If he vetoes it, I hope he has some emergency plans to start making vaccines himself because the manufacturers tell us they may very well stop.

Worried by the threat of losing the entire manufacturing base of vaccine makers coming from Henry Waxman and the AAP, Ronald Reagan made the bill law on November 15, 1986, “with mixed feelings” and “serious reservations.” He gave vaccine makers an early holiday gift when it came to vaccines, as the new law made clear:

No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.

What happened next should surprise no one who understands how capitalism works. The same industry that brought you Vioxx, thalidomide, fen-phen, Prozac, and the opioid epidemic had just had product liability removed and handed over to a newly established “vaccine court” that would be funded with a surtax on every vaccine purchased (yes, Americans fund the vaccine injury compensation program when they pay for a vaccine for themselves or their child) and ultimately managed and backstopped by the federal government. Remember, when this bill was passed in late 1986, it was viewed as a way to keep vaccine makers in the vaccine business. I’m not sure anyone (except perhaps pharmaceutical company executives and their lobbyists) could have predicted how vastly things would change. Consider the following:

In 1962 a child following the CDC’s recommended schedule would have received three vaccines by age five.

In 1983 a child following the CDC’s recommended schedule would have received ten vaccines by age five.

In 2018 a child following the CDC’s recommended schedule received thirty-eight vaccines by age five, nearly quadruple what a child received in the 1980s and more than twelve times what a child received in the 1960s.

When I was a child in the 1980s, there were just three vaccines that children received: DTP, polio, and MMR (administered several times to “boost” immunity). Today, influenza (Flu), hepatitis B, hepatitis A, haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), pneumococcal conjugate (PCV), rotavirus, meningitis, and varicella (chickenpox) vaccines have all been added to the childhood schedule (and been given multiple times through booster shots). When someone asks you if your child is “fully vaccinated,” perhaps the right reply is, “Based on which decade?” It’s worth noting that children were not “dying in the streets” during the 1980s, when we gave far fewer vaccines (and had one in ten thousand children with autism).

Let me pause for a moment and draw your attention to the words “recommended schedule.” If as a parent you are wondering about what vaccinations your child will receive at her next “well baby” visit, you might visit the CDC’s website and find the “recommended schedule.” Be aware that this schedule is not “recommended” to parents, as if you have agency (though the CDC wants you to believe you do). This schedule is recommended to the AAP, which instantly adopts it, and pediatricians, who often receive bonuses for full vaccine compliance in their practice. For parents it is a de facto mandated schedule because in most states your child can’t attend school without being vaccinated. While you might seek out an exemption—religious, philosophical, medical—these are getting harder and harder to come by. In fact, there is a movement by many state legislatures to remove vaccine exemptions altogether, as California did in 2015 with the passage of SB 277 (becoming the third state with only a medical exemption, followed soon after by New York and Connecticut).

As of today, the vaccine court created in 1986 has paid out more than $3.7 billion for vaccine injury claims—remember, funded by American taxpayers. The majority of those claims are filed by the families of vaccine-injured children. Meanwhile, the market for vaccines is expected to be worth $60 billion in 2020,up from $170 million in the early 1980s, just as the 1986 act was put in place. As the New York Times reported in 2014, “Once a loss leader for manufacturers, because they are often more expensive to produce than conventional drugs, vaccines now can be very profitable. . . . Since 1986, they have pushed up the average cost to fully vaccinate a child with private insurance to the age of 18 to $2,192 from $100, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

It’s hard to believe. The one thing that could slow the party down on the way to sixty billion dollars is consumer doubt. If parents don’t question vaccines, just as my wife Lisa and I did not, the juggernaut steams forward to more profits. But if parents begin to doubt vaccine safety, Big Pharma could be looking at a titanic loss. That’s where autism comes into play. At a rate of one in thirty-six, this is not an acceptable trade-off. It’s not that hard to imagine why there is so much suppression of the truth, and such vicious fighting.

Other Countries Give Far Fewer Vaccines

Even the definition of “vaccinated” is hard to pin down. Not only did being vaccinated mean something very different twenty years ago, being vaccinated today varies depending on where you are born in the world. Take, for example, the vaccination schedule of Denmark, which is managed and monitored by the Danish Health and Medicines Authority. It provides parents with a scheduled childhood vaccination program, similar to that of the United States, but missing from the Danish schedule are the following five vaccines that American children get: hepatitis B, hepatitis A, influenza (flu), rotavirus, and varicella (chickenpox).

A “fully vaccinated” American child and a fully vaccinated Danish child are not the same. A Danish child gets far fewer vaccines (sixteen total vaccines in Denmark versus thirty-eight in the United States). If these vaccines are vitally important, why would a country that serves as an entry point for many to travel to Europe exclude the vaccinations on the American schedule? Hepatitis B vaccine is only given in most European countries to the offspring of mothers who have hepatitis B themselves. Most European countries do not routinely give hepatitis A, rotavirus, varicella (chickenpox), or the flu shot.

Digging a little deeper, we find that the United Kingdom doesn’t give children the chickenpox vaccine. In the UK the National Health Service (NHS) manages the vaccine program, and they explain why they have chosen not to give the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine to children:

The chickenpox vaccine is not part of the routine UK childhood vaccination programme because chickenpox is usually a mild illness, particularly in children. There’s also a worry that introducing chickenpox vaccination for all children could increase the risk of chickenpox and shingles in adults.

In England chicken pox is not a recommended vaccine, but a parent in the United States who chooses to avoid the chickenpox vaccine might be chided by her pediatrician for “undervaccinating” her child or have trouble enrolling that child in daycare or school. Welcome to the land of vaccination confusion.

No Vaccines for Many Infectious Diseases

I live in Oregon. Like every state, we have a state health department. In our case it’s the Oregon Health Authority, or OHA. In order to manage the monitoring of infectious disease, the state has laws about how quickly a health-care provider must report the presence of certain infectious diseases in a patient to the OHA. Diseases are classified into three categories: report immediately, report within 24 hours, and report within one working day—it’s a ranking system for how concerned the OHA is about various infectious diseases.

There are sixty-seven total diseases that are “reportable” in my state. Of those sixty-seven, we have vaccines for only ten. The other fifty-seven reportable diseases have no vaccine available. Of the seventeen diseases that require immediate reporting, we vaccinate for four of them, leaving 100 percent of children “unprotected” against the other thirteen diseases!

Vaccines don’t form a protective ring around anyone; our immune system remains our primary defense against disease, at least for the fifty-seven reportable ones here in Oregon for which we have no vaccine. As best-selling author Dr. Bob Sears explains:

A healthy immune system is the key to preventing infectious diseases. We are all exposed to millions of germs every day, and vaccines only cover a tiny fraction of one percent of these germs. So we must rely on our own immune system to fight off most potential infections.

In fact, I’d argue most people’s understanding of what a vaccine does and how it works is cartoonishly simple and goes something like this: You get a perfectly safe vaccine, it boosts your immune system, and then you’re protected from whatever disease you were vaccinated for, perhaps forever. Except no part of that simple explanation is true.

There Will Always Be Outbreaks

Every year there are reported outbreaks of pertussis, mumps, and measles. There’s a simple explanation for this consistency, and it’s not what you think. Put simply: The vaccines don’t work that well. As the Associated Press reported in 2013:

“A government study offers a new theory on why the whooping cough vaccine doesn’t seem to be working as well as expected. The research suggests that while the vaccine may keep people from getting sick, it doesn’t prevent them from spreading whooping cough — also known as pertussis — to others. “It could explain the increase in pertussis that we’re seeing in the U.S.,” said one of the researchers, Tod Merkel of the Food and Drug Administration.

In 2017 public health researchers at Boston University argued that the resurgence of whooping cough cases “can largely be attributed to the immunological failures of acellular vaccines,” as lead researcher Dr. Christopher J. Gill explained

:

This disease is back because we didn’t really understand how our immune defenses against whooping cough worked, and did not understand how the vaccines needed to work to prevent it. Instead we layered assumptions upon assumptions, and now find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of admitting that we may [have] made some crucial errors. This is definitely not where we thought we’d be in 2017.

And the media reporting on measles and other outbreaks rarely explains that the majority of people infected with pertussis or measles or mumps have been vaccinated. There was a mumps outbreak at Harvard University just a few years ago. It turns out “the infected students had all been vaccinated against mumps, as required by law. It’s possible the vaccine didn’t work in some people, or that the virus mutated in ways that made the shot less effective. The mumps vaccine fails to induce immunity in about 12 percent of people who receive it, so mumps outbreaks occur occasionally even in highly vaccinated populations.”

In 2017 the CDC’s own Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices held an October meeting to discuss the issue of vaccine effectiveness, explaining that “research suggests that 10 or more years after the second childhood dose [of mumps], protection against the virus fades enough to help outbreaks take hold.” It’s worth noting there is a whistle-blower lawsuit against Merck in Pennsylvania, the maker of the mumps vaccine, with former Merck employees claiming Merck hid the efficacy data on mumps, because it was showing that the vaccine often didn’t work. The whistle-blowers charged that “the drug maker knew its vaccine was less effective than the purported 95% level, and alleged senior management was aware and also oversaw testing that concealed the actual effectiveness.”

Vaccine Safety Testing Is Inadequate

Vaccines aren’t required to undergo double-blind trials before they are given to babies. When a pharmaceutical company tests vaccines, they don’t have a “control group” receiving a placebo vaccine to see if there is a difference in adverse outcomes from getting a new vaccine. Worse, the safety testing during a new vaccine trial evaluates adverse reactions after participants received a vaccine for somewhere between two and five days. As one example, the only stand-alone polio vaccine in the United States was monitored for only forty-eight hours after administration.That’s it. Autism, which takes time to manifest, would never be captured in these safety trails. In fact, many of the known adverse events from vaccines with names like Guillain-Barré syndrome, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, and rheumatoid arthritis may take weeks, months, or even years to manifest, so safety testing wouldn’t capture any of them.

As another example, the safety study from Recombivax, one of the most widely used hepatitis B vaccines in the world, and given to many American babies on day one of life, included “434 doses of RECOMBIVAX HB, 5 mcg . . . administered to 147 healthy infants and children (up to 10 years of age) who were monitored for 5 days after each dose.” The entire safety profile for this vaccine, given to millions of children, was based on 147 infants who were monitored for five days. And the infants were not given any other vaccines, despite the fact that at two months, four months, six months, and twelve months of age, babies simultaneously receive at least four other vaccines: rotavirus, DTP, Hib, and PCV. As pediatrician Dr. Harold E. Buttram explains in a letter to the BMJ:

In order to meet the criteria of scientific proof, a vaccine safety study would need to perform before-and-after human studies designed to screen for possible adverse effects on the neurological, immunologic, and hematological systems, comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated subjects, both in sufficient numbers and followed for sufficient periods of time to be meaningful. There have never been any studies of this nature, and apparently none have been attempted. Based on personal observation, it appears that before-and-after testing has been studiously avoided by government health agencies for fear that the results would discourage public confidence in vaccine programs. Until this level of safety testing is done, it is a virtual certainty that many adverse vaccine reactions are taking place unrecognized and will continue to take place. By the same token, until meaningful, objective vaccine safety testings are done, in my opinion the NIH, CDC, FDA can justifiably be accused of negligence in protecting the health and welfare of the American public, especially the children.

No group has done more to expose this testing inadequacy than the Informed Consent Action Network. They put a comprehensive chart together of the work—or lack thereof—behind every licensed childhood vaccine, it’s truly nauseating, as they report:

The below graph lists the vaccines recommended by CDC for routine use in children and shows the lack of a long-term placebo-controlled trial for each. Links to documentation are included which show the short safety review periods and the controls used.

Because of how limited safety testing is for vaccines prior to rolling them out to more than seventy million American children, the CDC relies on safety monitoring once vaccines are being given in the real world, which is where things get even more problematic.

Adverse Events Are Closer to One in Fifty

The 1986 law that indemnified vaccine makers from harm also created VAERS, which is a passive reporting system for vaccine adverse events. What this means is that VAERS only works to the extent doctors or parents decide to report a vaccine injury to the VAERS online system. Since most parents have no idea what a vaccine injury looks like and most doctors aren’t trained to recognize a vaccine injury, and the general stance is that vaccines are completely benign, you can imagine the limitations of this system, and science has born that out. In 2007 the CDC funded a study by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care for three years involving 715,000 patients that found “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.”

In 2016 VAERS received 59,117 reports of vaccine adverse events, including 432 deaths and 10,284 emergency room visits.

If those 59,117 reports were 1 percent of the actual total, that would imply there had actually been 5.9 million reportable adverse events from vaccines in a single year.

The CDC-funded Harvard Pilgrim study’s purpose was to automate the reporting of vaccine injuries by programming known vaccine reactions into medical charts of patients experiencing certain reactions near the time of vaccination. The pilot study yielded troubling results, because of 715,000 individuals, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. That’s 2.6 percent of vaccine recipients—a far cry from the “one in a million” figure tossed around by vaccine marketers! The Harvard Pilgrim researchers stood ready to integrate this new reporting system with VAERS but reported instead that the CDC went radio silent on a study that cost more than one million dollars, as principal investigator Ross Lazarus reported:

Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.

A three-year study produced results so potentially devastating to the CDC—because the adverse event rate was so much higher than anything the CDC could share with the public—that the program was shut down.

Adverse Events Are Poorly Understood

What harm, exactly, can a vaccine cause? In 1991 the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) looked at side effects from just one vaccine, the DPT, and concluded that science supported a causal relationship with the following six vaccine injuries: acute encephalopathy, chronic arthritis, acute arthritis, shock and unusual shock-like state, anaphylaxis, and protracted inconsolable crying. In 2012 the IOM looked at the 158 most common vaccine injuries reported to VAERS and found that science “convincingly supports a causal relationship” with 18 of those injuries but found that there wasn’t any science to either confirm or deny 135 additional injuries. Here’s the list of injuries that might be caused by vaccines, except no one has looked:

Encephalitis, encephalopathy, infantile spasms, afebrile seizures, seizures, cerebellar ataxia, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, transverse myelitis, optic neuritis, neuromyelitis optica, multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, brachial neuritis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, small fiber neuropathy, chronic urticaria, erythema nodosum, systemic lupus erythematosus, polyarteritis nodosa, psoriatic arthritis, reactive arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, arthralgia, autoimmune hepatitis, stroke, chronic headache, fibromyalgia, sudden infant death syndrome, hearing loss, thrombocytopenia, immune thrombocytopenic purpura.

In 86 percent of the vaccine injuries reported to VAERS, no one has any idea whether they are related to vaccines.

No One Knows the True Impact of Multiple Doses

In 2012 a study looking at data from the aforementioned VAERS database noted several disturbing patterns. The more vaccines a child received in a single setting, the more likely she was to be hospitalized or die. In the study, published in Human and Experimental Toxicology, Dr. Gary Goldman and Neil Miller found a “a positive correlation between hospitalization rates and the number of vaccine doses” and also “younger infants were significantly more likely than older infants to be hospitalized or die after receiving vaccines.” The authors also affirmed the inadequacies of current vaccine testing:

Studies have not been conducted to determine the safety (or efficacy) of administering multiple vaccine doses in a variety of combinations as recommended by CDC guidelines.

Frustrating for parents is the contradictory, and scientifically unsupported, perspective the American Academy of Pediatrics provides on their website about vaccinating a child with multiple vaccines at once, which states: “Vaccines are well-studied to make sure that it is safe to give them all at once.” Parents are understandably confused.

The DTP Vaccine: More Harm than Good in Africa

There is little science comparing health outcomes of vaccinated children versus completely unvaccinated children; that is until 2017, when arguably the most disturbing science ever done on this topic produced an outcome that reflects very poorly on global vaccination efforts and asks and answers the ultimate question about vaccines: Are they really “safe and effective”? Published in the peer-reviewed journal EBioMedicine, the study is titled, “The Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural Experiment.”

Researchers from the Research Center for Vitamins and Vaccines, Statens Serum Institut (Denmark), and Bandim Health Project looked closely at data from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The scientists in this study closely explored the concept of NSEs, “nonspecific effects” of vaccines, which is a fancy way of saying vaccines may make a child more susceptible to other infections. They found that the data for children who had been vaccinated with the DTP vaccine “was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DTP. . . . DTP is the most widely used vaccine. . . . All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus, or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease, it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.”

In lay terms, this means that giving a child the DTP vaccine may make the child sick from other infections. Life is about risk and reward. As a venture capital expert throughout my career, I used risk/reward to analyze every deal I ever made. Parents should have all the information they need, so that they too can make a risk/reward decision on behalf of their kids; in other words, informed consent. You and I and every other parent in the world want safety and health for our kids.

Perhaps no scientist has been more eloquent or public in discussing this issue than Dr. Tetyana Obukhanych, who wrote a book, Vaccine Illusion: How Vaccination Compromises Our Natural Immunity and What We Can Do to Regain Our Health, that discusses the issue of NSEs from vaccines. Dr. Obukhanych testified before the California State Assembly, just before they voted to make vaccines mandatory for school attendance in California. Her training is in immunology, and she herself would tell you that she began her education “very enthusiastic about the concept of vaccination, just like any typical immunologist.” However, Dr. Obukhanych quickly lost her enthusiasm for vaccinations, noting that

despite the fact that the biological basis of naturally acquired immunity is not understood, present day medical practices insist upon artificial manipulation of the immune response (a.k.a. immunization or vaccination) to secure “immunity” without going through the actual disease process. The vaccine-induced process, although not resembling a natural disease, is nevertheless still a disease process with its own risks. And it is not immunity that we gain via vaccination but a puny surrogate of immunity. For this reason, vaccination at its core is neither a safe nor an effective method of disease prevention.

What we learn from the African study, and that is perfectly explained by Dr. Obukhanych, is that children going through the artificial disease process triggered by a vaccine are actually more susceptible to suffer from (and sometimes die) from other diseases, because their immune system is weakened and compromised in ways we really don’t yet understand.

The Dengue Fever Vaccine

Another real-world example of the unanticipated NSEs from vaccines emerged from a scandal in the Philippines in late 2017. The dengue fever vaccine, administered to more than seven hundred thousand children, actually made dengue fever worse (and often deadly) for any vaccine recipients who hadn’t previously had dengue fever. The scandal engulfed the nation and prompted scathing condemnations of pharmaceutical industry influence by the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who stated through his spokesperson, “We will leave no stone unturned in making those responsible for this shameless public health scam which puts hundreds of thousands of young lives at risk accountable.” National Public Radio covered the scandal and reported:

The world’s only vaccine against dengue has hit a roadblock, and this complication is causing some countries to restrict use of the vaccine. Sanofi Pasteur, the French company that manufactures the shot, raised new safety concerns last week about the vaccine. In response, the Philippines suspended a mass immunization campaign, which has already given one dose of the vaccine to more than 700,000 children. And the Brazilian government has tightened restrictions on the shot. The vaccine—called Dengvaxia—raises the risk of a deadly form of dengue for people who have never been exposed to the virus, Sanofi Pasteur wrote Wednesday in a statement. The company says it discovered the complication after analyzing data from a six-year study. . . . Sanofi Pasteur has spent more than $1.5 billion to develop Dengvaxia over the past two decades. The vaccine is currently approved in 19 countries, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Mexico and Thailand. The Philippines was leading the most ambitious — and costly — effort to vaccinate kids. More than 700,000 kids, older than age 9, had already received one dose. Over the next few years, the country had planned to give two more doses to the 700,000 kids who had already received one dose.

The Manila Times was highly critical of the dengue fever vaccine fiasco, blaming former Philippine president Aquino (who ordered the mass vaccination against dengue fever) and quoting dengue fever researcher Dr. Scott Halstead, who provided some dark irony: “It’s happened. We have a vaccine that enhances dengue.”

The Flu Vaccine Made Canadians More Vulnerable

It’s unlikely many Americans heard about the dengue fever vaccine scandal, and probably fewer still knew that a similar study in Canada had noted the phenomenon of a weakened immune response after being vaccinated back in 2015, this time involving the flu vaccine. University of Calgary researchers, profiled in an article in Global News titled, “Canadian study finds flu shot could increase risk of getting sick,” discovered that the 2014–15 flu vaccine worked far better for people who hadn’t received a flu vaccine in the previous year. Said differently, the more vaccines for flu you received, the less well it worked.

In the Global News article, University of Calgary researcher Dr. Jim Dickinson explained: “A negative effectiveness suggests the vaccine made people more susceptible to the flu. We need to do further research to understand why this has happened.”

Bolstering the case that repeated flu vaccines may alter the immune system in unpredictable ways, in 2018 University of Maryland scientists discovered that receiving a flu vaccine made your risk of infecting others far more likely, because the volume of flu vaccine you shed through breathing and sneezing was six times higher than for those who hadn’t received a flu vaccine:

[We found] 6.3 (95% CI 1.9–21.5) times more aerosol shedding among cases with vaccination in the current and previous season compared with having no vaccination in those two seasons.

Parents Are Concerned about Gardasil

Gardasil, a vaccine intended to prevent the spread of the human papilloma virus (HPV), is the most important new vaccine for Merck, the largest vaccine maker in the world. Gardasil alone accounted for more than two billion dollars in revenues in 2016, making Gardasil Merck’s single largest vaccine.

Gardasil is typically administered to healthy teenage girls, and the devastating stories of chronically ill and injured girls following Gardasil administration has crept up in every country where the vaccine is administered. In Japan, a country with a robust history of honesty about vaccine side effects, the stories of Gardasil injuries became such a public scandal that uptake rates for the vaccine are now under 1 percent (current rate in the United States is over 60 percent for teenage girls). In late 2016 a Japanese industry watchdog group—Medwatcher Japan—issued a scathing letter criticizing, among others, the World Health Organization, which they felt was endorsing the Gardasil vaccine without acknowledging the growing body of science demonstrating high rates of devastating side effects:

Countries other than Japan have also indicated major problems with the safety of HPV vaccines. Ignoring these “inconvenient” facts in an effort to promote HPV vaccination contradicts the primary responsibility of WHO, which is to dispassionately assess risks and benefits. . . . Reported serious AEs [adverse events] include diverse, complex, multi-system symptoms such as seizures; disturbance of consciousness; systemic pain including headache, myalgia, arthralgia, back pain and other pain; motor dysfunction such as paralysis, muscular weakness, exhaustion, and involuntary movements; numbness and sensory disturbance; autonomic symptoms including dizziness, hypotension, tachycardia, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea; respiratory dysfunction including dyspnea and asthma; endocrine disorders such as menstrual disorder and hypermenorrhea; hypersensitivity to light and sound; psychological symptoms including anxiety, frustration, hallucinations, and overeating; higher brain dysfunction and cognitive impairments including memory impairment, disorientation, and loss of concentration; and sleep disorders, hypersomnia and sudden sleep attacks. In some cases, these symptoms impair learning and result in extreme fatigue and decreased motivation, negatively impacting everyday life.

Meanwhile, in Ireland the furious debate about Gardasil was frequently front page news throughout 2017 as a well-organized group of parents—calling themselves “Regret”—turned the debate about Gardasil into a national issue. In the late fall of 2017, the Irish Times reported that “uptake for the vaccine has plummeted from a high of 87 per cent to 50 per cent. Any further decline is likely to call into question the economic, medical and political rationale of the programme” and that “almost 650 girls in Ireland reported requiring medical intervention or treatment after receiving the HPV vaccine, according to data collected by the State’s medicines watchdog.”

In 2017 a published meta-analysis of Gardasil clinical trials stated that “two of the largest randomized trials found significantly more severe adverse events in the tested HPV vaccine arm of the study.” The study, “Serious adverse events after HPV vaccination: a critical review of randomized trials and post-marketing case series,” concluded, “These findings raise further doubt on HPV vaccine safety.”

Merck’s most important vaccine receiving withering, worldwide criticism may serve to accelerate a reckoning about vaccines in general and perhaps shed the light more fully on autism, too. Gardasil shares something in common with most of the vaccines given to infants: a very high level of aluminum adjuvant.

Vaccines Are Linked to Autoimmune Disease

Autism may just be the tip of the iceberg for a host of neurological and physical disorders impacting our children at epidemic levels. Conditions of autoimmunity—asthma, diabetes, food allergies, eczema, and so on—are growing at rates similar to autism. Could vaccines also be behind their explosion? According to many scientists, absolutely.

As one example, scientists at the University of Virginia have drawn a direct line between the aluminum (referred to as “alum”) used in vaccines to stimulate the immune system and the explosion in food allergies, stating “the era of food allergy began with the post-millennial generation, the same faction who received new immunizations during early childhood. Many of these vaccines contain alum, an adjuvant known to induce allergic phenotypes.” I wrote an extensive article about aluminum and autism right here:

Allergy scientists know that if they want to create a food allergy in rats, the quickest way to do it is by injecting them with vaccine ingredients. In a study from Norway—“Development and Characterization of an Effective Food Allergy Model in Brown Norway Rats”—scientists wanted to figure out the quickest way to give lab rats a food allergy so they could study various food allergy suppression drugs on them. Since rats aren’t born with food allergies, the most effective method was clear: inject the rats with egg protein and aluminum adjuvant, and they will soon be allergic to eggs.

There’s even a textbook from one of the largest textbook companies (Wiley & Sons) in the world titled Vaccines and Autoimmunity, a book that “explores the role of adjuvants—specifically aluminum in different vaccines—and how they can induce diverse autoimmune clinical manifestations in genetically prone individuals.” The book’s co-author, Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, is viewed as the world’s foremost authority on autoimmunity, and he is very direct in raising the alarm bell about vaccine side effects:

“Due to the adverse effects exerted by adjuvants, there is no controversy over the need for safer adjuvants for incorporation into future vaccines.”

Unvaccinated kids are…healthier, according to 6 studies

The first study that compared children who had received a vaccine with children that hadn’t was published in 2000. Although autism wasn’t something the study considered, it was still revealing. Titled “Effects of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis or Tetanus Vaccination on Allergies and Allergy-Related Respiratory Symptoms among Children and Adolescents in the United States,” this study from the UCLA school of public health did look specifically at the DTP vaccine to see if it might be responsible for allergies and allergy-related symptoms, such as asthma. Looking at more than thirteen thousand children, the study found that:

DTP or tetanus vaccination in US children is associated with lifetime history of asthma or other allergies and allergy-related symptoms. . . . Assuming that the estimated vaccination effect is unbiased, 50% of diagnosed asthma cases (2.93 million) in US children and adolescents would be prevented if the DTP or tetanus vaccination was not administered.

So the first study to ever compare a group that received a vaccine with a group that didn’t found a dramatic difference in rates of asthma and allergies among the vaccinated group, so much so that they thought not getting the DTP vaccine might reduce cases of asthma by 50 percent! Note that many children with autism suffer from what are known as comorbid conditions, such as asthma, allergies, and other autoimmune conditions.

In 2008 in the second study ever looking at a group of children who didn’t receive a vaccine, public health researchers Carolyn Gallagher and Melody Goodman from SUNY Stony Brook looked at the possible relationship between the hepatitis B vaccine and special education.Were children who received the full series of hepatitis B vaccines (three separate vaccines, the first one often given on day one of life) more likely to end up in special education classes than children who didn’t receive any hepatitis B vaccines? The study, “Hepatitis B Triple Series Vaccine and Developmental Disability in US Children Aged 1–9 Years,” was published in the journal Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry, and the results were pretty clear: The full series of hepatitis B led to a ninefold greater likelihood of receiving special education:

This study found statistically significant evidence to suggest that boys in United States who were vaccinated with the triple series Hepatitis B vaccine . . . were more susceptible to developmental disability than were unvaccinated boys. . . . The odds of receiving EIS [special education] were approximately nine times as great for vaccinated boys (n = 46) as for unvaccinated boys (n = 7), after adjustment for confounders.

The same researchers from SUNY Stony Brook published another study in 2010, this time looking at the relationship between receiving the hepatitis B series and autism. Published in the prestigious Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, “Hepatitis B Vaccination of Male Neonates and Autism Diagnosis” once again reached very clear conclusions:

“Boys vaccinated as neonates had threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis compared to boys never vaccinated or vaccinated after the first month of life.”

Journalist David Kirby appreciated the significance of the new findings, writing in the Huffington Post:

[The study] will be among the first university-based population studies to suggest an association between a vaccine and an increased risk for autism. And that would be in direct contradiction to all those MMR and thimerosal studies that purportedly found no such link.

The two Goodman and Gallagher articles about hepatitis B raise many concerns. I’ve met pediatricians who feel that the hepatitis B vaccine specifically has triggered the epidemic of neurological disorders and autoimmunity we now see in our children. Hepatitis B was the first vaccine introduced after Congress indemnified vaccine makers from liability in 1986. The vaccine has a high dose of aluminum, which I believe is the primary cause of autism and it’s often given to babies on day one of life, which many immunologists feel is a huge mistake. These two studies raise major concerns, but I’m guessing you never knew either of these studies existed, which supports my point about scientists and PR firms.

In 2017, however, something amazing happened. Two separate studies comparing vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children actually got published. Unlike the Goodman and Gallagher studies above, which only explored a single vaccine (the rest of a child’s vaccine status was simply not considered), these two new studies met the “gold standard”—they found children who had never received any vaccines and looked at their health outcomes in a variety of ways. The public health researchers from Jackson State University originally planned to publish a single study, until they looked at the data on children born prematurely, noting that the data on the difference in health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated premature infants was so dramatic it deserved its own study.

Published in the Journal of Translational Science, the first groundbreaking study was called, “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-Year-Old U.S. Children,” and its results were so devastating to the US vaccine program that there wasn’t a single media outlet in the country that covered its release. The results of comparing vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children were no surprise to me, my wife, or any of the autism parents I know, but perhaps would surprise others:

The vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD [neurodevelopmental disorders]. After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.

Specifically, vaccinated children were found to have a fourfold higher likelihood of having autism. I’m reminded of a quote by Dr. Daniel Neides of the Cleveland Clinic, who wondered if we were making trade-offs that aren’t worth it. He said,

Simultaneously, the Jackson State authors published a study in the same journal just looking at children born prematurely, titled, “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children.” The results were disturbing, as the researchers found children born prematurely and vaccinated were fourteen times more likely to develop a neurodevelopmental disorder! The authors were appropriately concerned:

Preterm birth coupled with vaccination, however, was associated with a synergistic increase in the odds of NDD, suggesting the possibility that vaccination could precipitate adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm infants. These results provide clues to the epidemiology and causation of NDD but question the safety of current vaccination programs for preterm infants.

In 2020, Dr Brian Hooker Neil Miller took the study of unvaccinated children to a new level by looking at actual data from a pediatrician’s office who had a large number of unvaccinated patients. The study, Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disordersconcluded exactly what by now is a pretty familiar refrain:

Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47-3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04-9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63-2.78). In a quartile analysis, subjects were grouped by number of vaccine doses received in the first year of life. Higher odds ratios were observed in Quartiles 3 and 4 (where more vaccine doses were received) for all four health conditions considered, as compared to Quartile 1. In a temporal analysis, developmental delays showed a linear increase as the age cut-offs increased from 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 months of age (ORs = 1.95, 2.18, 2.92 and 3.51, respectively). Slightly higher ORs were also observed for all four health conditions when time permitted for a diagnosis was extended from ⩾ 3 years of age to ⩾ 5 years of age.

Conclusion: In this study, which only allowed for the calculation of unadjusted observational associations, higher ORs were observed within the vaccinated versus unvaccinated group for developmental delays, asthma and ear infections. Further study is necessary to understand the full spectrum of health effects associated with childhood vaccination.

Six separate studies, all comparing a group of children vaccinated with a group of children unvaccinated, at least for a single vaccine. I’m guessing that for most readers this is the first time you’ve read about any of these studies. I think a fair question would be, “Why?” The answer is simple: Studies that might hurt the financial performance of pharmaceutical companies or damage the reputation of public health officials or embarrass pediatricians are not publicized by media outlets that derive advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical companies.

Vaccines Didn’t Cause the Decline in Measles

The idea that vaccines saved humanity is unsupportable by the facts. But it’s worth addressing the two diseases that everyone talks about whenever a vaccine debate takes place: measles and polio. I’ll start with measles.

Just before the first rollout of a nationwide measles vaccine program, the three leading scientists at what was then called the Public Health Service (today’s CDC) made a presentation in San Francisco at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting. The date was November 1, 1966. The presentation was led by Dr. David J. Sencer, who at the time held the title of chief of the PHS’s National Communicable Disease Center. He was joined by his assistant chief, Dr. H. Bruce Dull, as well as the PHS’s chief of epidemiology, Dr. Alexander Langmuir. It’s fair to say that at this point in history no one knew more about the measles virus than these three scientists. The PHS scientists used the APHA’s annual meeting to announce plans for their ambitious national launch, with the hopes of eradicating measles by the end of 1967.

The doctors also turned their presentation into a report titled, “Epidemiological Basis for Eradication of Measles in 1967,” and some of the matter-of-fact statements they made might get a doctor banned from the mainstream media today as even a single case of measles is a cause for panic and outbreak stories often make the national news. In fact, a new parent might think measles was just like Ebola, except it’s not, as the PHS scientists made very clear in 1966 stating,

“For centuries the measles virus has maintained a remarkably stable ecological relationship with man. The clinical disease is a characteristic syndrome of notable constancy and only moderate severity. Complications are infrequent, and, with adequate medical care, fatality is rare.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, even without vaccines, measles outbreaks only happened every few years, on a somewhat dependable cycle; they noted that “in large population centers, as in cities or whole metropolitan areas, measles epidemics recur in 2-to-3-year cycles.” They also established a vaccination threshold to eradicate measles well below the 95 percent number public health officials use today, nothing that “it is evident that when the level of immunity was higher than 55 percent, epidemics did not develop.” Before the vaccine had been introduced, it’s worth noting that the death rate from measles in the United States had already declined by approximately 99.96 percent from its peak in the mid-1800s. In 1960 the death rate from measles was 0.23 per 100,000 people. Asthma, by comparison, had a mortality rate more than ten times higher for the same year.

In 2013 “Measles Vaccination Before the Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccine” was published in the American Journal of Public Health, looking at the history of the measles vaccine, and had many similar observations about the history of measles, including the view from parents and doctors that measles was “unpleasant but inevitable”:

At the beginning of the 1960s, it was clear that a vaccine against measles would soon be available. Although measles was (and remains) a killer disease in the developing world, in the United States and Western Europe this was no longer so. Many parents and many medical practitioners considered measles an inevitable stage of a child’s development. . . . By 1960, thanks to the use of antibiotics and improvements in living conditions, measles mortality was declining steadily in industrialized countries. . . . Parents largely came to see measles as an unpleasant, although more or less inevitable, part of childhood. Many primary care physicians shared this view.

“So what?” some might argue, even if measles was considered a mild and inevitable illness of childhood, aren’t we better off as a society by having even less measles around? But I think we should all be suspicious of the extreme fear-mongering generated in the press every time even a single case of measles surfaces and ask the question, “Who is generating all the panic?” Also, we have to be honest about the adverse events from the MMR vaccine and decide if they outweigh the benefits of reducing the incidence of a mild childhood illness. According to Physicians for Informed Consent, a large group of doctors in California:

There is no evidence that the measles vaccine causes less death or permanent disability than measles. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the measles vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 measles vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.” Because permanent sequalae (after effects) from measles, especially in individuals with normal levels of vitamin A, are so rare, the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to prove that the vaccine causes less death or permanent injury than measles.

That’s quite a statement from a group of doctors. They’re saying the risk/reward equation to have the measles vaccine isn’t there.

What about Polio?

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the modern vaccine industry was built on the reputation the polio vaccine carries forth to this day for having saved the children of the world from the scourge of polio. Nothing stirs the emotions quite like polio, especially for anyone who lived through the polio scares of the 1940s and ’50s. The images of children in iron lungs, casts, and using crutches to walk is the most chilling imagery we have of any infectious disease in the modern era, and polio is always referenced whenever debates about vaccines erupt.

Ending the polio epidemic is the iconic achievement of vaccines, and maintaining the purity and simplicity of the narrative that vaccines ended the polio epidemic is critical to maintaining the image of vaccines as infallible and essential. That being said, there are several unanswered questions about polio that deeply challenge the narrative that the polio vaccine saved the world:

Why did poliovirus, a well-known and fairly mild enterovirus, suddenly provoke a devastating epidemic in the late 1940s and early 1950s? For most, a bout with poliovirus is a minor event, but for a small number (perhaps 1 to 2 percent), the virus somehow makes its way into the nervous system, where it can be far more dangerous, and sometimes deadly poliomyelitis. The outbreaks were confined largely to warm-weather months. They had higher prevalence in agricultural areas. Do any of these facts relate to each other?

Did DDT escort poliovirus into the nervous system? In November 1953 Dr. Morton S. Biskind published a pretty clear answer in the American Journal of Digestive Diseases.His famous paper, “Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides,” minced absolutely no words in making it clear what was causing mild poliovirus to morph into paralytic poliomyelitis: DDT. The insecticide, utilized for the first time in 1945, had become ubiquitous in the United States, even though the public health service warned in 1951 how risky its use was: “

DDT is a delayed-action poison. Due to the fact that it accumulates in the body tissues, especially in females, the repeated inhalation or ingestion of DDT constitutes a distinct health hazard. The deleterious effects are manifested principally in the liver, spleen, kidneys, and spinal cord. . . . Children and infants especially are much more susceptible to poisoning than adults.”

Can DDT use explain the trends in polio outbreaks? DDT spraying was much more prevalent in the warm-weather months. Many of the first cases of polio took place in agricultural areas. There were many case examples to compare and contrast: Israel, which was late in introducing DDT (in the early 1950s), was late in having a polio epidemic.I n the Philippines, American troops used DDT on the military bases and had high poliomyelitis outbreaks, but natives living outside the base didn’t.

Most importantly, Dr. Biskind explained in his article that the biological science published in 1944 and 1947 showed that DDT did the very thing that made the nervous system susceptible to poliovirus’s becoming poliomyelitis: It produced “degeneration of the anterior horn cells of the spinal cord in animals.” These cells at the top of the spinal column are the key entry point to the spinal column, where the poliovirus then creates inflammation of the myelin sheath creating, you got it, poliomyelitis.

Once biological plausibility was firmly established, Dr. Biskind then asked in his article the most important question about the polio epidemic you’ve never heard before: “When the population is exposed to a chemical agent known to produce in animals lesions in the spinal cord resembling those in human polio, and thereafter the latter disease increases sharply in incidence and maintains its epidemic character year after year, is it unreasonable to suspect an etiologic relationship?”

Why does polio stubbornly persist in countries like India, even though many Indian children are vaccinated fifteen or more times before the age of five? Perhaps it also won’t surprise you that in India, where polio stubbornly persists even with children receiving as many as two dozen polio vaccines each, DDT remains in wide use.

Did polio decline in near lockstep with the decline and ultimate ban of DDT in the United States? Yes, it did. The United States, in fact, hasn’t had a case of polio since 1979. DDT was banned by the EPA in 1972.

Could “polio provocation” also explain the rise in polio? What’s clear about poliovirus’s becoming poliomyelitis is that somehow the virus needs to be able to jump into the nervous system. DDT appears to be a potent escort, given its capacity to degenerate the spinal cord. Another potential escort is what’s known as “polio provocation,” a theory that recently moved from hypothesis to biological fact. An article from Cambridge University explains: “In 1998 scientists Drs Matthias Gromeier and Eckard Wimmer were able to show that tissue injury caused by certain injections gives the polio virus easy access to nerve channels, thereby increasing its ability to cause paralysis.”

The study, “Mechanism of Injury-Provoked Poliomyelitis,”explained: “Using a mouse model developed for the study of poliomyelitis, we have shown that muscular trauma induced by multiple injections can lead to rapid progression of PV-induced paralysis, upregulation of viral replication in certain tissues, and acceleration of the progression of histopathological lesions. Thus, our data provide direct experimental evidence for the concept of PPM [provocation poliomyelitis].”

The study authors raised a very concerning question: What if the very act of repeated vaccination was the thing leading to poliomyelitis in the developing world?

“Skeletal muscle injury is known to predispose its sufferers to neurological complications of concurrent poliovirus infections. This phenomenon, labeled ‘provocation poliomyelitis,’ continues to cause numerous cases of childhood paralysis due to the administration of unnecessary injections to children in areas where poliovirus is endemic. Recently, it has been reported that intramuscular injections may also increase the likelihood of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis in recipients of live attenuated poliovirus vaccines.”

During the 1950s, tonsillectomy surgeries on children also exploded, and children who had received the operation were three times likelier to develop polio.

The elimination of DDT may have had as much, if not more, to do with the reduction of polio cases in the United States as the vaccine did. A blog post titled “The Age of Polio” by journalist Dan Olmsted and autism father Mark Blaxill considered this very issue, wondering if the narrative we’ve been fed about polio is too simplistic, the authors arguing “that a single-minded focus on germs—and an unwillingness to explore novel and potentially uncomfortable ideas from outside medical orthodoxy [such as DDT’s being a trigger for poliomyelitis]—is an inadequate strategy when it comes to modern diseases.” Worse, the simplistic view that epidemics such as polio’s can be conquered solely with a vaccine might inhibit a more holistic understanding of how to fight disease:

But the victory over the epidemics of poliomyelitis means our understanding of polio is essentially frozen in amber, circa 1955. Few diseases have been so completely conquered, at least at home, while being so incompletely understood, and that is not a good outcome. In leaving so many important topics on the table — why outbreaks occurred, why the pattern of contagion was so atypical for an infectious disease — scientists allowed some weak ideas to become conventional wisdom and some important ones to be missed. . . . And the connection of other illnesses to pesticides, and environmental toxins in general, has been slow in dawning. . . . The suffering of polio’s victims is honored by learning all of its lessons, including the danger of environmental toxins and the perils of ignoring their role in modern disease; the risk of focusing all of our energy on vaccinations as magic bullets, and the fundamental ethical obligation to search for the truth without fear or favor. Only then can we work out the real nature of illnesses that confront us here and now, ranging from autism to Parkinson’s to the persistence of poliomyelitis itself. Only then can we begin to prevent such disasters as The Age of Polio.

I’m sure some are wondering, If I can even criticize the polio vaccine, am I really just saying that no vaccines are worth it? I think each vaccine needs to be evaluated on its own merits. Much as Physicians for Informed Consent did with their analysis of the data, sometimes the risks from a vaccine outweigh the potential benefits, but these facts are very hard for the average parent to ascertain. And the history of vaccination needs to be accounted for in a more honest and transparent manner. Finally, the relationship between man and infectious disease is likely far more complicated and intertwined than we all appreciate.

What if there was a synergistic component to having certain illnesses, meaning they actually made your immune system more robust in the long term? That may sound esoteric to you, but scientists are aggressively pursuing just this angle, and the results are thought-provoking. A 2010 study, “Mumps and Ovarian Cancer: Modern Interpretation of an Historic Association,” found that having had mumps (the other “M” of the MMR vaccine) might make someone less susceptible to ovarian cancer. A 1998 study found that children who had measles and other “febrile infectious childhood diseases” had lower cancer risk as adults. A 2000 British Journal of Cancer study found that measles in childhood led to a lower risk of Hodgkin’s disease and that having childhood illnesses in general created lower cancer rates: “these results support previous evidence that early exposure to infection protects against HD [Hodgkin’s Disease].” A 2005 study by scientists from Canada examined many studies and found, “infections may play a paradoxical role in cancer development with chronic infections often being tumorigenic and acute infections being antagonistic to cancer,” meaning exposure to infectious childhood diseases lowers cancer risk. And in 2016 Baylor scientists “reported an inverse relationship between a history of chicken pox and glioma, a type of brain cancer, meaning that children who have had the chicken pox may be less likely to develop brain cancer.”What if certain illnesses and our immune system really do have a synergistic relationship? What if nature is actually more complicated than we think?

There may be many parents who feel, even after understanding the true history of polio, compelled to get the polio vaccine for their child. I have no personal problem with that. My problem is with the exaggerated, one-sided, fault-free history of vaccines that parents are presented with, one that hits parents over the head with the “safe and effective” mantra and discourages critical thinking. And if we can’t talk honestly about vaccines, we really can’t talk about how to end the autism epidemic. And that’s my real beef. It has turned me into an angry father.

A Perfect Circle of Denial

Vaccine injury, in my opinion, hides in plain sight, largely due to the way vaccines are tested and monitored, which is compounded by how poorly understood vaccine injuries are by the typical first line of defense when problems happen: pediatricians. Let’s think through this perfect “circle of denial” for a moment:

Vaccines are tested, as single doses, by observing side effects for just a few days after they are given. This ensures that any conditions that take time to manifest, which would be most autoimmune and neurological conditions, will never be captured through safety testing. Next, the postadministration form of capturing adverse events, VAERS, has been shown to capture less than 1 percent of all vaccine injuries. Add to this that pediatricians are never taught how to identify vaccine injuries, partially because the safety testing and reporting are so inadequate. And finally, parents are left completely in the dark about what’s happening when their child has a reaction. When you think about this circle of denial, you can see how an epidemic of vaccine injuries could be hiding in plain sight.

Doctors Are Raising Concerns

When I started to closely research vaccines after I watched my son’s health decline, I was shocked by how many doctors and scientists had raised very public concerns about whether vaccines are really “safe and effective” and had been doing so for decades. Dr. Robert Mendelsohn was the most famous American pediatrician of the 1970s and ’80s. He made over five hundred TV and radio appearances, authored six best-selling books about medicine and pediatrics that sold over a million copies, and wrote a nationally syndicated column, The People’s Doctor, for twelve years. Over those years his writing on the topic increased accordingly, and he told his readers that “although I administered them myself during my early years of practice, I have become a steadfast opponent of mass inoculations because of the myriad hazards they present.” He also realized that railing against the false narratives the vaccine industry had helped create would be hard for many to understand:

As I write about the dangers of mass immunization, that it is a concept that you may find difficult to accept. Immunizations have been so artfully and aggressively marketed that most parents believe them to be the “miracle” that has eliminated many once-feared diseases. Consequently, for anyone to oppose them borders on the foolhardy. For a pediatrician to attack what has become the “bread and butter” of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest’s denying the infallibility of the pope.

Dr. Mendelsohn passed away in 1988, just as the United States was embarking on a massive campaign to increase the total number of vaccines given to children. He was the first nationally known pediatrician to express public concern about the growing hazards vaccines were creating, but he was far from the last. Perhaps the most well-known pediatrician today is California’s Dr. Robert Sears, whose 2008 book, The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child, has sold more than 250,000 copies, and he provides some perspective on why he speaks out about the risks of vaccines:

I got interested in the topic of vaccines way back in medical school. A friend of mine convinced me to read a book about vaccines, and it ended up being a very anti-vaccine book. It was all about an old vaccine called the DPT vaccine that we don’t use anymore. But the book talked a lot about the risks and the dangers of that vaccine. The author of that book was calling for that vaccine to no longer be used. A number of years later, it turns out that they did discover that vaccine was causing a lot of very severe, life-threatening, even fatal side effects, so they did end up taking that vaccine off the market. So it kind of opened my eyes to the fact that there are some very severe, fortunately very rare, side effects to vaccines, and I wanted to learn more about this issue. I started reading a lot more books.^[

Dr. Sears is joined by many other pediatricians, including pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky of New York, who provides some insight into what he learned about vaccines during medical school:

When I went through medical school, I was taught that vaccines were completely safe and completely effective, and I had no reason to believe otherwise. All the information that I was taught was pretty standard in all the medical schools and the teachings and scientific literature throughout the country. . . . Over the years, I kept practicing medicine and using vaccines and thinking that my approach to vaccines was completely onboard with everything else I was taught. But more and more, I kept seeing that my experience of the world, my experience in using and reading about vaccines, and hearing what parents were saying about vaccines were very different from what I was taught in medical school and my residency training . . . and it became clearer to me as I read the research, listened to more and more parents, and found other practitioners who also shared the same concern that vaccines had not been completely proven safe or even completely effective, based on the literature that we have today. . . . It didn’t appear that the scientific studies that we were given were actually appropriately designed to prove and test the safety and efficacy.

Dr. Suzanne Humphries, a board-certified nephrologist turned activist and the author of Dissolving Illusions, shared some perspective on her journey:

Do you know how much doctors learn about vaccines in medical school? When we participate in pediatrics training, we learn that vaccines need to be given on schedule. We learn that smallpox and polio were eliminated by vaccines. We learn that there’s no need to know how to treat diphtheria, because we won’t see it again anyway. We are indoctrinated with the mantra that “vaccines are safe and effective”—neither of which is true. Doctors today are given extensive training on how to talk to “hesitant” parents—how to frighten them by vastly inflating the risks during natural infection. They are trained on the necessity of twisting parents’ arms to conform, or fire them from their practices. Doctors are trained that nothing bad should be said about any vaccine, period.

Dr. Rachael Ross spent three seasons cohosting the Emmy Award–winning and nationally syndicated TV Show, The Doctors. When she wasn’t hosting the show, Dr. Ross was commuting home to run her family practice in Gary, Indiana, alongside her father and brother, both physicians. When Dr. Ross changed her tune about using vaccines in her practice, the mainstream media met her announcement with silence, but her words were powerful and clear. In 2016 Dr. Ross explained her change of heart in a widely read blog post titled, “Vaccines, Vaccine Injury, & My Perspective as a Doctor & Mom”.

I have witnessed the vaccine schedule grow from 16 doses of 4 vaccines from birth to six years old when I was a child, to the current recommendation of 49 doses of 14 vaccines between birth and age six, and 69 doses of 16 vaccines between birth and the age of eighteen . . . and we’ve been giving them on-time, sometimes five shots a day to help kids “catch-up,” and all without question. Medical school and residency taught us all to do so. I guess I can’t help but wonder if there’s a connection between the fact that when we had to give fewer vaccines we had fewer childhood diseases. It is only human to wonder. We had fewer learning disabilities, less asthma, less autism, and less diabetes. Autism in particular was 1 in 500 in the late seventies and it has now skyrocketed to 1 in 50. Why so many? Why so soon?

Dr. Ross’s concern, when you look at a chart of the data, is deeply disturbing; the linear relationship between the rise in vaccines and the rise in autism is hard to miss

In early 2017 Dr. Daniel Neides, the medical director of Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute caused a controversy when he wrote an article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer titled, “Make 2017 the year to avoid toxins (good luck) and master your domain: Words on Wellness.” He specifically addressed whether the risk/reward of the current vaccination program was worth it: “Some of the vaccines have helped reduce the incidence of childhood communicable diseases . . . but not at the expense of neurologic diseases like autism and ADHD increasing at alarming rates.”

I agree with Dr. Neides. In many cases I don’t think the vaccine trade-off is worth it. I think we’re swapping a minor reduction in a handful of acute illnesses for an explosion in lifelong chronic illness, including some as devastating as autism. But worst of all, I deeply resent the people in positions of authority and power who endlessly repeat the lie that vaccines are “safe and effective,” which serves to not only shame parents, but also to shut down an open debate. If we can’t honestly look at the facts about vaccines and recognize that they have real risks as well as some benefits, we will never be able to openly and honestly discuss the autism epidemic.

So, what are parents supposed to do?

Well, at the very least, I think the current CDC childhood schedule should not be followed. I think we should immediately reduce the total number of vaccines given to American children. The word “vaccinate” can mean so many different things, and not all vaccines are created equally. So it’s time to get specific, and it’s time to reduce the number of vaccines American children receive. First, if other first-world countries haven’t added a vaccine to their schedule, why should we give it to American children? Second, any vaccine added since the 1986 law removing liability from vaccine manufacturers is up for discussion. And third, if science exists implicating a vaccine or showing it’s done more harm than good, that’s a serious red flag.

In the United States there are thirteen separate vaccines currently on the US schedule, most given to children between two and four times each. They are: (1) hepatitis B, (2) rotavirus, (3) DTaP, (4) Hib, (5) PCV, (6) polio, (7) influenza, (8) MMR, (9) varicella, (10) hepatitis A, (11) meningococcal, (12) Tdap, (13) HPV.

Many first-world countries don’t give: hepatitis B (unless the mother is hepatitis B positive), rotavirus, influenza, varicella, hepatitis A, and HPV. So that simple exercise would remove six vaccines from the US schedule.

New since 1986 (and not already excluded): Hib, PCV, meningococcal. Hib is a potentially deadly bacteria. It’s particularly dangerous for infants. That said, the Hib vaccine contains aluminum, so the risk/benefit equation is complex. PCV (often called “prevnar”) has too many questions associated with it, including the possibility that PCV vaccines are contributing to antibiotic resistance and the explosion in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) cases. It should be removed. Meningococcal is a very new vaccine, only added to the schedule in 2012 for young children. Serious questions remain about its safety and efficacy. I would remove it.

The Trump Administration is trying to move parents in this direction by at least placing vaccines into three different categories:

My Conclusion: Reduce the vaccine schedule to the following vaccines: DTaP, Hib, polio, and MMR. Of course, this will be viewed by pro-vaccine talking heads as a radical and dangerous idea, despite the fact that until the late 1980s, the entire US vaccine schedule was DTaP, polio, and MMR. Furthermore, decisions need to be made about when, exactly, to give these vaccines. In general, first vaccines should be delayed until children have reached their first birthday and the MMR delayed until they are past three years old, as Dr. Paul Thomas does in his practice. Speaking of Dr. Thomas, I really hope you listen to podcast I did with him where we discuss many of these issues:

I emailed this story to a friend, probably the only person in the world I think knows more about vaccines than I do. I asked him what he thought I should tell parents to do. He gave me a one word answer: “None.” Hard for me to disagree.

When it comes to vaccines, parents have much to ponder.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

The first study that compared children who had received a vaccine with children that hadn’t was published in 2000. Although autism wasn’t something the study considered, it was still revealing. Titled “Effects of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis or Tetanus Vaccination on Allergies and Allergy-Related Respiratory Symptoms among Children and Adolescents in the United States,” this study from the UCLA school of public health did look specifically at the DTP vaccine to see if it might be responsible for allergies and allergy-related symptoms, such as asthma. Looking at more than thirteen thousand children, the study found that:

DTP or tetanus vaccination in US children is associated with lifetime history of asthma or other allergies and allergy-related symptoms. . . . Assuming that the estimated vaccination effect is unbiased, 50% of diagnosed asthma cases (2.93 million) in US children and adolescents would be prevented if the DTP or tetanus vaccination was not administered.

So the first study to ever compare a group that received a vaccine with a group that didn’t found a dramatic difference in rates of asthma and allergies among the vaccinated group, so much so that they thought not getting the DTP vaccine might reduce cases of asthma by 50 percent! Note that many children with autism suffer from what are known as comorbid conditions, such as asthma, allergies, and other autoimmune conditions.

In 2008 in the second study ever looking at a group of children who didn’t receive a vaccine, public health researchers Carolyn Gallagher and Melody Goodman from SUNY Stony Brook looked at the possible relationship between the hepatitis B vaccine and special education.Were children who received the full series of hepatitis B vaccines (three separate vaccines, the first one often given on day one of life) more likely to end up in special education classes than children who didn’t receive any hepatitis B vaccines? The study, “Hepatitis B Triple Series Vaccine and Developmental Disability in US Children Aged 1–9 Years,” was published in the journal Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry, and the results were pretty clear: The full series of hepatitis B led to a ninefold greater likelihood of receiving special education:

This study found statistically significant evidence to suggest that boys in United States who were vaccinated with the triple series Hepatitis B vaccine . . . were more susceptible to developmental disability than were unvaccinated boys. . . . The odds of receiving EIS [special education] were approximately nine times as great for vaccinated boys (n = 46) as for unvaccinated boys (n = 7), after adjustment for confounders.

The same researchers from SUNY Stony Brook published another study in 2010, this time looking at the relationship between receiving the hepatitis B series and autism. Published in the prestigious Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, “Hepatitis B Vaccination of Male Neonates and Autism Diagnosis” once again reached very clear conclusions:

“Boys vaccinated as neonates had threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis compared to boys never vaccinated or vaccinated after the first month of life.”

Journalist David Kirby appreciated the significance of the new findings, writing in the Huffington Post:

[The study] will be among the first university-based population studies to suggest an association between a vaccine and an increased risk for autism. And that would be in direct contradiction to all those MMR and thimerosal studies that purportedly found no such link.

The two Goodman and Gallagher articles about hepatitis B raise many concerns. I’ve met pediatricians who feel that the hepatitis B vaccine specifically has triggered the epidemic of neurological disorders and autoimmunity we now see in our children. Hepatitis B was the first vaccine introduced after Congress indemnified vaccine makers from liability in 1986. The vaccine has a high dose of aluminum, which I believe is the primary cause of autism and it’s often given to babies on day one of life, which many immunologists feel is a huge mistake. These two studies raise major concerns, but I’m guessing you never knew either of these studies existed, which supports my point about scientists and PR firms.

In 2017, however, something amazing happened. Two separate studies comparing vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children actually got published. Unlike the Goodman and Gallagher studies above, which only explored a single vaccine (the rest of a child’s vaccine status was simply not considered), these two new studies met the “gold standard”—they found children who had never received any vaccines and looked at their health outcomes in a variety of ways. The public health researchers from Jackson State University originally planned to publish a single study, until they looked at the data on children born prematurely, noting that the data on the difference in health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated premature infants was so dramatic it deserved its own study.

Published in the Journal of Translational Science, the first groundbreaking study was called, “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-Year-Old U.S. Children,” and its results were so devastating to the US vaccine program that there wasn’t a single media outlet in the country that covered its release.The results of comparing vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children were no surprise to me, my wife, or any of the autism parents I know, but perhaps would surprise others:

The vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD [neurodevelopmental disorders]. After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.

Specifically, vaccinated children were found to have a fourfold higher likelihood of having autism. I’m reminded of a quote by Dr. Daniel Neides of the Cleveland Clinic, who wondered if we were making trade-offs that aren’t worth it. He said,

Simultaneously, the Jackson State authors published a study in the same journal just looking at children born prematurely, titled, “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children.” The results were disturbing, as the researchers found children born prematurely and vaccinated were fourteen times more likely to develop a neurodevelopmental disorder! The authors were appropriately concerned:

Preterm birth coupled with vaccination, however, was associated with a synergistic increase in the odds of NDD, suggesting the possibility that vaccination could precipitate adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm infants. These results provide clues to the epidemiology and causation of NDD but question the safety of current vaccination programs for preterm infants.

In 2020, Dr Brian Hooker Neil Miller took the study of unvaccinated children to a new level by looking at actual data from a pediatrician’s office who had a large number of unvaccinated patients. The study, Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disordersconcluded exactly what by now is a pretty familiar refrain:

Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47-3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04-9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63-2.78). In a quartile analysis, subjects were grouped by number of vaccine doses received in the first year of life. Higher odds ratios were observed in Quartiles 3 and 4 (where more vaccine doses were received) for all four health conditions considered, as compared to Quartile 1. In a temporal analysis, developmental delays showed a linear increase as the age cut-offs increased from 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 months of age (ORs = 1.95, 2.18, 2.92 and 3.51, respectively). Slightly higher ORs were also observed for all four health conditions when time permitted for a diagnosis was extended from ⩾ 3 years of age to ⩾ 5 years of age.

Conclusion: In this study, which only allowed for the calculation of unadjusted observational associations, higher ORs were observed within the vaccinated versus unvaccinated group for developmental delays, asthma and ear infections. Further study is necessary to understand the full spectrum of health effects associated with childhood vaccination.

In January 2025, Dr. Tony Mawson and colleagues published another study, this time using a gigantic and highly credible dataset including more than 4,600 unvaccinated children, to support many of the previous conclusions they reached. Titled Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid, the study looked at the data of 47,155 children enrolled in the Florida State Medicaid program. The study’s method:

Vaccination uptake was measured by numbers of healthcare visits that included vaccination-related procedures and diagnoses. Cross-sectional analyses were performed to calculate prevalence odds ratios (Aims 1-2). A retrospective cohort design was used to compute relative risks specifically of ASD (Aim 3).

As you might expect by now, the results supported what we are seeing in the unvaccinated populations:

The analysis of claims data for 47,155 nine-year-old children revealed that: 1) vaccination was associated with significantly increased odds for all measured NDDs; 2) among children born preterm and vaccinated, 39.9% were diagnosed with at least one NDD compared to 15.7% among those born preterm and unvaccinated (OR 3.58, 95% CI: 2.80, 4.57); and 3) the relative risk of ASD increased according to the number of visits that included vaccinations. Children with just one vaccination visit were 1.7 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than the unvaccinated (95% CI: 1.21, 2.35) whereas those with 11 or more visits were 4.4 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than those with no visit for vaccination (95% CI: 2.85, 6.84).

I’ll pull out the part of that conclusion that hits me hardest as an autism parent:

“Children with just one vaccination visit were 1.7 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than the unvaccinated (95% CI: 1.21, 2.35) whereas those with 11 or more visits were 4.4 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than those with no visit for vaccination (95% CI: 2.85, 6.84).”

Study #8: “Impact of Childhood Vaccination on Short- and Long-Term Chronic Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study.”

In the 8th study—18,468 children were included in this study by Detroit's Henry Ford Health System, the largest ever, and of course the results were devastating and consistent with the previous seven studies:

“Compared to unvaccinated children, those who received one or more vaccines had dramatically higher rates of chronic illness:

• 329% more asthma

• 203% more atopic disease

• 496% more autoimmune disease

• 453% more neurodevelopmental disorders
    • including 228% more developmental delays
    • and 347% more speech disorders”

Author Nicholas Hulscher, MPH noted:

Eight separate studies, all comparing a group of children vaccinated with a group of children unvaccinated, at least for a single vaccine. I’m guessing that for most readers this is the first time you’ve read about any of these studies. I think a fair question would be, “Why?” The answer is simple:

Studies that might hurt the financial performance of pharmaceutical companies or damage the reputation of public health officials or embarrass pediatricians are not publicized by media outlets that derive advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical companies.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

WASHINGTON, District of Columbia—I’ve been involved in the autism fight for more than two decades. My wife, Lisa, and I founded Generation Rescue in 2005, soon after Jenny joined us. We watched our son change. We listened to thousands of other parents describe what happened to their children. We fought with pediatricians, journalists, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and just about every institution that told us that what we believed we had witnessed with our own eyes couldn’t possibly have happened. We were mocked, called dangerous, called anti-science, and eventually given the most effective label of all: “anti-vaxxers.” Once that label was attached to you, nothing else you said mattered. Your observations didn’t matter. Your child’s history didn’t matter. The thousands of other parents reporting remarkably similar experiences didn’t matter. The debate, we were repeatedly told, was over.

Which is why I am having such a difficult time adequately describing what I watched at the White House last week. For parents like us, it was almost incomprehensible. The President of the United States was sitting there. His extraordinarily influential deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, was sitting there. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And these men were talking publicly about America’s childhood vaccine program in language that, not very long ago, could get an ordinary parent effectively excommunicated from polite society.

Miller called what had happened with the childhood vaccine schedule a “medical travesty.” President Trump again questioned the way vaccines have been administered to American children, and his administration is now translating those concerns into actual federal policy. Whatever you think about vaccines, Donald Trump, Bobby Kennedy, or Stephen Miller, stop for a moment and appreciate how extraordinary that is. I certainly did, because I remember when nobody would listen to us. And now the President is.

I Wrote This Eleven Years Ago

There is another part of this story that deserves to be remembered, and you’ll forgive me for taking a very small victory lap. Eleven years ago, when Donald Trump was still a candidate and the idea that he would actually become President was regarded by much of the political establishment as somewhere between improbable and absurd, I wrote an essay for Age of Autism with a title that leaves very little ambiguity about where I stood:

Trump Stands With My Son, I Stand With Trump

I don’t bring this up because I had some unique insight into presidential politics. I certainly didn’t. I bring it up because I saw something in Trump on this particular issue before there was any conceivable political advantage in seeing it, and more importantly, Trump himself was taking this position before there was any political advantage in taking it. In fact, there was almost certainly political downside.

Trump didn’t discover this issue because Bobby Kennedy became his HHS secretary. He didn’t discover it because MAHA became politically fashionable. He had been talking about vaccines and autism publicly since at least 2007. In 2011, he described an employee whose healthy child received vaccines and subsequently changed dramatically, an experience Trump has referenced repeatedly over the years. In 2012 and 2014 he was posting publicly about his concerns over the childhood vaccine schedule. Then, during the 2015 Republican presidential debate, he told essentially the same story to an enormous national television audience and argued that childhood vaccinations should be spread out.

Years before that presidential campaign, he had also put money behind people challenging the conventional wisdom. In 2010, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $10,000 to Generation Rescue, the autism organization Lisa and I founded and which Jenny McCarthy later led.

Think about the timeline. This wasn’t Trump discovering an issue that tested well with voters. This was Trump saying things that virtually every political professional would have advised him not to say. You can love Donald Trump. You can hate Donald Trump. You can believe he is the greatest president of our lifetime or spend every waking hour wishing he would disappear.

But on this particular issue, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging something: the man has been remarkably consistent.

In fact, one of the more amusing historical footnotes is that even people who despised everything we were saying acknowledged Trump’s consistency at the time. In September 2015, Science-Based Medicine published a lengthy attack on Trump, me and the entire vaccine-autism movement. The author (some dimwit who calls himself “Orac”) specifically cited my Trump Stands With My Son essay and then conceded that, although Trump had changed his positions on plenty of other subjects, his views on vaccines and autism had been remarkably consistent.

Well, here we are.

Eleven years later, Trump isn’t a long-shot candidate anymore. He is sitting in the Oval Office for his second term, surrounded by senior members of his administration, and talking about the same issue.

That is extraordinary.

And Then I Read the Newspapers

The reaction was almost instantaneous. Reuters reported the administration’s announcement while reminding readers that the vaccine-autism connection has been “debunked.” The Associated Press published a “Fact Focus” describing statements by Trump and Kennedy as false or misleading. Other major media outlets used essentially the same framing: unfounded, disproven, debunked, dangerous.

Same story, same words, same certainty. Watching it unfold, I found myself thinking about something much larger than vaccines: Who actually has the power in America?

I don’t mean constitutionally. We all took civics. We know the answer we’re supposed to give. I mean actual power. Because here we have the elected President of the United States, surrounded by some of the most powerful people in his administration, saying in effect that they believe something has gone terribly wrong, that they want another look, and that they intend to make changes. And almost before the words have left their mouths, the institutional immune system activates. Politicians condemn it. Medical organizations condemn it. Experts condemn it. The media tells Americans that the underlying question has already been answered and therefore doesn’t really need to be asked again.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable question that I genuinely don’t know how to answer: Is Big Pharma more powerful than the President of the United States?

Follow the Money

I have spent most of my professional life in business, and one lesson business teaches you very quickly is that incentives matter. Money matters. And an almost incomprehensible amount of money flows from pharmaceutical companies into the institutions that shape American public opinion and public policy.

Consider advertising. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars every year advertising through American media. Now ask yourself a very simple question: if you owned a television network and one industry was handing your business an enormous amount of money every year, would that industry have influence? Notice the word I used—influence. I don’t need to believe that some Pfizer executive calls a newsroom and dictates tomorrow’s headline. I don’t think that’s how power usually works, and frankly, it doesn’t need to work that way.

Institutions learn where their bread is buttered. People understand which opinions advance careers and which ones end them. Editors know which sources are considered “credible.” Reporters learn which questions are respectable. Politicians learn which donors return phone calls. Scientists understand which research gets funded and which research is likely to make them radioactive. Eventually an entire ecosystem can move in the same direction without anybody ever having to issue an order. That is how institutional power works.

And advertising is only half of this story. Pharmaceutical and health-product interests spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the federal government. I don’t cite those numbers as proof that every congressman has been “bought” or that every journalist is corrupt. That would be simplistic and impossible to prove. I cite them because pretending this amount of money creates no gravitational pull whatsoever would be even more ridiculous. You don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Washington because lobbying doesn’t work, and you don’t spend billions advertising through America’s media companies because those relationships have no value.

The President Vs. the System

And that is what makes this moment so fascinating. Trump isn’t fighting one pharmaceutical company. He is confronting an ecosystem that has been built over decades and includes pharmaceutical companies, lobbyists, medical associations, universities, researchers, federal bureaucracies, members of Congress, political donors, medical journals, television networks, newspapers, and an entire professional class whose careers have developed inside the existing system.

That’s the mountain. And suddenly I realized something last week: for 20 years, many of us dreamed of having someone in the White House who would listen. We thought that was the finish line. It wasn’t. It may only have been base camp.

Because now we have something I never imagined we would have: a President of the United States willing to stand publicly on this issue (against his poll-watching advisors’ advice) and absorb the ridicule that inevitably comes with it. We have an HHS secretary who has spent much of his adult life questioning the vaccine establishment. We have one of the President’s closest and most powerful aides using language about the childhood vaccine schedule that sounds far more like something you would have heard at a Generation Rescue conference 15 years ago than inside the White House.

And yet the mountain is still there. Maybe that tells us something about how powerful the mountain really is.

This Is Bigger Than Trump

There is another reason I give Trump credit for what happened last week. Politics rewards cowardice, and every political consultant in Washington understands polling, swing voters and midterm elections. Vaccines remain one of the most radioactive subjects in American public life. The politically safe move would have been obvious: wait. Talk about food dyes. Talk about obesity. Talk about chronic disease. Talk about government transparency. Maybe mention Tylenol again. Do all the popular pieces of MAHA and leave vaccines alone until after the midterms. There must have been people around Trump telling him precisely that.

He didn’t listen. Neither did Kennedy. Neither did Miller. Instead, with an election approaching, they walked directly into perhaps the most controversial medical debate in America. Whatever else one thinks about these men, that isn’t political caution. And for families who have been screaming into the wind for decades, there is something deeply moving about witnessing it.

I wish I could go back and talk to the version of myself who wrote Trump Stands With My Son, I Stand With Trump ten years ago. I would tell him that Trump is going to win. Then lose. Then come back and win again. I would tell him that Bobby Kennedy will be running HHS, that one of the President’s closest advisers will describe what happened to the childhood vaccine schedule as a medical travesty, and that the federal government itself will be reconsidering recommendations that were once treated as untouchable.

I don’t think that version of me would believe a word of it.

And yet here we are.

Can He Actually Win?

That is where my exhilaration collides with my fear. Presidents come and go. Industries remain. Administrations last four or eight years. Bureaucracies can last generations. Pharmaceutical companies don’t have elections. Lobbying firms don’t have term limits. Advertising budgets don’t need Senate confirmation. And the enormous financial incentives surrounding the American healthcare system don’t disappear because a President signs an executive order.

That is why I don’t have a triumphant ending for this essay. I wish I did. I genuinely don’t know how this ends.

I know what I strongly believe happened to our children. I know what happened in my own family. I know what thousands of parents have told me over the last two decades. I also know that the dominant position of America’s major medical organizations remains that vaccines have not been shown to cause autism. That disagreement is precisely why I believe genuine scientific inquiry matters so much. If one side believes the question has been conclusively answered and another believes important questions were never properly investigated, the answer shouldn’t be censorship, ridicule or another journalist inserting the word “debunked” into the third paragraph of every story.

The answer should be better science. Open the data. Ask uncomfortable questions. Run the studies people have been demanding (And actually read the growing body of unvaccinated studies that have been published.) Make conflicts of interest transparent. Stop deciding in advance which questions scientists are allowed to ask. And then let the evidence win.

Maybe Trump can force that process. Maybe Kennedy can. Maybe the enormous power of the presidency, combined with millions of parents and citizens who simply refuse to go away, will finally be enough. But I watched the reaction last week and realized that I am less certain than I once would have been.

The President of the United States has enormous power. So does an industry with billions of dollars in advertising, hundreds of millions in annual lobbying expenditures, armies of lobbyists, deep relationships throughout medicine and government, and extraordinary influence over the institutions that determine which ideas Americans are permitted to regard as respectable. As Aaron Siri would say, the religion of vaccines is alive and well, many of our fellow citizens remain devotees (especially Democrats who tend to do the oppostite of whatever Trump says).

For more than 20 years, parents like us have been asking for someone powerful enough to take this issue on. Against almost unimaginable odds, that person now occupies the Oval Office. Ten years ago, when almost nobody believed he would ever get there, I wrote that Trump stood with my son, and therefore I stood with Trump. I couldn’t possibly have imagined the scene I would be watching from the White House a decade later.

But having the President on your side and winning are apparently two very different things.

So what happens when the most powerful elected official in the world goes up against the most powerful industry in the world?

Who actually has more power, Donald Trump or Big Pharma?

For the first time in my 20 years in this fight, I think we’re going to find out. I desperately hope the answer is the President.

Time will tell, and it wont be 11 years.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

Appendix:

The scientific debate can begin right here:

TASMANIA, Australia—Country Artist Tyler Hudson came bombing through the U.S. last week (he’s a Texan living in Australia) and one of his Instagram posts about Autism did something that really doesn’t happen to me anymore after 22 years as an autism dad: it choked me up.

His post was a read-aloud excerpt from his new book, The Missing Lyrics, that discussed a poem written by his NT daughter about his teenage son with profound autism, whose name is Lyric.

I was fine until these words:

I want to personally thank Tyler Hudson and his family for re-igniting something in me that’s faded with time and focus on optimizing my son’s life: outrage.

I’m 57 years old, which means I have one advantage in this conversation that many people don’t: I remember the world before profound autism became commonplace. That’s not nostalgia talking. It’s memory.

I went to elementary school in the 1970s. I played Little League. I rode my bike around the neighborhood until the streetlights came on. I went to church, summer camp, birthday parties, county fairs, airports, shopping malls, and movie theaters. I sat in packed gymnasiums and crowded cafeterias. I stood in line for the Scrambler at the fair behind a hundred kids I’d never met. I was surrounded by children everywhere I went, constantly, for my entire childhood.

Looking back, I can remember many of them. The kid who always picked his nose. The kid who couldn’t stop talking. The class clown, the bully, the shy girl, the future valedictorian. I even remember the girl in my sister’s grade with Down syndrome, because there was exactly one.

What I cannot remember—not a single time, not once, not anywhere—is a child who couldn’t speak. A child who wore a helmet because he smashed his head into concrete. A child who shrieked uncontrollably for hours. Parents wrestling a teenage son twice their size to keep him from hurting himself. A mother scanning a parking lot in a panic because her nine-year-old bolted and can’t say his own name.

I’ve asked hundreds of people my age the same question, and I get the same answer every time, usually after a long pause and a puzzled look. They don’t remember it either. (Ask a former nurse or teacher over the age of 70, you’ll get the same response, too.) If those children existed in our world, they were so extraordinarily rare that none of us ever encountered them.

Today, they are everywhere. And the most astonishing part isn’t that our world changed. It’s that we’ve stopped acting like it did.

Think about that for a minute. If I had walked into my fourth-grade classroom in 1978 and told my teacher that one day virtually every school district in America would have multiple classrooms dedicated to children who could not speak, who required one-on-one aides, who wandered, who self-injured, who had seizures, who would almost certainly require lifelong care, she would have assumed I was describing some dystopian science fiction novel. She would have asked what happened. She would have wanted to know what we did about it. Any reasonable adult in 1978 would have.

Yet here we are. We built an entire infrastructure around this new reality—special education departments, behavioral therapy franchises, sensory gyms, respite care agencies, Medicaid waivers, sibling support groups, adult residential services, a whole professional class of people whose careers exist because of it. We did it fast, and we did it without ever really pausing to say out loud what the construction of that infrastructure implies. You do not build all of that for a population that has always been there. And somewhere along the way we collectively decided to stop asking the most obvious question in the world:

How the f*&^ did this happen?

It’s as if a meteor landed in the middle of town and, after twenty years, everyone simply started using it as a picnic table.

Now, I know exactly what the response to all of this is, because I’ve heard it a thousand times. Those children were always here. We just didn’t have the words. They were locked away in institutions, or labeled mentally retarded, or written off as schizophrenic, or hidden in back bedrooms by families too ashamed to bring them out. The diagnostic criteria widened. Awareness improved. What looks like an epidemic is really just a bright light being switched on in a room that was always full.

Absolute and complete bullshit. I wrote an entire article about this con job here.

Here is what I’ll grant without hesitation: Awareness did improve. Definitions broadened mildly. Broadened criteria and better recognition explain the mild end of the distribution beautifully. Of course a socially awkward, brilliant, verbally fluent kid in 1975 went undiagnosed. Nobody was looking for him. He was just the odd one, the intense one, the one who knew everything about trains. He grew up, got a job, and figured it out at thirty-five. That story is completely believable, and I believe it.

Now apply the same logic to the other end, the profound autism end where 40% or more of our kids reside. Tell me the mechanism by which an entire society failed to notice non-speaking teenagers who bite through their own hands. Tell me how a rural county in 1974 misplaced the children who need two adults to get them into a car. These are not subtle presentations. These are not kids you overlook because the paperwork was wrong. A profoundly disabled child is the single most visible category of child there is—visible to teachers, to neighbors, to pediatricians, to grandparents, to the guy running the concession stand at the Little League field.

And the institutions everyone points to were emptying, not filling. Deinstitutionalization was well underway by the time I was in grade school. The population was moving out into communities—into my community—during exactly the years I’m describing. If those children were being warehoused somewhere, they should have been arriving in my world, not vanishing from it.

What troubles me even more is that we’ve become so accustomed to profound autism that the public conversation about autism increasingly revolves around people whose lives bear almost no resemblance to the families I know.

Again, this is not a criticism of anyone. If you discovered in college that you were autistic because social situations exhausted you or eye contact made you uncomfortable, I sincerely hope that insight helped you understand yourself better. I mean that. I don’t begrudge anyone clarity about their own life, and I’ve watched that clarity change people’s lives for the better.

But let’s stop pretending that experience is interchangeable with the experience of a child who cannot tell his mother that his stomach hurts. Who may spend hours each day engaging in self-injury. Who requires assistance with nearly every aspect of daily living. Whose parents quietly carry the knowledge that their greatest fear isn’t next year—it’s what happens after they’re gone.

This isn’t about ranking suffering or deciding who deserves the word “autism.” Frankly, I’ve grown tired of semantic arguments. Call my son’s condition profound autism, severe autism, catastrophic autism, or invent an entirely new name for it. I honestly don’t care. I care about clarity. Because when one word is stretched so far that it comfortably includes a successful engineer who discovered he was autistic at thirty-five and a non-speaking adult who will require lifelong care, that word begins to lose its usefulness.

We even invented a word to paper over the problem. Spectrum. It sounds so reasonable, so generous. And it does real work—it correctly conveys that there’s enormous variation. But a spectrum implies a smooth gradient, one continuous thing shading gently from one end to the other, and that framing quietly does something dangerous. It suggests these are differences of degree rather than differences of kind. It lets a policy discussion, a research budget, or a news segment slide from one end to the other without anyone noticing the switch. And in practice, the sliding only goes one direction.

More importantly, the people with the greatest needs begin to disappear from public view. It’s not malicious. It’s just what happens when the loudest voices belong to the people most capable of speaking for themselves.

I want to be concrete for a moment, because abstraction is how this stays comfortable.

And it’s the ordinary grief underneath all of it, which nobody wants to hear about because it sounds like ingratitude: that you would give anything—anything—to know what he thinks about.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for anyone. I’m telling you because it’s the part that gets sanded off, and the sanding is how a national emergency becomes a manageable line item.

Then there are the siblings, who almost never get mentioned at all.

They are the quietest casualties of this, and the most uncomplaining. They learn early to need less. They learn to read a room before they enter it, to notice the tension in a parent’s shoulders, to make themselves easy. They give up birthday parties, vacations, and a certain amount of parental attention that is simply not available and never will be. Many of them become extraordinary adults—thoughtful, capable, unusually kind. And many of them also spend their twenties working out what it cost.

They also inherit it. Not the diagnosis—the responsibility. Every family I know has had some version of the conversation, usually late at night, usually badly: what happens to your brother when we’re gone. There is no good way to have that conversation with a nineteen-year-old.

Which brings me to the thing parents in this world think about constantly and discuss almost never.

The children we’ve all seen in the grocery store are becoming adults. That’s not a projection; it’s arithmetic. The kids who started arriving in the nineties are in their thirties now. The public imagination stops at the sweet non-speaking eight-year-old, because an eight-year-old is easy to feel something about. Nobody has a mental image for a thirty-four-year-old man with the same needs, six inches taller than his father, a raging libido, whiskers he can’t shave himself, whose father is seventy-one and whose mother has had a hip replaced.

The waiting lists for adult residential placement in some states run to years. In a few, they run to decades. Parents are aging out of the ability to lift their own sons. And the honest answer to “what’s the plan” is, for an enormous number of families, that there isn’t one—there’s a hope that a sibling will step in, or that a spot opens, or that everyone dies in the right order.

We built the front end of this system in a hurry because children in classrooms create political urgency. We never built the back end, because adults in group homes don’t.

So why did the question disappear?

I don’t think there’s a conspiracy. I’ve never found one, and I’ve looked harder than most. I think it’s something more mundane and more difficult to fix: almost everyone’s livelihood in this field sits downstream of the diagnosis, and almost nobody’s sits upstream of it.

Think about who the professionals are. The special education teacher, the behavioral therapist, the speech pathologist, the occupational therapist, the residential provider, the advocacy organization, the researcher studying interventions and supports. Every one of them is doing genuine, valuable, exhausting work. Every one of them is helping the children who are already here. And none of them, in the course of doing that work well, ever has to ask why there are so many. It isn’t their job. It isn’t anyone’s job.

Add to that the fact that asking the question has become socially expensive. It gets you sorted, immediately, into a camp. People hear the question and assume they already know the answer you’re driving at, and the conversation ends before it starts. So reasonable people stop asking, not because they’ve been persuaded, but because it isn’t worth the trouble.

That’s how a question dies. Not by being answered. By becoming impolite.

The irony is that the families living with profound autism aren’t asking for pity. Most of the parents I know have become remarkably resilient. They are funny, resourceful, and unbelievably tough. They have to be. What they are asking for is something much simpler: don’t stop being outraged and the scale of disability we now have in our society.

Don’t let familiarity become indifference. Don’t let an entire generation of profoundly disabled children become background noise simply because you’ve seen them before.

Every time another child loses language, every time another family begins this journey, every time another sibling quietly rearranges his or her childhood around the needs of a brother or sister, that should still strike us as extraordinary. Not because those children are any less worthy of love, but because no society should become comfortable with an epidemic of profound disability in its youngest members.

Somewhere along the way, I think we confused acceptance with surrender. We absolutely should accept and love every child exactly as they are. Those two ideas aren’t in conflict. But acceptance should never mean abandoning the search for answers. Loving a child with leukemia has never required pretending leukemia is simply another beautiful form of human diversity. Loving a child with profound autism shouldn’t require us to stop asking why so many children are following this path or whether future families could be spared it. If anything, our love for the children already affected should strengthen our resolve to understand what happened—not weaken it.

And history keeps proving that the asking is worth it. Nobody knew what was harming children in houses with old paint until somebody insisted on finding out, and the answer turned out to be sitting on the windowsills. Thousands of babies died in their sleep every year and it was accepted as one of the tragedies of being alive, right up until people who refused to accept it noticed which way the babies were lying. Neither of those answers came from the people managing the consequences. They came from people who were stubborn about the cause.

None of that required blaming anybody. It required funding the question, comparing populations honestly, counting carefully, and being willing to publish an answer nobody expected. That’s all. That’s the entire ask. (Of course I think I know the answer, my blog is full of articles that support my POV.)

So I come back to the question that keeps bothering me, the question I can’t shake no matter how many conferences I attend or how many articles I read: where did our outrage go?

Not our compassion. I see compassion every day. I see teachers, therapists, parents, siblings, and caregivers performing acts of extraordinary kindness, many unpaid, most of them unwitnessed. That’s not what went missing.

What seems to have vanished is the deep moral conviction that this should not simply be accepted as the new normal. The conviction that a generation of children losing the ability to speak is a thing that demands an explanation. The refusal to shrug.

History is full of moments when people looked at widespread suffering and declined to treat it as inevitable, and we remember those people specifically because everyone around them had already stopped looking. I hope someday we’ll look back on profound autism the same way—not as something we gradually learned to live with, but as something we finally decided was too important to stop trying to understand.

My son is not a mystery I’m trying to solve. He’s my son. But he is also evidence of something, and I’d like someone to tell me what.

Thanks to Tyler Hudson and his family for rekindling my outrage.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

That history matters right now because we are standing at another fork in the road in our understanding of autism—especially profound autism and non-speaking autism—and once again the institutions are behaving with the same certainty they displayed before. The modern version of the old assumption goes something like this:

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But watching this vote unfold, I couldn’t help but notice the absurdity of the debate itself. Committee members who opposed the change kept saying variations of the same thing: “We’ve heard ‘do no harm’ as a moral imperative. We are doing harm by changing this wording.” Another said “no rational science has been presented” to support the change.

And t…

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Let me be blunt: If you believe that better diagnosis explains why autism went from affecting 1 in 10,000 children to 1 in 36, you’re either uninformed, repeating lies you’ve heard, or lying yourself.

The North Dakota Study Destroys This Myth

In 1987, researchers published a prevalence study of autism in North Dakota. They looked at all 180,000 children under eighteen in the entire state. They assessed children in person. The data was peer-reviewed, published, and replicable. They foun…

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PORTLAND, Oregon—I never wanted to become an expert on autism. I was a Stanford graduate working in private equity, living a comfortable mainstream life with my wife. We were compliant parents who did exactly what our pediatrician told us. Our first son Sam somehow made it through the vaccine onslaught unscathed. Our second son Jamie wasn’t so lucky.

Jamie’s precipitous decline after his vaccines woke us up. It made no sense. A healthy, developing toddler suddenly lost his words, stopped making eye contact, and retreated into a world we couldn’t reach. The anger came as we realized his vaccines had done this to him. My life has never been the same. We trust less but love more. Without Jamie, we wouldn’t have been ready for Covid and so many other poisons constantly offered to us by Pharma.

What follows is everything I’ve learned about autism over the past two decades of research, writing, and fighting to save other children from my son’s fate.

The Epidemic is Real

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s at Sunrise Valley Elementary School in Northern Virginia, autism simply didn’t exist. Not one kid. Ask anyone over 50 about autism in their childhood—it’s the same answer worldwide: I never heard of it.

Today, autism affects 1 in 36 children. That’s not “better diagnosis.” That’s a catastrophe.

In 1987, exceptionally thorough researchers in North Dakota looked at all 180,000 children under age eighteen. They assessed children in person. The data was published, peer-reviewed, and replicable. They found autism in 3.3 per 10,000 kids—roughly 1 in 3,300.

To believe the epidemic isn’t real, you’d have to believe those North Dakota researchers missed 98.8 percent of autism cases. You’d have to believe all those kids were sitting right next to you in class, and you, your parents, your teachers, and your doctors never noticed. It’s an impossible world, but it’s the one the Bad Guys want us to believe in.

The truth? In 1987, if you had one million kids, 330 had autism. Today, with those same one million kids, 27,777 have autism. The epidemic is real, and it’s catastrophic.

What Causes Autism: The Mechanism

The answer is hiding in plain sight: aluminum adjuvants in vaccines.

Few people appreciate that the aluminum in vaccines isn’t organic aluminum from nature—it’s man-made aluminum nanoparticles. Our bodies have no mechanism to dispose of them. When vaccines are injected, macrophages from the immune system grab these aluminum nanoparticles and circulate them throughout the body, eventually depositing them in the brain where they stay forever.

It’s a Trojan horse mechanism. The aluminum sneaks into the brain by hiding inside the immune cells that are supposed to protect us. Once there, it causes permanent neuroinflammation, activates microglia, damages neurotransmission, impairs mitochondrial function, and triggers the brain damage we recognize as autism.

Leading scientists worldwide have been screaming about this for over a decade. Dr. Chris Exley from Keele University found extraordinarily high aluminum levels in the brains of people who died with autism. French researchers warned in 2013 that “continuously escalating doses of this poorly biodegradable adjuvant in the population may become insidiously unsafe, especially in the case of overimmunization or immature/altered blood brain barrier.”

The medical establishment claims aluminum in vaccines is safe by comparing injected aluminum nanoparticles to ingested, soluble aluminum from food. This is criminally dishonest—like claiming injecting gasoline is safe because drinking orange juice is safe.

The Vulnerable Subset

Not every child develops autism after vaccination, which has allowed vaccine defenders to muddy the waters. But we now understand why some children are more vulnerable.

Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, former director of medical research at Johns Hopkins’ Kennedy Krieger Institute, testified that vaccines can cause autism in children with mitochondrial dysfunction. These are metabolic abnormalities where cellular energy levels are low, making children more susceptible to vaccine injury.

Vaccine proponents desperately claim mitochondrial disorders are rare. They’re not. Data shows 20 to 50 percent of children with autism have some type of mitochondrial disorder. Worse, these disorders can be genetic or caused by environmental toxins—meaning a healthy child could receive one vaccine load, develop a mitochondrial disorder, then receive a second load and develop autism.

This is what happened to Hannah Poling, whose family received over $20 million in compensation from the vaccine court after vaccines caused her autism. Her case wasn’t unique—we know of at least 83 cases where the vaccine court compensated families for vaccine-induced brain damage that resulted in autism, even though the court refuses to use the word “autism” in its decisions.

The Timeline That Proves Everything

On November 14, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, giving vaccine manufacturers complete immunity from liability. Reagan’s own administration had opposed the bill. The Department of Justice called it “a major new entitlement program for which no legitimate need has been demonstrated.”

But once liability was removed, the vaccine schedule exploded. In the early 1980s, children received about 11 doses of 3 different vaccines. Today they receive 72 doses of 16 different vaccines by age 18.

The autism epidemic began in 1989—exactly when the first birth cohorts received the expanded, liability-free vaccine schedule. This isn’t coincidence. It’s cause and effect.

Nine vaccines we give children today didn’t even exist in the mid-1980s. Vaccination rates were around 60 percent. Today they’re over 95 percent. We couldn’t have had “herd immunity” in the 1980s, yet somehow we all survived just fine.

The Suppressed Science

The CDC knows vaccines cause autism. Dr. William Thompson, a CDC scientist, admitted under oath that the agency destroyed data showing vaccines increase autism risk, particularly in African American boys. He turned over thousands of documents to Congress. Those documents have been buried for nearly a decade.

Dr. Zimmerman was the government’s own expert witness in vaccine court. When he told Department of Justice lawyers that vaccines can cause autism in vulnerable children, they fired him and misrepresented his testimony to win cases and deny compensation to thousands of families. That’s not science—that’s fraud.

Meanwhile, vaccine safety trials are designed to hide injuries. They monitor adverse events for only 4-5 days after vaccination, when autism develops over weeks and months. They use other vaccines or aluminum adjuvant as the “placebo” instead of saline, making it impossible to detect vaccine-caused harm.

Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the so-called godfather of vaccines, admitted in a nine-hour deposition that he experimented on orphans, mentally disabled children, and babies of prisoners. This is the ethical framework that built our vaccine program.

What Vaccines Didn’t Do

Here’s what vaccine promoters don’t want you to know: vaccines were responsible for at most 1-3.5 percent of the decline in mortality since 1900.

In 1970, Dr. Edward Kass, President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, warned his colleagues not to give vaccines credit they didn’t deserve. In 1977, epidemiologists McKinlay and McKinlay published definitive research proving that 92.3 percent of mortality decline happened before 1950, before most vaccines existed.

What actually saved us? Clean water, safe food, proper sanitation, plumbing, improved nutrition, and reduced crowding. The CDC reconfirmed this in 2000: “Nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.”

Measles mortality declined 98 percent before the vaccine was introduced. You don’t get to claim you saved humanity when you were responsible for 3.5 percent at most.

The Unvaccinated Are Healthier

Seven peer-reviewed studies have compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Every single one shows unvaccinated kids are healthier. They have dramatically lower rates of allergies, asthma, ADHD, ear infections, eczema, learning disabilities—and virtually no autism.

These studies are nearly impossible to publish because the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want the public to see the results. The CDC has refused for decades to do a comprehensive vaccinated versus unvaccinated study, claiming it would be “unethical.” That’s a lie. Millions of children are already unvaccinated by parental choice.

Florida just eliminated all vaccine mandates. Over the next five years, we’re going to see autism rates begin to decline in counties where vaccination rates drop substantially. The gap between vaccinated and unvaccinated children will become undeniable. This will be the natural experiment the CDC has desperately tried to prevent.

What Jamie Taught Me

Through spelling on a letterboard, my profoundly autistic, non-speaking son revealed the truth that destroys the neurodiversity movement’s narrative.

Jamie is intellectually intact. He’s been aware of everything his entire life but trapped inside a body that won’t obey him. His hand-flapping, his repetitive behaviors, his inability to make eye contact—none of that is his choice. His motor system is damaged.

Jamie doesn’t want his autism celebrated. He describes it as torture—being locked in a prison he can’t escape. He wants to be treated, not accepted. He remembers developing normally as a toddler before autism took over. He knows he was injured.

The neurodiversity movement serves a specific purpose for the pharmaceutical industry: it reframes vaccine injury as genetic variation. If autism is natural human diversity that’s always existed, it can’t be an epidemic and can’t be caused by vaccines. But kids like Jamie who regressed after vaccination prove autism is acquired injury, not innate identity.

Jamie didn’t write about being “blessed” with autism. He wrote: “I want to be free of this prison.”

The Big Tobacco Playbook

The vaccine industry has perfected every tactic Big Tobacco used to hide cigarette harm, then added layers of protection Big Tobacco never achieved.

Both industries knew their products caused serious harm. Both suppressed and manipulated science. Both paid scientists to manufacture doubt. Both destroyed careers of honest researchers. Both captured regulatory agencies.

But Big Tobacco never made cigarettes mandatory. The government never forced children to smoke to attend school. Doctors never reported parents to child protective services for not letting kids smoke.

The vaccine industry created a liability-free, government-mandated product with no long-term safety studies and no accountability when things go wrong. It’s Big Tobacco on steroids, and children are paying the price.

What Comes Next

With RFK Jr. heading HHS, we finally have a chance to expose the truth. We need:

• The complete vaccinated versus unvaccinated study the CDC refuses to do

• Release of Dr. Thompson’s suppressed documents

• Investigation of vaccine court corruption

• True placebo-controlled trials for all vaccines

• Proper safety testing of aluminum adjuvant

• An end to all vaccine mandates

• Restoration of manufacturer liability

The pharmaceutical industry will fight with everything they have. They have trillions at stake. But the truth is on our side, the science is on our side, and the injured children are on our side.

Trust Your Instincts

If your gut tells you something is wrong with the vaccine schedule, listen. You’re not crazy. You’re not anti-science. You’re a parent trying to protect your child in a system that has been completely captured by pharmaceutical profits.

The autism epidemic can end. But only if we have the courage to confront the truth about what caused it.

Vaccines didn’t save humanity. They’re destroying our children’s futures. The sooner we face that reality, the sooner we can end this catastrophe and give kids like Jamie a chance at the life they deserve.

Everything I know about autism leads to one inescapable conclusion: We did this to our children. And we can stop doing it.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

WASHINGTON, District of Columbia—If RFK Jr. is serious about adding autism to the “Table Injuries” of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the world of the Vaccine Court is about to radically change. For those not as familiar, I’d like to explain two important facts about the Vaccine Court, but first let’s review what RFK Jr actually said.

RFK Jr’s Words

Here’s what Secretary Kennedy wrote on X:

The 1986 Vaccine Act gave vaccine makers immunity against lawsuits by children who suffer vaccine injuries. The statute, and numerous subsequent court decisions, recognized that vaccines, like all medicines, are, in the words of the American Academy of Pediatrics case, “unavoidably unsafe,” and that a percentage of vaccinated children will suffer injuries or death. Congress, therefore, simultaneously created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which obliged HHS to compensate injured children. In the words of then Labor and Public Welfare Committee Chairman Senator Edward Kennedy, “when ... children are the victims of an appropriate and rational national policy, a compassionate [g]overnment will assist them in their hour of need.” Under the VICP, vaccine victims can petition for compensation to the so-called “Vaccine Court,” which pays out awards from a trust fund endowed by a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine. Congress intended that injured children be compensated “quickly and fairly” for injuries, “either presumed or proven to be causally connected to vaccines,” with doubts about causation resolved in favor of the victim. To date, the Vaccine Court has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners. But the VICP no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent. Instead, the VICP has devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption as government lawyers and the Special Masters who serve as Vaccine Court judges prioritize the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund, over their duty to compensate victims. The structure itself hobbles claimants. The defendant is HHS, not the vaccine makers; and claimants are therefore facing the monumental power and bottomless pockets of the U.S. government represented by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, most of the Special Masters come from government, legal, or political posts, and typically display an extreme bias that favors the government side. There is no discovery, and the rules of evidence do not apply. The government lawyers do not allow children’s attorneys access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a taxpayer-funded CDC surveillance system that houses the best data on vaccine injuries. Attorney compensation is in the hands of notoriously biased Special Masters and often hostile government attorneys, who can leverage this power to turn petitioner attorneys against their clients’ interests. The VICP routinely dismisses meritorious cases outright or drags them out for years. Instead of “quickly and fairly” awarding compensation, Special Masters dismiss over half of the cases. Most of those that proceed typically take 5+ years to resolve, with many languishing for more than 10 years as parents struggle to care for children suffering with often extreme disabilities. Petitioners’ attorneys complain that the Special Masters make punitive downward adjustments to attorneys’ fees and medical expert fees to punish effective advocacy. Expert witnesses for injured children complain that they suffer intimidation and even threats that they will lose professional status or NIH funding if they testify for injured children. The government pays its own medical expert witnesses promptly while simultaneously slow-walking payments for petitioners’ experts—sometimes for years. The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it. I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals. I am grateful to be working with @AGPamBondi and HHS staff to fix the VISP. Together, we will steer the Vaccine Court back to its original Congressional intent.

It’s now being reported that RFK Jr. plans to add autism to the list of vaccine injuries that can receive compensation from the court.

The “Vaccine Court”

If vaccines cause autism, you’d think “vaccine court” would be a great place to find the evidence for it. Compensated claims typically include extensive details about timelines, medical tests, and doctors’ opinions. They read more like case reports in medical journals than legal settlements.

Established through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, the original purpose of the vaccine court (officially called the United States Court of Federal Claims special masters) was to quickly and expeditiously pay any claims made by American citizens for vaccine injury. The vaccine court is buried within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and when you petition the vaccine court because of a vaccine injury, you’re actually suing the federal government, and the lawyer representing the government (and therefore opposing your claim) will be a Department of Justice lawyer. Due process in vaccine court is nonexistent. There’s no jury, just a single court-appointed “special master” who hears your case and makes a decision.

Since 1989, when the vaccine court began to operate, these special masters have awarded more than $5.0 billion to vaccine-injured Americans (children and adults). Of the total cases filed since the court came into existence in 1998, there have been over 1,400 claims filed for death and 27,000 filed for injury. The DTP vaccine is the most common vaccine for claims to be filed against, with MMR in second place. Of the people who file claims with the court, approximately 34 percent end up receiving compensation.

Rolf Hazlehurst, an assistant attorney general from Tennessee, has been an outspoken critic of the vaccine court, particularly since he had to fight his way through it as a claimant on behalf of his son Yates, who he believes developed autism as a result of his vaccinations. In a memorandum to the US Congress in 2013, Rolf Hazlehurst described the court:

Vaccine court is not a court of law. It is an administrative proceeding in which the most basic rules of law do not apply. In vaccine court, the Rules of Discovery, Evidence and Civil Procedure do not apply. There is also no judge or jury. In vaccine court, the American legal system has been replaced by what is known as a special master. A special master is an appointed government attorney.

Why Does the Vaccine Court Exist?

This may seem like an elementary question, but it’s not. The purpose of the vaccine court is to protect the vaccine program, not to monitor vaccine safety or mete out justice. The year the vaccine court began operating—1989—is important to this story, because that’s also the birth year many point to as the beginning of a meteoric rise in the number of children with autism. Three other potentially monumental things happened in 1989: the hepatitis B vaccine was licensed, the Hib vaccine was licensed, and, for the first time, a second dose of the MMR vaccine was recommended for all American children.

When the vaccine court was established in 1986, there were only three vaccines given in the United States—DTP, polio, and MMR—and vaccinations rates hovered between 50 and 60 percent nationally. Today, there are eleven vaccines for children, given in multiple doses, with vaccination rates hovering around 90 percent nationally. There is an enormous difference between the market the vaccine court was created to “protect” and the market today. In raw numbers there are nearly four times as many vaccine doses given each year to children than there were in 1986, even though the US population has only grown by 0.3 in that same time period. I wrote an article about the passage of this bill, which was largely spearheaded by Congressman Henry Waxman. Here’s an excerpt from that article:

On October 20, 1986, the Los Angeles Times ran a story regarding a controversial bill making its way through Congress, the headline shouted:

REAGAN LIKELY TO VETO VACCINE COMPENSATION BILL

The story went on to explain the highly divisive nature of the bill, intended to shield vaccine makers from liability, and the Reagan administration was speaking out to express their opposition:

In a strongly worded letter to House Speaker Tip O'Neil, the then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Otis R. Bowen said, "The bill is likely to do little to assure the vaccine supply or to improve our childhood immunization efforts."

Assistant Attorney General John R. Bolton, writing to the Head of the House Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Department of Justice, said the White House opposed the legislation because it was creating, "a major new entitlement program for which no legitimate need has been demonstrated."

Ronald Reagan himself was troubled by the vaccine compensation bill and was quoted as saying, "Although the goal of compensating those persons is a worthy one, the program has…serious deficiencies."

The Reagan administration seemed to be particularly concerned with two issues: who was going to pay for the compensation required for vaccine injury, and the precedent of the federal government indemnifying private companies from liability.

Beginning in 1989, the US vaccine schedule quickly morphed from the one the vaccine court was created to support to a far larger schedule with more complexity.

This isn’t a coincidence; the vaccine court removed all liability from vaccine makers, greatly altering the risk-reward calculation in their favor.

When the court was established, the word “autism” was never even discussed. By the late 2000s autism almost brought the entire court, and the vaccine program, to a screeching halt.

Fact #1: Changes Make It Nearly Impossible to Win Claims

Few people know that the vaccine court amended its rules in 1995 to make it harder to win a claim in vaccine court, largely due to the increasing number of claims made as the vaccine schedule became bloated. By revising its Vaccine Injury Table—a list of “accepted” injuries from various vaccines, the court quietly made the standard for proving a vaccine injury much higher. As one simple example, claims for DPT shots causing brain injury were paid on roughly 25 percent of filed cases before the 1995 changes and only 5.4 percent of cases after the change were made, a decrease of more than 80 percent. Testifying before Congress in 1999, Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, explained:

The principal reason why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has become highly adversarial and is turning away three out of four claimants is that the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), with the assistance of the Department of Justice (DOJ), has wielded its discretionary authority to all but eliminate a just list of compensable events in the Vaccine Injury Table, thereby destroying the guiding tenet of presumption.

Recognizing vaccine injury is no easy task; few doctors are able to recognize any of the signs. The United States has a vaccine injury reporting system called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. Estimates are that VAERS captures roughly 1 percent of all vaccine injuries. How many vaccine injuries actually make it into vaccine court? A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1 percent. (I can’t find any accurate data, but the number is clearly tiny or the vaccine court would have exploded in size.)

The burden is on the parents to track “adverse events,” despite the fact that pediatricians almost never explain all of the possible side effects. Parents might be told to expect redness at the injection site, swelling, maybe some fussiness or mild fever. Nothing some infant Tylenol can’t fix.

Perusing the website of a vaccine court attorney today, you can see how strongly the decks are stacked against those injured by vaccines. Richard Gage & Associates, one of the top vaccine lawyers in the country, lets potential clients know that “obtaining compensation for a vaccine injury is a complex, sometimes extremely difficult process.” Parents of a child who received compensation shared their view about what the experience was like:

DOJ [Department of Justice] attorneys were disrespectful and combative. . . . The Compensation Program should be about compensation and not about defense of the vaccine program.

A critical report from November 2014 about the vaccine court produced by the General Accountability Office (a federal agency) found the court wasn’t accomplishing what it had been purportedly created to do: to make vaccine injury compensation quick and fair. The report noted that most claims take “multiple years to adjudicate” with 51 percent taking more than five years.

Parents who have filed claims in the court report that the compensation program has an “adversarial environment” and a statute of limitations (three years from the date of injuries being exhibited) that reduces the likelihood that parents can even file claims.

This is far worse when it comes to autism, a condition that wasn’t even contemplated when the court was created.

As Mr. Hazlehurst’s memo further explains:

The procedural “catch 22” of vaccine court works as follows. Under the Vaccine Act, before the parents of a vaccine-injured child may file a lawsuit in a court of law, they must first timely file a claim in vaccine court. However, the Vaccine Act has a 3-year statute of limitations, which begins to run upon the first symptom of injury. Under the CDC vaccine schedule children receive their first vaccinations either at birth or 2 months of age. However, in most cases, children are not diagnosed with autism until they are 3 or 4 years old. Therefore, by the time the child is diagnosed with autism, the statute of limitations has run in vaccine court and the parents are forever denied the right to proceed with a lawsuit in a court of law.

In a 1998 article for the Washington Post, journalist Arthur Allen criticized the changing standards of the vaccine court and explained the excruciating (and ultimately losing) journey of a family whose son had become extremely disabled from the DPT vaccine. With the changes to the Vaccine Injury Table, Mr. Allen noted, “the burden of proof in most cases now lies with the petitioners, and that is a tricky business, because proof is an elusive matter in ailments of the brain.” Mr. Allen caught the former medical director of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, Dr. Geoffrey Evans, in a vulnerable moment, explaining the true purpose of the vaccine court:

There’s a larger issue, too. They want parents to immunize their children, and for that they want the record to show that vaccines are safe. “I’m not going to say that awarding too many people will undermine vaccine safety, but I look on the Internet, and I see that our statistics are taken out of context,” says [Dr. Geoffrey] Evans, the medical director of the compensation program.

I want to highlight something Mr. Allen wrote above: “They want the record to show that vaccines are safe.” Dr. Evans viewed his job as protecting the vaccine program, and he made it clear that awarding “too many people” for vaccine injury could very much “undermine” vaccine safety.

Why does this matter? Because shortly after Dr. Evans made this comment, the court was flooded with claims—claims from way “too many people” for something that no one had even discussed when the vaccine court was created in 1986 (because it barely existed): autism.

Fact #2: Some amazing parents discovered that many children were receiving payouts from vaccine court for autism as long as they didn't call it autism (at least 83, probably many more)

Mary Holland, an NYU Law Professor and Lou Conte, a prison guard, had one thing in common: they were both parents of children with autism. Soon after the Hannah Poling case became worldwide news they went to work, asking a simple question, “Is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (‘VICP’) of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims a fair forum?” They decided to conduct an investigation, and possibly publish a study, depending on what they found.

Are the cases of “autism” that the VICP [Vaccine Injury Compensation Program] rejected in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding really different from the cases of “encephalopathy” and “residual seizure disorder” that the VICP has compensated before and since? Is it possible the VICP rejected cases of “autism” because of the hot-button label and not because of real differences in injuries or evidence?

Of course, they soon discovered what you probably have already deduced: that the court has in fact been compensating cases of autism called other things since the inception of the program. After digging through thousands of claims, many with sealed and confidential decisions that kept firm conclusions from being drawn, they were still able to find eighty-three cases of children with an autism diagnosis who had been compensated for “vaccine induced brain damage.”

Holland and Conte began to compile their results in earnest. For a court that had recently reassured the world that vaccines don’t cause autism, this was a devastating finding. Worse for the vaccine court, the study authors decided to include interview responses they received from some of the families who had received compensation from the court in their study. The study authors asked, “How is your child’s life today?” Some of the responses follow:

· “[She] is profoundly autistic. [She] is non-verbal, has major behavioral issues, is self-injurious . . . classic and very severe autism.”

· “[He] has no speech, no functional use of his hands. . . . He is not potty trained. He is very sensory defensive, flaps his hands, and makes moaning noises.”

· “[She] is a ‘giant baby.’ . . . She functions at the level of a 2-year old. . . . [She] has frequent periods of frustration, extreme rage, and self-injurious behavior.”

Those are parental responses from just three of the eighty-three compensated children. The study authors also asked, “Was your child’s claim resolved fairly?” One family responded, “No, it was a war.” Another noted, “The attorney for the government was absolutely horrible. She was cold, insulting, and did whatever she could to keep us from getting compensated.”

Keep in mind that these eighty-three cases were a fraction of compensated cases, the majority of which remain sealed and confidential to this day. There could be hundreds more; we just don’t know. Discussing this report in their book Vaccine Injuries, Louis Conte and Tony Lyons explained that “despite requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the government blocked investigative access to the vast majority of cases.” Conte and Lyons also reached out to former vaccine court employees and reported on those findings:

One retired employee stated emphatically that the development of autism in the presence of severe encephalopathy was understood by those in the program on both sides of the bar. . . . Another retired employee also confirmed that autism was seen as an indication of brain damage in vaccine injury.

A Bombshell Report

The study spearheaded by Ms. Holland and Mr. Conte was front-page news. Published in the spring of 2011 in the Pace Environmental Law Review, “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury” challenged the legitimacy of the vaccine court and showed that the courts had found, at least eighty-three times, that the medical standard for vaccines causing autism had been met. One report excerpt explained:

It is notable that over a twenty-year period the VICP did not publicly acknowledge an apparent vaccine-encephalopathy-autism link. While in the early years of the program there might have been no particular attention to this association, certainly by the late 1990’s, the question of vaccine injury and autism was one of general public interest. The findings of so many cases of autism among compensated cases calls into question HHS’s assertions on the topic.

Fox News broke the “bombshell report” on their May 16, 2011, nightly news broadcast. Lead reporter Alisyn Camerota noted that “the Feds have been quietly compensating children injured by vaccines; these are children who have autism. All of this despite the public denials.” Ms. Camerota explained she had interviewed one of the compensated parents, who told Fox News she had been told to stay quiet and that she feared losing the annuity she received from the government for her child’s vaccine injury by publicly commenting. Ms. Camerota explained that the federal government had issued a statement in response to the study, affirming that vaccines don’t cause autism. (Author’s note: any evidence of this national story has been largely scrubbed from the Internet!) Finally, Ms. Holland appeared on screen and issued an eloquent rebuke of the federal government’s public position:

Remember that these case decisions that were compensated by the federal government were based on science. They had ample scientific and medical evidence before them. We rely on the fact that the government used the best science available to decide that these were cases of vaccine injury. What we’ve added to this debate, Alisyn, is that these kids have autism. In addition, there are an awful lot of kids whose families allege that they have autism and when they use that word, they didn’t get compensation.

Many of the families of the eighty-three children joined Ms. Holland and her coauthors in a public press conference on the steps of the vaccine court. They demanded a congressional investigation. They said the vaccine court isn’t working. They explained the vaccine court’s “dirty secret,” that children with vaccine-induced autism are routinely compensated, meeting the vaccine court’s high hurdle for proof, so long as they avoid the word autism. It was a bombshell, the kind of study published in a peer-reviewed law journal that on perhaps any other topic would produce an immediate congressional investigation, like the Flint drinking water crisis in 2016. Except it didn’t.

You can listen to my podcast interview with Mary Holland:

J.B. Handley: Mary Holland, Esq. Interview, How to End the Autism Epidemic

J.B. HANDLEY

·

SEPTEMBER 18, 2024

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Conclusion

The Vaccine Court has been a nightmare for autism parents. Is RFK Jr about to change everything? Time will tell.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

LAKE OSWEGO, Oregon—My 19-year-old son Jamie is sitting at the desk in our home office, directly in front of a computer screen where Dana Johnson, an occupational therapist based in Tampa, Florida, is guiding Jamie through a process she calls “self commands.” I’m sitting to Jamie’s right, laminated letterboard in hand, serving as Jamie’s “CRP,” an acronym familiar to the brave few undertaking a new communication method for nonspeakers with autism like Jamie known as Spelling 2 Communicate (“S2C”), which happens to be the subject of a book co-written by me and Jamie that was released by Skyhorse Publishing in April 2021. To our great joy, the book has led to an overwhelming number of nonspeakers and their families giving S2C a try, and many new stories of children attaining fluency and being able to share with their families—for the first time in their lives—true thoughts and feelings. (By the way, CRP stands for “Co…

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And then the darkness fell, on Jamie first and then our entire family.

My son has profound autism—the “real kind” as many of us with this variety of child say to each other—and it’s something that most people will never really understand.

Let me start with everything that is great and amazing. Jamie is 23. He’s happy every day. He’s healthy, loved, and spends huge swaths of his day doing things that bring him joy. He’s learned to spell to communicate, and this has changed his life in so many wonderful and beautiful ways. He just graduated form online high school. He’s so funny, he loves to laugh, and he’s incredibly loving towa…

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ROCKVILLE, Maryland — Ever heard of a “biostitute”? The scientific world is filled with them, scientists willing to publish garbage to protect industry (and captive regulatory agencies) from the truth about the damage their products are causing. When it comes to the autism epidemic, no study has caused more trouble (or deserves to be retracted) more than this one, published in 2011 by Mitkus et al:

Updated aluminum pharmacokinetics following infant exposures through diet and vaccination

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STAFFORDSHIRE, England —Dr. Chris Exley of Keele University in England and his colleagues published a paper that for the first time ever looked at the brain tissue of subjects with autism to determine the level of aluminum (note: they spell “aluminum” as “aluminium” in the United Kingdom) found within their brain tissue. For anyone trying to convince the world that “the science is settled and vaccines don’t cause autism,” the study’s findings are deeply contradictory to that statement. In a blog post written by Professor Exley on the day his study was published, he explained the groundbreaking results:

J.B. Handley Blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Dr. Exley’s quote includes a reference to “monocytes at injection sites” and the fact that the interaction between these monocytes and aluminum has been demonstrated in previous published science. I know, that sounds pretty technical, but bear with me. A “monocyte” is a type of white blood cell, of which one form of monocyte is a “macrophage.” A macrophage can be thought of as the garbage man of the immune system, eating up foreign substances, cell debris, etc. As you will see in a moment, macrophages appear to be playing a critical and devastating role in triggering autism, serving to escort man-made aluminum injected from a vaccine directly into the brain, where it can disrupt brain development and trigger autism.

Dr. Exley’s study — “Aluminium in brain tissue and autism” — is arguably the final piece of a puzzle that first started to come together in 2004, and picked up steam after 2010, that has dramatically furthered the scientific understanding of exactly how a vaccine can trigger autism. This timeline is critical to recognize, because the Vaccine Court in the United States dismissed the vaccine-autism hypothesis in 2009, long before most of what I’m about to explain even existed. Science is a continuum, an emergence of truth through many different studies that often have to be pieced together before the picture becomes clear. And, scientific progress can sometimes move slowly until that moment when an emerging truth presents itself in such a way that it can no longer be denied. In my opinion, Dr. Exley’s study provided the only data missing from an airtight explanation of what happened to my son and so many other children, and provided all the doubters with the “biological plausibility” of how, exactly, a vaccine injected into a baby’s shoulder can trigger autism.

For Americans, the race to discover what’s causing all this autism will likely be won on foreign shores. As you’ll soon see, ALL of the science explaining how autism can be caused has come from other countries, even though a Caltech scientist pushed the first domino way back in 2006.

Why is aluminum in vaccines at all?

Aluminum is a critical component of most vaccines given to children. It serves as an “adjuvant” meaning the aluminum serves to “wake up” the immune system, provoking the immune system to recognize the “antigen” within the vaccine for whatever disease the vaccine serves to protect against. The amount of aluminum in vaccines given to children skyrocketed beginning in the early 1990s for two reasons: 1), more vaccines were added to the children’s vaccine schedule and, 2), the vaccination rate for all vaccines given to children rose (from 50–60% of children vaccinated in the mid-1980s to over 90% today). A child in the mid-1980s would have received 1,250 micrograms of aluminum from their vaccines by their 18-month birthday if they were fully vaccinated. Today, that number is 4,925 micrograms, a near-quadrupling of total aluminum. You can read more about this in an excellent study published by Neil Miller, here’s an image from the study:

Mystifyingly, aluminum has never experienced biological testing to consider its safety for being injected into babies, having been “grandfathered” into our modern safety standards. Canadian scientists Dr. Chris Shaw and Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic addressed this omission in a critical study they published in 2011 in Current Medicinal Chemistry titled, “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are they Safe?” They wrote:

ICAN decided to test the CDC and NIH’s ability to produce any studies to show the safety of vaccine adjuvant through a FOIA lawsuit, by now I’m guessing you know how that ended…read the whole article.

Ground zero at Caltech

When Caltech scientist Dr. Paul Patterson passed away in 2014, I had little appreciation that he had triggered a chain of events over the course of his career that may now provide a clear and unambiguous explanation of how and why my son developed autism back in 2004. Knowing exactly how my son’s autism was caused is incredibly important to my wife and I, because the more information we have about causation, the more chance we have to do something about it, and perhaps recover my son from an affliction now impacting 1 in 32 American kids.

What you’re about to read is the product of more than two dozen very recent peer-reviewed published scientific studies, with really no original thought by me. I’m a businessman and a father, but what follows is a “grand theory of autism” so complete and well-supported that I think it deserves the attention of every member of the autism community. When the totality of this explanation became clear to me, not only did my jaw hit the floor, but I was immediately consumed with thoughts about how this clear explanation might impact the way we treat our son’s autism, and I hope it does the same for you and perhaps your doctor as well. What I’m certain of is that this “grand theory” needs to be heavily debated, and I hope by putting it in the public realm I help move it along that path.

(I’m indebted to an anonymous scientist who runs a website called Vaccine Papers, where many of these insights came from. I will quote VP throughout this piece, referring to VP as “VP.” I highly recommend you read the totality of his website, where the explanations are far more scientific than what you will read here.)

It shouldn’t be a surprise that all of this science has been published outside the United States. I’ve listened closely to the stories of American scientists wanting to study autism and complaining that any studies that are even remotely controversial are nearly impossible to fund or get approved.

Discovery #1: “Maternal Immune Activation” can cause autism

While Dr. Patterson’s passing wasn’t something I was aware of at the time, it was certainly recognized by the scientific community, of which his obituary from Caltech explains in great detail.

Dr. Patterson’s “research focused on interactions between the nervous and immune systems — a connection that was not universally acknowledged in the early days of neuroscience”explains his obituary, “he became intrigued by epidemiological studies that had linked a severe viral or bacterial infection during pregnancy with the increased risk of a woman giving birth to a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder such as schizophrenia or autism. Patterson and his coworkers reproduced this human effect in mice using a viral mimic that triggers an infection-like immune response in the mother, producing in the offspring the core behavioral symptoms associated with autism and schizophrenia.”

In 2006, Dr. Patterson introduced his complex understanding of the interaction between the immune system and neurodevelopment through an excellent article in the Engineering & Science journal, titled Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism. I hope you’ll take the time to read this for yourself, Dr. Patterson does a great job of explaining his discovery to the uninitiated, it’s really a seminal work. Here’s a quote":

Are you with me so far? Basically, what Dr. Patterson is saying is that if a pregnant mother gets sick (virus, bacteria) while pregnant — an event that “activates” her immune system — that activation can impact the neurodevelopment (how exactly the brain is constructed) of her fetus, potentially leading to neurological problems after birth. Dr. Patterson took this explanation a step further, explaining that the brains of people with autism reflect the immune system activation that took place, even decades later, as he cites valuable work being done at Johns Hopkins:

While Dr. Pardo and colleagues were the first to find this “microglial activation” in the brain of children with autism, this finding has now been replicated many times, here’s a study from Japan in 2013 finding the same thing:

If you’re going to take one thing away from this section, I’d recommend an excerpt from Dr. Patterson’s quote worth memorizing:

“there’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.”

Is that what happened (and still is happening) to my son?

Further Refinement of Discovery #1: Immune Activation from the Cytokine Interleukin-6

If you’re an autism parent, you’ve probably heard the expression “cytokine storm” and half-understood what that might mean (anything with “storm” at the end of it can’t be good — what this really means is a chronic, slow burn inflammation in the brain). In 2006, Dr. Patterson and his colleagues were speculating that the immune system’s cytokines might be responsible for altering the brain development of the fetus during gestation:

“Cytokines are produced by the white blood cells, and their levels in the blood increase when we get an infection…We think that maternal immune activation alters brain circuits…there’s that permanent, subclinical, altered immune state in the autistic brain — those increased cytokine levels…are they [cytokines] actually interacting with the brain in an ongoing fashion, with consequences visible in the patients’ behavior? I favor [the cytokine] hypothesis.”

Study Link HERE

Just a year after Dr. Patterson’s excellent article about Maternal Immune Activation (“MIA”), he and his colleagues produced the first study that took their understanding of cytokines to a more detailed level. Knowing that MIA was producing offspring with neurological disorders (in their mouse model), they wanted to find out what — exactly WHAT — was causing the altered brain development. They figured it was a cytokine (of which there are many), but which one? As the Patterson and his colleagues noted, “however, the mechanism by which MIA causes long-term behavioral deficits in the offspring is unknown.” That is until they discovered it:

In the case of the 2007 experiment, Patterson and his colleagues injected pregnant mice with a specific cytokine — interleukin-6 (“IL-6”) — and saw changes in the neurology of their offspring.

Replication of Dr. Patterson’s discovery about MIA and IL-6

Dr. Patterson’s work was groundbreaking. He tied the immune system and brain together in ways previously not recognized. Like all great new discoveries in science, Dr. Patterson’s theories have since been replicated many times. In 2012, Dr. Patterson and his colleagues produced this paper,which was more autism-specific and reached a similar conclusion:

In 2014, the M.I.N.D. Institute at UC-Davis published an important study that took Dr. Patterson’s work in mice and replicated it in monkeys. Why do monkeys matter? The study authors explained:

And, the M.I.N.D. Institute scientists saw similar results to what had been found in mice:

There are many additional studies that support Dr. Patterson’s findings, here’s one more to make the point from Neuroscience — Brain IL-6 elevation causes neuronal circuitry imbalances and mediates autism-like behaviors — published in 2012:

Dr. Patterson helped establish as scientific fact that an MIA during pregnancy can cause autism. As a parent, I’m haunted by Dr. Patterson’s words that “there’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.” If that’s really what’s happening to my son, it creates an obvious question: What can we do about it? It’s why understanding exactly what happened to my son is so important…

…And why there’s something else Dr. Patterson mentioned in his 2006 magazine article, something that today might get him run out of Caltech but was still allowed in the scientific discourse back then, he said this:

Dr. Patterson said it, so I don’t have to be the first to bring it up. He said a vaccination “activates the immune system” and he also told us that “immune activation” can cause autism. How exactly does a vaccine activate the immune system?

Answer: Aluminum hydroxide, aka “aluminum adjuvant”.

Discovery #2: Aluminum Adjuvant causes immune activation and is far more neurotoxic than previously thought

Aluminum compounds (Al hydroxide and Al phospate) are the most common adjuvants used in vaccines. They are currently used in the hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis(DTaP, Tdap), Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), human papillomavirus (HPV) and pneumococcus (PCV) vaccines. Aluminum adjuvant “activates” the immune system, which induces long term immunity to antigens in the vaccine. The scientific understanding of aluminum adjuvant toxicity has changed and deepened dramatically in recent years.

In fact, the published research on aluminum adjuvant is so new it has not even been considered by our FDA or CDC, who are still basing their recommendations about aluminum use in vaccines on a study published in 2011 that erroneously concluded that aluminum from a vaccine likely ends up in the body’s skeletal system:

Most of the guess work about aluminum is based on dissolved aluminum, not aluminum hydroxide, which is the type of aluminum used in vaccines. We’re now learning that aluminum hydroxide is a nanoparticle, absorbed by our body’s macrophage (the immune system’s garbage man) where the macrophage can then easily transport the aluminum hydroxide to the brain (the macrophage passes easily through the blood-brain barrier). If you’d like to see a complete takedown of the “safe level” of aluminum argument still made by the FDA and CDC, see VP’s excellent work, here’s a short excerpt:

The first time I personally woke up to the the idea that the aluminum adjuvant used in vaccines might be far more toxic and dangerous than I knew was when I started reading about the incredible work of Dr. Chris Shaw at the University of British Columbia in Canada. In 2007, Dr. Shaw published the first study looking at injected aluminum adjuvant in this paper, Aluminum Adjuvant Linked to Gulf War Illness Induces Motor Neuron Death in Mice and sounded a worldwide alarm about the dangers of aluminum adjuvant:

In 2009, Dr. Shaw’s and his colleagues in British Columbia published another study looking at injected aluminum hydroxide, and the results were deeply disturbing:

2012: Mechanisms of aluminum adjuvant toxicity and autoimmunity in pediatric populations

Three years after his groundbreaking study, Dr. Shaw and his colleague, Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic, published this paper in 2012, expressing grave concerns about the limited understanding of aluminum adjuvant’s toxicity:

The two scientists called for an urgent reevaluation of the safety profile of aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines:

2013: Slow CCL2-dependent translocation of biopersistent particles from muscle to brain

In 2013, French scientists demonstrated that aluminum adjuvant, when injected into the body of a mouse, ended up in the brain 1 year later. The study authors expressed serious concerns about this very new discovery:

The authors chose their words carefully, recognizing the ubiquity of aluminum adjuvant’s use in pediatric vaccines all over the world, which is why their choice to call aluminum adjuvant “insidiously unsafe” should cause any parent worry. Unfortunately, the very thing they express real concern about — escalating doses — is exactly what has been happening to children since the early 1990s, when the immunization schedule in the U.S. and all over the world more than tripled, largely due to new vaccines being introduced that contain aluminum adjuvant.

2015: Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines

In 2015, another study from Université Paris Est Créteil (UPEC) in France further supported this new view of aluminum adjuvant as a dangerous, biopersistent, and ultimately brain-injuring toxin. (The study confirmed that aluminum adjuvant slowly makes its way to the brain, where it then stays, possibly forever.)

The study explained that aluminum adjuvant can generate a long-term immune response because of its “biopersistence”, which basically means our body has no ability to rid itself of aluminum adjuvant, because its a man-made substance we have no natural designs to eliminate:

November 2016: Non-linear dose-response of aluminium hydroxide adjuvant particles: Selective low dose neurotoxicity

And, in 2016, the most important and revealing study yet done on aluminum adjuvant provided more bad news, and more insight.

It’s safe to say that this study’s conclusions have revolutionized our understanding of aluminum adjuvant. From the journal Toxicology, the French study authors were very concerned about the widespread use of aluminum adjuvant:

They also discovered, through mouse-models, a deeply alarming unique characteristic of aluminum adjuvant: low, consistent doses were MORE neurotoxic than a single bolus dose:

Read study HERE

This a counter-intuitive conclusion, but profoundly important, so I’m bringing in VP to further explain:

The study authors also disputed the way the FDA and CDC currently think about aluminum adjuvant toxicity, basically saying that the current approach is wrong:

And, the French scientists finish with a conclusion that all parents should find very troubling:

Discovery #3: Aluminum can increase IL-6 in the brain

One of the only frustrations of the remarkable toxicity studies on aluminum adjuvant coming out of France is that many scientists did not explicitly measure the mice brains for the cytokine IL-6 which we know can be released during an immune activation event and also know is strongly associated with causing autism. But, a study from the Middle East provides a strong foundation for the IL-6-aluminum adjuvant connection.

In this case, scientists were using aluminum to induce Alzheimer’s in rats, which they appear to have done successfully, showing that aluminum caused a 4-fold increase in IL-6:

If any of this remains confusing, I think VP’s description of aluminum adjuvant in the body will fill in any holes:

Most vaccines contain aluminum, and aluminum is a proven neurotoxin, in amounts received from vaccines. Vaccines in combination can result in toxic aluminum overload. Even the aluminum in a single vaccine can be harmful because the aluminum is in a form that is more dangerous than ingested aluminum. Specifically, vaccine aluminum is in nanoparticulate form, which is harder for the body to eliminate, and because it is transported around the body differently than ingested aluminum.

It is natural and normal to ingest small doses of aluminum from food and water. Its not good for you, but the body has adequate defenses. Absorption of ingested Al is low, about 0.3%, so about 99.7% is eliminated in feces. Ingested aluminum is in ionic form (individual charged atoms), which is readily removed by the kidneys. Also, ionic aluminum is blocked from entering the brain by the blood brain barrier. The low absorption, rapid elimination by the kidneys and barrier to brain entry adequately protects the brain from aluminum.

However, nanoparticulate aluminum from vaccines cannot be removed by the kidneys. The particles are far too large to be filtered out by the kidneys. The Al nanoparticles do dissolve slowly (converting to ionic aluminum). But long before they can dissolve completely, the Al nanoparticles are “eaten” by immune system cells called macrophages. In other words, the particles wind up inside the macrophages. Once loaded with the Al nanoparticles, the macrophages spread aluminum as they travel through the body. This is dangerous, because the Al-loaded macrophages carry Al nanoparticles to tissues (e.g. the brain) that are damaged by very small amounts of aluminum.

Quick Pause: The chicken-egg of immune activation

I want to address a topic that triggered much of the exploration that drove me to write this article in the first place. Back in the day, I got into a bit of a public squabble with Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine patent holder who also serves as a spokesperson for the vaccine industry. Dr. Hotez also has a daughter with autism, so this debate is very personal for him, as it is for me. Dr. Hotez is convinced that autism is “created” in utero as he explained to me, “my read of the scientific literature is that brains of children with autism, like ours, were that way by the first or second trimester of pregnancy.” Dr. Hotez bases his conclusion about autism’s timing on the work of a single study by Dr. Eric Courchesne and colleagues titled, “Patches of disorganization in the neocortex of children with autism.”which was published in 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Hotez even took his refutation of some of the things I have publicly written about autism and vaccines a step further, and I think this is really the dividing line for many scientists, he wrote to me:

“A vaccine given in the first year of life could not possibly cause a total reorganization of the brain architecture, it just defies reason.”

Does it? Does it defy reason that the re-wiring of the brain — that we now believe is caused by an immune activation event — could never happen after a child is born?

This is the single most important question that needs to be answered to determine autism’s cause, and I think the answer will govern the autism causation debate from here on out:

·       If vaccines cannot cause a “reorganization of brain architecture” after a child is born, then vaccines are unlikely to be the cause of autism (however, vaccines given to a pregnant women may still pose a risk to triggering a Maternal Immune Activation).

·       If, however, vaccines given after birth can cause the brain to “reorganize”, then we have a serious, serious problem with vaccines.

I believe the science is very clear on this point. Read on.

The evidence for post-natal autism triggers is strong

The study that Dr. Hotez mentioned to me, the study that proved to him that autism was determined in utero, I have now read probably a dozen times. You can read it for yourself, it’s a study where scientists looked at the actual post-mortem brains of children with autism, and found striking differences in brain architecture. What the study didn’t do, because it would be impossible to do with post-mortem brains, some as old as 15 years, was speculate exactly WHEN the brain disorganization took place. And, really, how could they? I’m guessing Dr. Hotez was thrown off by the conclusion of this study, where the authors offered up a guess:

“In conclusion, we identified discrete patches of disorganized cortex in the majority of postmortem samples obtained from young autistic children that we examined. These patches occurred in regions mediating the functions that are disturbed in autism: social, emotional, communication, and language functions. Such abnormalities may represent a common set of developmental neuropathological features that underlie autism and probably result from dysregulation of layer formation and layer-specific neuronal differentiation at prenatal developmental stages.”

Did you catch what the study said, the part that Dr. Hotez turned into fact to support his claim (and by the way he has cited this study repeatedly in public writings about autism’s cause)? The authors said the disregulation they saw in the brains of children “probably” happened during “prenatal development stages.” I think the evidence you will see actually points to the opposite. VP explained it well:

The “patches of disorganization” paper is actually further evidence implicating immune activation and therefore vaccines. Immune activation experiments have shown that immune activation/cytokines causes disruption of neuron layers. So a vaccine could definitely do this. I believe that autism-associated differences in the prenatal period are simply indicators that the baby is particularly susceptible to immune activation injury. Immune activation works like this: each time there is an activation event, the immune system becomes more sensitive and reactive to immune stimulus. So, an activation “hit” during gestation can render the baby more susceptible to immune activation injury postnatally. This increased reactivity is known to occur with microglia in the brain (microglia are immune cells in the brain). its called “microglial priming”. Once microglia are primed by immune activation, they become hyperreactive for a long time, perhaps a lifetime.

VP went a little farther than Dr. Hotez did, providing this image which is hard to shake once you’ve seen it:

What you can see fairly clearly is that the brain is far from done developing once a child is born. In fact, 5 separate phases of brain development are either in process or yet to start. Could an immune activation event after the child has been born impact brain development? Yes, it could.

And, the published science also supports this view. In a study done in 2012, Wei and colleagues induced autism-like symptoms in mice by injecting them with IL-6 AFTER they were born. This is NOT a maternal immune activation event, this is an immune activation event of a newborn that leads to the development of symptoms of autism.

Read study HERE

The authors noted:

“Here we show that mice with elevated IL-6 in the brain display many autistic features, including impaired cognitive abilities, deficits in learning, abnormal anxiety traits and habituations, as well as decreased social interactions. IL-6 elevation caused alterations in excitatory and inhibitory synaptic formations and disrupted the balance of excitatory/inhibitory synaptic transmissions. IL-6 elevation also resulted in an abnormal change in the shape, length and distributing pattern of dendritic spines. These findings suggest that IL-6 elevation in the brain could mediate autistic-like behaviors, possibly through the imbalances of neural circuitry and impairments of synaptic plasticity.”

Still think Dr. Hotez has a point, that autism happens during gestation or never? Then this study will really blow your mind, from all the way back in 1981.

Read study HERE

In this case study of three children, published in Child Neurology, the authors describe three cases of sudden onset autism, all caused by infection and inflammation of the brain.

It appears that not only can an infection trigger an immune activation event that leads to autism after a child is born, it can even happen to a child who is 5, 7, or 11 years old (the ages of the three children in this study). Are you reading this, Dr. Hotez?

Discovery #4: Hepatitis B vaccine induces IL-6 in postnatal rats

When this paper was published in China, no one I knew in the autism community mentioned it, I’m guessing because it was hard to patch together its significance. You had to appreciate all of Patterson’s work. You had to understand the IL-6 connection to autism. You had to appreciate the brand new insights about aluminum adjuvant toxicity, the low dose implications, and that aluminum adjuvant was ending up in the brain. And, you had to read a paper from China that covered a lot of other ground, as well as providing a missing link in the aluminum adjuvant-cytokine (IL-6)-autism hypothesis that it helped fortify.

Read study HERE

VP has written extensively about this study, I will start by quoting VP, but if you want a highly detailed scientific analysis of this study, check this out.

“An important new study by Li et al. reports the effects of bacillus calmette-guerin (BCG) vaccine (for tuberculosis) and hepatitis B vaccine on brain development in infant rats. The study relates the observed brain changes to the type of immune activation (Th1 or Th2, explained below) stimulated by the vaccines. The BCG and hep B vaccines had opposite effects on the brain (BCG being beneficial, and hep B being detrimental), and a combination of both vaccines resulted in cancellation of the effects.

This is the first study to test the effects of immune activation by vaccination on brain development. All other studies of immune activation have used essentially pathological conditions that mimic infection and induce a strong fever. A criticism I have heard often from vaccine advocates is that the immune activation experiments are not relevant to vaccines because vaccines cause a milder immune activation than injections of poly-IC or lipopolysaccharide (two types of immune system activators). This new study demonstrates that vaccines can affect brain development via immune activation. Hence, the immune activation experiments are relevant to vaccines…The hep B vaccine increased IL-6 in the hippocampus (the only brain region analyzed for cytokines).”

And, VP continues, explaining the timing of the injury to the Hep B rats:

“An important finding in the rat BCG/Hep B study is that many of the effects of hep B vaccine did not appear until age 8 weeks. This finding undermines claims of vaccine safety, which are almost always based on short-term outcomes of a few days or weeks. Furthermore, 8 weeks is a long time in rats. 8 week old rats are almost fully mature adults. This suggests that adverse effects of vaccines may take years or decades to appear in humans. This is consistent with what is known about immune activation and schizophrenia. Immune activation in the fetus can cause schizophrenia 20–30 years later.

The accumulating scientific evidence and the Li et al study in particular suggest that vaccination may cause mental illness. The mental illnesses would emerge years or decades after vaccination of an infant. Vaccines are likely contributing the the rise of mental illnesses in the USA over the last 25 years. The rise in mental illnesses in the USA is coincident with the dramatic increase in vaccination that started in the 1980s.”

This study is extraordinary! There were three different groups of rats: rats receiving the BCG vaccine (not given in the U.S.), rats receiving the Hepatitis B vaccine (given on day 1 of life in the U.S.) and a control group with no vaccine. The BCG vaccine does NOT contain aluminum adjuvant and the impact on the rat’s brains from BCG was actually positive! The Hep B vaccine rats, however, showed the kind of immune activation event we are seeing in autism (high IL-6)

This is biological proof of the link between a vaccine — given to a post-natal animal — inducing an immune activation event, including the cytokine marker for autism, IL-6. A scientific first.

Discovery #5: High levels of aluminum in autism brains

Earlier, I mentioned the study published by Professor Chris Exley — “Aluminium in brain tissue and autism” — that found incredibly high levels of aluminum in the brain tissue of five people with autism. In an interview soon after his study was released, Dr. Exley explained:

Professor Exley and his colleagues were startled by something else: the location of the aluminum within the brains:

What Professor Exley found were macrophages, the kind the French scientists discovered were transporting aluminum into the brains of mice, loaded with aluminum, and serving as carriers to bring the aluminum into the brain. Dr. Exley’s study showed that the conclusion being drawn in the laboratory with mice were equally true in the brains of people with autism. It turns out the biological experiments using mice to gauge the impact of injected aluminum adjuvant were equally accurate when extrapolated to humans. In fact, Professor Exley was so shocked by the findings, it altered his view of the safety of using vaccines containing aluminum.

Dr. Exley just told parents not to get vaccines that constitute MOST of the childhood vaccine schedule. Dr. Exley, a tenured professor at Keele University of Bioinorganic chemistry and without peer the leading expert in the world on the neurotoxicity of aluminum. (Of course, like all scientists willing to touch this topic, Dr. Exley was pushed out of Keele University in 2021).

As an aside, and as to be expected, Dr. Exley’s study was subjected to withering criticism. As a parent really only interested in the TRUTH, I’m fine with this, it’s important that every meaningful criticism is considered and every conclusion criticized. I sent Dr. Exley’s study to a former colleague of Dr. Paul Patterson. He’s not impressed, he writes, “I honestly don’t think it should have been published because it has a critical scientific flaw… The authors didn’t use any healthy control tissue, so we have no way of knowing what normal Al levels in a brain would by their method. Imagine, for example, if the blades they used to cut the brains had trace levels of Al that contaminated their tissue. If they had used healthy controls, you would have also seen high Al levels in the healthy brains as well. Since they had no such controls, their results are scientifically meaningless.”

I share this response, in an email exchange, with Dr. Exley himself. His unedited response:

I ask him that it’s been like since the study was published, is it being considered by any “mainstream” scientists or organizations? What is the political fallout from your study like? Do you have a concern of being “Wakefielded” for your study (which, of course, he was)? He responds:

Five discoveries, a clear path to autism

Here’s a simple graphic that I think spells out the process of triggering autism very clearly, as demonstrated by the published science I have just shared with you:

(This graphic is from a great brochure created by Vaccine Papers, you can get a complete copy right HERE.)

Published studies are showing that autism is caused by an immune activation event. The adjuvant in vaccines — aluminum adjuvant — can activate the brain’s immune system and is far more neurotoxic than previously realized — all the new science has been published in just the last few years. Aluminum can cause IL-6, the key cytokine implicated in autism. Chinese scientists — for the first time anywhere in the world — used a vaccine to trigger an immune activation event, and recorded elevated levels of IL-6 in rats. THIS is a biological basis for HOW a vaccine can cause autism. Remember what Dr. Hotez said to me? He said:

“A vaccine given in the first year of life could not possibly cause a total reorganization of the brain architecture, it just defies reason.”

But, that’s exactly what the science is showing us. Vaccines, administered early and often, are igniting immune activation event after immune activation event. Here’s a different chart looking at the development of the brain over time, from a neuro-immunological perspective. Imagine 6–7 immune activation events (right after they receive 4–6 aluminum adjuvant containing vaccines in a single appointment) in certain vulnerable children during critical phases of brain development. With everything you’ve just read, is it really that hard to imagine?

A new study summarizes all that we know

In 2022, a study titled Inflammation and Autophagy: A Convergent Point between Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)-Related Genetic and Environmental Factors: Focus on Aluminum Adjuvants was published by Crépeaux and colleagues, and it does a remarkable job explaining all that is known so far about the relationship between aluminum-containing vaccines and autism. The study contained this disturbing graphic that shows what happened to babies injected with aluminum vaccines who are genetically susceptible. If you want to send one study to your most skeptical, scientifically-oriented friend, I would send them this one!

The study authors write:

Implications and questions

I can’t help but tie everything I read and see here to my own son’s experience. Born in 2002, my son seemed to get sicker and more confused with every vaccine appointment, and his head always seemed to be hurting. And, with each appointment, unusual behaviors and odd movements began to appear. A really sad reminder of this reality appeared in a study published just last week in Nature, that described how children with autism developed enlarged foreheads:

Read study HERE

“Brain enlargement has been observed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the timing of this phenomenon, and the relationship between ASD and the appearance of behavioural symptoms, are unknown. Retrospective head circumference and longitudinal brain volume studies of two-year olds followed up at four years of age have provided evidence that increased brain volume may emerge early in development.”

Wouldn’t the above theory about how autism is triggered do a pretty good job of explaining why these children have large (swollen) heads? As you know, the immune activation event leads to what Dr. Patterson called “an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.” And, guess what, permanent immune system activation means inflammation…which would lead to a “large brain” and a “swollen forehead.” Is that why children with autism are known to head bang? Perhaps you would too if you’re brain was in a state of permanent inflammation?

Question: What about gastrointestinal disorders?

So many children with autism experience gastrointestinal disorders, my son most certainly did. And, gastrointestinal distress is now fully appreciated to be a “co-morbid” condition of autism. But what, exactly, might cause it? You don’t have to look too far:

Read study HERE

“Aluminum increased the intensity and duration of macroscopic and histologic inflammation, colonic myeloperoxidase activity, inflammatory cytokines expression, and decreased the epithelial cell renewal compared with control animals. Under basal conditions, aluminum impaired intestinal barrier function. In vitro, aluminum induced granuloma formation and synergized with lipopolysaccharide to stimulate inflammatory cytokines expression by epithelial cells. Deleterious effects of aluminum on intestinal inflammation and mucosal repair strongly suggest that aluminum might be an environmental IBD risk factor.”

Question: What about all the other types of autoimmunity (food allergies, etc.) that are at epidemic levels, and often co-morbid with autism?

Spearheaded by Israeli scientist Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, the scientific evidence that aluminum adjuvant is causing epidemics of a wide variety of auto-immune conditions is becoming overwhelming. Dr. Shoenfeld even has his own text book explaining this!

Click to order from Amazon

“With the discovery of autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA), the work of leading researchers from 14 countries on the role of adjuvants in different vaccines and how they can induce diverse autoimmune clinical manifestations in genetically prone individuals has been published in the newly released medical textbook, Vaccines and Autoimmunity.”

Dr. Shoenfeld’s groundbreaking study in 2013—Autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA) 2013: Unveiling the pathogenic, clinical and diagnostic aspects—explained the role of aluminum adjuvant in triggering autoimmunity across a wide variety of conditions:

“Notwithstanding that molecular mimicry and bystander activation in a genetically predisposed individual have been called to be responsible, the finger should be pointed at the adjuvants. One in particular has raised several distresses: aluminum. Indeed, this has been used as an adjuvant for the past 90 years but it is also an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin. Experimental research has showed that alum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. Thus, efforts should be put in clarifying the potential threat of alum-containing vaccines.”

Question: What about the MMR, it has no aluminum adjuvant?

The MMR vaccine does not contain aluminum adjuvant. Yet, many (but far from all) parents point to the appointment where their child received the MMR vaccine as a trigger for autism. We need more scientific data than we have about what exactly the MMR vaccine does to the brain (does it generate IL-6 or other cytokines?), but because we don’t know, we’re left to speculate.

One obvious answer is that the MMR vaccine is the first live virus vaccine children receive (it’s typically given between age 12–18 months, most children have received 15–20 vaccines by then), and it’s a triple (measles, mumps, rubella) live virus. For an immune system bathed in aluminum adjuvant and possibly already simmering with activation events, this triple dose might push a child right over the edge. This might explain the seizures (an extreme immune activation event) that sometimes follow the MMR appointment. We also know that children who also receive the varicella vaccine (chicken pox) along with the MMR have higher rates of seizure events. This would make sense, four live viruses at once would likely challenge the immune system more than three, but we can’t explain exactly how the MMR biologically impacts the immune system the way we can for aluminum adjuvant, and now for Hepatitis B vaccine (thanks to Chinese scientists). Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld discusses the fact that a live vaccine activates the immune system more than a vaccine using aluminum adjuvant:

“It is evident that a live attenuated vaccine is more prone than a killed vaccine to activate the immunity response.”

But, a more obvious explanation has recently emerged. Namely, the MMR vaccines triggers something in the body known as MCP-1, which serves as a beacon to encourage aluminum-laden macrophages to rush to the brain. I’ll let VP explain:

“When MCP-1 is produced by microglia, macrophages from around the body travel into the brain…‘MCP’ stands for ‘macrophage chemoattractant protein’, which of course describes its primary function of summoning macrophages…MCP-1 production is stimulated by some types of immune activation. Hence, a vaccine that stimulates MCP-1 may cause AANs [aluminum adjuvant nanoparticles](e.g. from prior vaccines) to move into the brain. Some infections or toxins induce MCP-1. Interestingly, Al adjuvant induces MCP-1, suggesting that it may stimulate its own transport…We can speculate that AANs from vaccines may remain ‘dormant’ for years, until MCP-1 production is stimulated. The MCP-1 will cause macrophages containing AANs to mobilize and transport AANs into the brain and other sensitive tissues. This may explain some of the damage from the MMR vaccine. MMR is given at 15–18 months of age, which is after Al-containing vaccines are given (at 0, 2, 4, and 6 months). The measles vaccine can stimulate MCP-1 production. Therefore, the MMR vaccine may stimulate the movement of AANs (received from prior vaccines) into the brain. This may explain how MMR could cause Al toxicity, even though it does not contain aluminum adjuvant.”

Question: Didn’t they already prove vaccines don’t cause autism?

If you’ve read this far, I assume you already know this is a fable. If you’re unsure, just look at this simple graphic. All those vaccine industry spokespeople who say “the science is settled” fail to mention that only one ingredient (thimerosal) and one vaccine (MMR) has ever been looked at for its relationship to autism.

No vaccine containing aluminum adjuvant has ever been explored for its relationship to autism, despite a growing and clear body of evidence implicating aluminum adjuvant in causing “immune activation,” the central cause of autism.

It’s also worth pointing out that in the early and mid-2000s when parents first started sounding the alarm about the connection between vaccines and autism, we had no biological evidence to support our view, we just had the collective experience of seeing our children disappear after vaccine appointments. Today, it’s a completely different world. Consider the words of Dr. Kimberley McAllister of the UC Davis Mind Institute in 2016:

It’s time for the CDC, FDA, Autism Speaks, and the American Academy of Pediatrics to face the biological evidence staring us all in the face!

Question: Aren’t you just “moving the goalposts” on the autism-vaccine hypothesis?

Of course critics will say this. First it was the MMR. Then it was mercury. Then it was “too many, too soon.” What’s different now is very important: overwhelming published, peer-reviewed science making a clear connection between immune activation events, aluminum adjuvant, and autism. That’s why this article is filled with study references, not conjecture.

What’s been true throughout the autism epidemic remains true today: an overwhelming (tens of thousands) number of parental reports of regression of their children into autism after vaccination.

Implications

I want to know what, exactly, happened to my son. When he was diagnosed with autism in 2004, the prevailing understanding of autism in the parent community was that it was growing exponentially, many parents were seeing changes after vaccine appointments, and that mercury or a live virus (measles) were the most likely causes. We had no biological science. The understanding of aluminum or the aluminum adjuvant was comically simplistic, almost a throw away point. We had no idea what an immune activation event, a cytokine, or IL-6 meant. (In fact, if you want a good laugh, see how Dr. Paul Offit is still describing aluminum adjuvant, despite its now proven extreme neurotoxicity. He states: “Parents can be reassured that the trace quantities of aluminum in vaccines can’t possibly do harm.” Based on published science beginning in 2009, this is an unsupportable lie.)

Everything you have read so far is based on published science. The grand theory of autism’s causation, in my opinion, holds together pretty strongly.

Will we look back one day and say that aluminum adjuvant caused the autism epidemic the way we say that Thalidomide triggered birth defects? I think we will, but that’s just my opinion.

Next Steps

I believe we may be far closer to a complete explanation of how autism — and many related autoimmune conditions — are being caused. Scientists from all over the world have created a compelling body of work to support an almost complete biological understanding of how autism is triggered by aluminum adjuvant inside the body, creating an immune activation event, and leading to autism — most of this research has been published in just the last 10 years. And none of it from Americans.

Is everything published and written here true? Could the explanation really be that simple? Did a rising number of vaccines containing the aluminum adjuvant trigger an autoimmune epidemic, of which autism is the most severe, but not only, manifestation? Does an epidemic of food allergies, ADHD, learning disabilities, eczema, and diabetes fall into the same realm of causation?

Is is possible that injecting an immune system antagonist (aluminum adjuvant), all but guaranteed to cause immune activation events, has done just that in the brains of many of our children? Do even mildly impacted children also suffer from a permanent, simmering brain immune system activation? Should we believe the growing body of scientists from all over the world who are sounding the alarm about the impact injected aluminum adjuvant is having on our children?

Will these scientists who have published all this wonderful work pool their collective expertise and let the world know what they are learning? Will they take their exhortations for caution and further exploration — all buried inside their published studies — and publicly warn parents about what is becoming so clear? (In fact, many scientists tried to do just that, see the Appendix.)

In my opinion, we are much, much closer to understanding how autism has been triggered in so many children, and I hope this article is another step on the path to the truth. And, for so many of you out there doing everything you can to help your son or daughter with autism live the best possible life, perhaps a clearer understanding of how their autism was triggered will improve their chances for recovery.

Because VP was really my teacher on this topic, I will give them the last word:

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

APPENDIX A: Arguing with ChatGPT

I enjoy arguing with ChatGPT, which has been infected with industry talking points but still tries to apply logic to situations. Enjoy our “conversation.”

Me asking ChatGPT: Can aluminum adjuvant in vaccines cause an immune activation event?

ChatGPT: Yes, aluminum adjuvants in vaccines are specifically designed to cause an immune activation event. This is their primary function. When aluminum salts are included in a vaccine, they help to stimulate the immune system by enhancing the body's response to the vaccine's antigen, which is the substance that triggers an immune response.

Here’s how it works:

1. **Inflammation**: Aluminum adjuvants induce a local inflammatory response at the injection site. This inflammation attracts immune cells, such as macrophages and dendritic cells, to the area.

2. **Antigen Presentation**: The immune cells take up the antigen (the part of the pathogen or toxin that the vaccine targets) along with the aluminum adjuvant. The presence of the adjuvant helps to enhance the presentation of the antigen to T cells, which are a critical component of the adaptive immune system.

3. **Immune Activation**: By boosting the local immune response and facilitating better antigen presentation, aluminum adjuvants help to activate both the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system, leading to the production of antibodies and memory cells that will recognize and respond more effectively to future exposures to the pathogen.

This controlled immune activation is what allows vaccines to be effective in providing immunity without causing disease. The use of adjuvants like aluminum salts is especially important in vaccines that use inactivated or subunit forms of pathogens, which may not be sufficiently immunogenic on their own.

Me asking ChatGPT: What if health authors were wrong, and aluminum-containing vaccines caused autism by creating permanent immune activation events in the brains of some people?

ChatGPT: Hypothetically, if health authorities were wrong and aluminum adjuvants in vaccines were found to cause autism in susceptible children, the implications would be significant. Here’s how such a scenario might unfold and the likely responses:

1. **Recognition and Response**
  - **Reevaluation of Data:** The discovery of a link would likely come from new, robust studies or reanalysis of existing data. Health authorities, scientists, and public health organizations would thoroughly investigate the findings.
  - **Public Acknowledgment:** If a credible link were established, it would be critical for health authorities to acknowledge the mistake publicly. Transparency would be key to maintaining public trust.

2. **Immediate Actions**
  - **Halt or Modify Vaccine Use:** Vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants would likely be suspended or withdrawn from use while alternative formulations were developed.
  - **Development of New Vaccines:** Researchers would accelerate efforts to develop and distribute vaccines with different adjuvants or adjuvant-free options. Vaccines are essential for preventing serious diseases, so finding a safe alternative would be a priority.
  - **Enhanced Monitoring:** Surveillance systems for tracking vaccine safety would be intensified to monitor any other potential adverse effects.

3. **Addressing Affected Individuals**
  - **Support for Affected Families:** Governments and health organizations might offer medical, financial, and psychological support to families of children who were affected.
  - **Legal and Ethical Considerations:** There could be legal actions, compensation claims, and ethical debates about the responsibilities of health authorities and vaccine manufacturers.

4. **Long-Term Implications**
  - **Impact on Public Trust:** Trust in vaccines and health authorities could be severely damaged. This could lead to increased vaccine hesitancy and a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases.
  - **Reform in Vaccine Development:** The process of vaccine approval and monitoring might undergo significant changes to prevent similar errors in the future. This could include stricter safety trials, more rigorous post-marketing surveillance, and greater transparency.
  - **Broader Scientific Reflection:** The scientific community would likely engage in a deep reflection on how such an oversight occurred, leading to reforms in how research is conducted, peer-reviewed, and communicated to the public.

5. **Broader Public Health Consequences**
  - **Loss of Herd Immunity:** Reduced vaccination rates could result in the loss of herd immunity, leading to outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles, whooping cough, and polio.
  - **Re-Education and Awareness Campaigns:** Public health campaigns would need to work to rebuild trust in vaccines, likely focusing on the safety and efficacy of new formulations and the overall importance of vaccination.

6. **Learning and Moving Forward**
  - **Strengthened Safety Protocols:** Lessons learned from the mistake would lead to improved safety protocols, not just for vaccines but for all medical interventions.
  - **Global Collaboration:** There would likely be a greater emphasis on global collaboration in monitoring vaccine safety, sharing data, and ensuring that any potential issues are identified and addressed early.

Conclusion
While this scenario is hypothetical and not supported by current evidence, it underscores the importance of rigorous scientific research, continuous safety monitoring, and transparency in public health. The goal is always to minimize risks while maximizing the benefits of vaccination, which remains one of the most effective tools in preventing serious infectious diseases.

APPENDIX B: The three letters

In the middle of 2017, three of the most important scientists in the field of aluminum adjuvant toxicity-Dr. Christopher Shaw of Canada, Dr. Chris Exley of England, and Dr. Romain Gherardi of France-took the extraordinary step of writing letters of caution to our American public health authorities. I provide their letters below. As far as I know, they have made zero impact.

PORTLAND, Oregon—Quirky, socially-awkward, somewhat compulsive, but otherwise fully functioning adults who pay taxes and live independently almost succeeded in erasing my son’s disability from public consciousness, until Robert F. Kennedy told the truth about “Profound Autism” last week, and reminded everyone of one of my favorite quotes:

“The measure of society is how it treats its weakest members.”

— Thomas Jefferson

For the last 5-7 years, the whitewashing of Profound Autism (henceforth called “P.A.”) has been on full display. It probably started with the book NeuroTribes, and its taken off ever since. Embrace autism, accept autism, celebrate autism, but for God’s sake do not cure, end, or eliminate autism, that makes you a genocidal maniac.

My relationship with the neurodiverse community has been fraught, to say the least, so to them, I offer a p…

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“…this is an individual tragedy as well, autism destroys families, and more importantly it destroys our greatest resource which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who many of them were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old. These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children and we need to put an end to it.”

Our real…

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— Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, coauthors of Denial

WASHINGTON, District of Columbia—In a press conference this morning, RFK Jr annihilated the “canard” (as he called it) of dismissing the massive rise in the prevalence of autism (from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 31) as nothing more than better diagnosis. Will the mainstream press report any of this? Probably not, they are beholden to this lie by their Pharma and public health overlords. As Mr. Kennedy said, “epidemic denial has become a feature in mainstream media.”

Looking to understand how we ever got to this point of epidemic denialism and see the real science he was referring to? Read on.

…

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Dr. Stanley Plotkin is the godfather of the modern vaccine industry. Now 92 years old, he literally wrote the book on vaccines; called Plotkin’s Vaccines, it’s now in its seventh edition, and the textbook is recommended by Bill Gates as an “indispensable guide to the enhancement of the well-being of our world.” Even at his advanced age, in a recent, super creepy poll of the Top 50 “most influential people in vaccines,” Dr. Plotkin was voted #5 (Bill Gates was #1).

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The first study that compared children who had received a vaccine with children that hadn’t was published in 2000. Although autism wasn’t something the study considered, it was still revealing. Titled “Effects of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis or Tetanus Vaccination on Allergies and Allergy-Related Respiratory Symptoms among Children and Adolescents in the United States,” this study from the UCLA school of public health did look specifically at the DTP vaccine to see if it might be responsible for allergies and allergy-related symptoms, such as asthma. Looking at more than thirteen thousand children, the study found that:

DTP or tetanus vaccination in US children is associated with lifetime history of asthma or other allergies and allergy-related symptoms. . . . Assuming that the estimated vaccination effect is unbiased, 50% of diagnosed asthma cases (2.93 million) in US children and adolescents would be prevented if the DTP or tetanus vaccination was not administered.

So the first study to ever compare a group that received a vaccine with a group that didn’t found a dramatic difference in rates of asthma and allergies among the vaccinated group, so much so that they thought not getting the DTP vaccine might reduce cases of asthma by 50 percent! Note that many children with autism suffer from what are known as comorbid conditions, such as asthma, allergies, and other autoimmune conditions.

In 2008 in the second study ever looking at a group of children who didn’t receive a vaccine, public health researchers Carolyn Gallagher and Melody Goodman from SUNY Stony Brook looked at the possible relationship between the hepatitis B vaccine and special education.Were children who received the full series of hepatitis B vaccines (three separate vaccines, the first one often given on day one of life) more likely to end up in special education classes than children who didn’t receive any hepatitis B vaccines? The study, “Hepatitis B Triple Series Vaccine and Developmental Disability in US Children Aged 1–9 Years,” was published in the journal Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry, and the results were pretty clear: The full series of hepatitis B led to a ninefold greater likelihood of receiving special education:

This study found statistically significant evidence to suggest that boys in United States who were vaccinated with the triple series Hepatitis B vaccine . . . were more susceptible to developmental disability than were unvaccinated boys. . . . The odds of receiving EIS [special education] were approximately nine times as great for vaccinated boys (n = 46) as for unvaccinated boys (n = 7), after adjustment for confounders.

The same researchers from SUNY Stony Brook published another study in 2010, this time looking at the relationship between receiving the hepatitis B series and autism. Published in the prestigious Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, “Hepatitis B Vaccination of Male Neonates and Autism Diagnosis” once again reached very clear conclusions:

“Boys vaccinated as neonates had threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis compared to boys never vaccinated or vaccinated after the first month of life.”

Journalist David Kirby appreciated the significance of the new findings, writing in the Huffington Post:

[The study] will be among the first university-based population studies to suggest an association between a vaccine and an increased risk for autism. And that would be in direct contradiction to all those MMR and thimerosal studies that purportedly found no such link.

The two Goodman and Gallagher articles about hepatitis B raise many concerns. I’ve met pediatricians who feel that the hepatitis B vaccine specifically has triggered the epidemic of neurological disorders and autoimmunity we now see in our children. Hepatitis B was the first vaccine introduced after Congress indemnified vaccine makers from liability in 1986. The vaccine has a high dose of aluminum, which I believe is the primary cause of autism and it’s often given to babies on day one of life, which many immunologists feel is a huge mistake. These two studies raise major concerns, but I’m guessing you never knew either of these studies existed, which supports my point about scientists and PR firms.

In 2017, however, something amazing happened. Two separate studies comparing vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children actually got published. Unlike the Goodman and Gallagher studies above, which only explored a single vaccine (the rest of a child’s vaccine status was simply not considered), these two new studies met the “gold standard”—they found children who had never received any vaccines and looked at their health outcomes in a variety of ways. The public health researchers from Jackson State University originally planned to publish a single study, until they looked at the data on children born prematurely, noting that the data on the difference in health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated premature infants was so dramatic it deserved its own study.

Published in the Journal of Translational Science, the first groundbreaking study was called, “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-Year-Old U.S. Children,” and its results were so devastating to the US vaccine program that there wasn’t a single media outlet in the country that covered its release.The results of comparing vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children were no surprise to me, my wife, or any of the autism parents I know, but perhaps would surprise others:

The vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD [neurodevelopmental disorders]. After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.

Specifically, vaccinated children were found to have a fourfold higher likelihood of having autism. I’m reminded of a quote by Dr. Daniel Neides of the Cleveland Clinic, who wondered if we were making trade-offs that aren’t worth it. He said,

Simultaneously, the Jackson State authors published a study in the same journal just looking at children born prematurely, titled, “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children.” The results were disturbing, as the researchers found children born prematurely and vaccinated were fourteen times more likely to develop a neurodevelopmental disorder! The authors were appropriately concerned:

Preterm birth coupled with vaccination, however, was associated with a synergistic increase in the odds of NDD, suggesting the possibility that vaccination could precipitate adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm infants. These results provide clues to the epidemiology and causation of NDD but question the safety of current vaccination programs for preterm infants.

In 2020, Dr Brian Hooker Neil Miller took the study of unvaccinated children to a new level by looking at actual data from a pediatrician’s office who had a large number of unvaccinated patients. The study, Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disordersconcluded exactly what by now is a pretty familiar refrain:

Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47-3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04-9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63-2.78). In a quartile analysis, subjects were grouped by number of vaccine doses received in the first year of life. Higher odds ratios were observed in Quartiles 3 and 4 (where more vaccine doses were received) for all four health conditions considered, as compared to Quartile 1. In a temporal analysis, developmental delays showed a linear increase as the age cut-offs increased from 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 months of age (ORs = 1.95, 2.18, 2.92 and 3.51, respectively). Slightly higher ORs were also observed for all four health conditions when time permitted for a diagnosis was extended from ⩾ 3 years of age to ⩾ 5 years of age.

Conclusion: In this study, which only allowed for the calculation of unadjusted observational associations, higher ORs were observed within the vaccinated versus unvaccinated group for developmental delays, asthma and ear infections. Further study is necessary to understand the full spectrum of health effects associated with childhood vaccination.

Finally, in January 2025, Dr. Tony Mawson and colleagues published another study, this time using a gigantic and highly credible dataset including more than 4,600 unvaccinated children, to support many of the previous conclusions they reached. Titled Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid, the study looked at the data of 47,155 children enrolled in the Florida State Medicaid program. The study’s method:

Vaccination uptake was measured by numbers of healthcare visits that included vaccination-related procedures and diagnoses. Cross-sectional analyses were performed to calculate prevalence odds ratios (Aims 1-2). A retrospective cohort design was used to compute relative risks specifically of ASD (Aim 3).

As you might expect by now, the results supported what we are seeing in the unvaccinated populations:

The analysis of claims data for 47,155 nine-year-old children revealed that: 1) vaccination was associated with significantly increased odds for all measured NDDs; 2) among children born preterm and vaccinated, 39.9% were diagnosed with at least one NDD compared to 15.7% among those born preterm and unvaccinated (OR 3.58, 95% CI: 2.80, 4.57); and 3) the relative risk of ASD increased according to the number of visits that included vaccinations. Children with just one vaccination visit were 1.7 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than the unvaccinated (95% CI: 1.21, 2.35) whereas those with 11 or more visits were 4.4 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than those with no visit for vaccination (95% CI: 2.85, 6.84).

I’ll pull out the part of that conclusion that hits me hardest as an autism parent:

“Children with just one vaccination visit were 1.7 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than the unvaccinated (95% CI: 1.21, 2.35) whereas those with 11 or more visits were 4.4 times more likely to have been diagnosed with ASD than those with no visit for vaccination (95% CI: 2.85, 6.84).”

Seven separate studies, all comparing a group of children vaccinated with a group of children unvaccinated, at least for a single vaccine. I’m guessing that for most readers this is the first time you’ve read about any of these studies. I think a fair question would be, “Why?” The answer is simple:

Studies that might hurt the financial performance of pharmaceutical companies or damage the reputation of public health officials or embarrass pediatricians are not publicized by media outlets that derive advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical companies.

About the author

J.B. Handley is the proud father of a child with Autism. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University. His first book, How to End the Autism Epidemic, was published in September 2018. The book has sold more than 75,000 copies, was an NPD Bookscan and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, broke the Top 40 on Amazon, and has more than 1,000 Five-star reviews. Mr. Handley and his nonspeaking son are also the authors of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle and co-produced the film SPELLERS, available now on YouTube.

Oh wait, there were 16 measles outbreaks in 2024…

And 220 in 2011…

And 55 in 2012…

And 159 in 2013…

And 645 in 2014…

And I could keep going forever, and there always will be outbreaks and of course the reasons why this is true is rarely reported, so here are some simple facts and some science that you can share with your friends:

Fact: The measles vaccine effectiveness wanes over time, as a study proved in 2023.

The study is called:

Quantification of Waning Immunity After Measles Vaccination—Evidence From a Seroprevalence Study

The abstract concludes:

The average rate of waning immunity against measles after the first dose of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine (ages 1.5–10 years) was 9.7% per year from the geometric mean titer value of 2,634 mUI/mL. The average waning rate after the…

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