A $50 million federal research initiative examining the potential causes of autism is sidestepping any examination of a possible vaccine-autism link and is instead funding research by establishment scientists who have denied such a link, a new letter to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya alleges.
The NIH announced the $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI) last year. In his letter, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker wrote that three projects funded by the initiative are led by scientists who “built their careers on explicit, public denial that vaccines could play any role in autism etiology.”
Hooker wrote that his review of the ADSI portfolio turned up no studies examining “vaccines or vaccine components.” The ADSI appears designed to come to a predetermined conclusion that vaccines are not linked to autism, Hooker alleged.
The NIH-funded research instead largely focuses on connecting autism to a range of genetic and environmental causes while ignoring a possible link to vaccines, Hooker said.
In an assessment accompanying his letter, Hooker called the ADSI, as currently structured, “not a search for the truth” but, instead, a “validation engine” for mainstream autism narratives.
Hooker told The Defender he was motivated to write the letter after the Aug. 19 ADSI update meeting and the Aug. 27 meeting of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.
At the latter meeting, NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew Memoli said the agency is “working toward more investigation of vaccines as a cause of autism,” according to Hooker’s original letter.
“Those are reassuring words. They are also, unfortunately, contradicted by the facts on the ground,” Hooker wrote. He told The Defender the ADSI instead “consists of a bunch of re-tread genetics projects that have been altered to look like gene-environmental interaction projects.”
Hooker’s allegations come despite recent reports that studying the vaccine-autism link is a priority for President Donald Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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