Tag: autism

85 Minnesota Autism Clinics Under Investigation for Millions in Medicaid Fraud

About 85 autism clinics in Minnesota are under investigation for tens of millions in Medicaid billing fraud.

The state’s Department of Human Services (DHS) is under a microscope for paying out outrageous amounts for services supposedly delivered by the state’s burgeoning autism treatment sector, according to KSTP-TV.

The records show that DHS paid out claims totally about $700 million since the state’s autism program began in 2014. But millions of that seems to be paying for services that were never rendered. And investigators say that some $20 million has been fraud.

Now, DHS is reportedly visiting every one of the state’s locations after data shows that at least 85 of them fraudulently billed the program.

One expert says that the state ignored the warning signs.

Dr. Eric Larsson with the Lovaas Institute Midwest says that some of the bills were obviously suspicious. “No apparent email address, no website. Nobody is answering the phone,” he said. “They’re certainly not trying to deliver services.”

The problem first came to light last December when the FBI raided two Minnesota autism clinics under suspicions of fraudulent billing, KROC radio reported at the time.

State DHS officials are now scrambling to make sure that the hundreds of autism centers in the state are submitting legitimate bills.

Two of the clinics under investigation are Smart Therapy Center, LLC in Minneapolis and Star Autism Center LLC in St. Cloud, which also had ties to the Feeding Our Future child meal fraud case.

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Top Psychiatrist Says Autism Should Be Diagnosed With a Pencil

While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., brings in the best and brightest to conclude, once and for all, what caused the epic increase in Autism cases in the US, the answer may have just become very easy to discern due to the “guilt” admitted by one of the nation’s leading psychiatrists.

Those who long have been aware of the fraud associated with psychiatric diagnosing are not surprised to learn that the psychiatric community is behind the horrific number of Autism cases in the United States. The only thing that is surprising is how long it has taken for the fraud to be exposed. 

Dr. Allen Francis, former chair of the Task Force responsible for overhauling and updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), reflecting a greatly expanded diagnosis for Autism in the DSM-IV. Francis referred to the increase in Autism cases as an “epidemic” of overdiagnosis. One might argue that, based on his own words, it is an “epidemic of misdiagnosis.”

In the 1980’s the rate of Autism in the US was one in 2,000. With the help of Dr. Francis and his DSM-IV team, the rate had skyrocketed to 1 in 150 by 2000 and, unbelievably, today has settled at one in 31. Considering the extraordinary expansion of symptoms made by Francis and his team, one now refers to an Autism diagnosis as being on the “Spectrum.”

Yes. During an interview with the BBC, Francis explained that “it’s a kind of mea culpa – we had good intentions that led to terrible unintended consequences.” In fact, what is more interesting about Francis’s “mea culpa” is that the grand psychiatrist seems more concerned that his expansion of the Autism diagnosis has contributed to the anti-vax movement, not that millions of kids have been wrongly diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder where there is none.

Francis explained during his BBC interview that he and his team worked to loosen the definition of Autism because psychiatrists and pediatricians thought the criteria was too stringent, leaving some with lesser symptoms unable to get health services. According to Francis, he and his team “introduced something called Asperger’s disorder, and that evolved into autism spectrum disorder…”

Here’s the kicker, according to Francis “this meant that the symptoms of autism as currently used or defined by many clinicians, and certainly self-defined by patients and families, would include many people who have normal social awkwardness, eccentricities, difficulties relating to people that previously would never have been considered a mental disorder.”

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Mapping the Entire Field of Autism Causation Studies in One Article

It seems to me that the proper way to understand the autism epidemic is to read everything that has been written on autism causation, throw out any studies that are characterized by a financial conflict of interest or fatally flawed study design, and see what patterns emerge from the papers that are left. During my doctoral thesis I reviewed about 80 of the top studies in autism epidemiology and toxicology. That was groundbreaking at the time because the vast majority of mainstream scholars don’t have the courage to discuss any papers that threaten the profits of powerful industries. 

As I’ve continued to work in this space over the last six years, I now realize that there are over 800 autism causation studies in the English language focused on the US. It’s daunting to think about trying to wrap one’s head around a field that large. So, most public health officials just grab a favorite study here or there to justify their biases, and that is exactly the wrong way to approach this topic. There has to be a better way of working through the available knowledge on this issue. 

Now I believe that I’ve figured out how to map the entire field of autism causation studies (about 850 papers in all) in one article. If you sat down to read each article individually, it would likely take you several years. But as I will show below, you don’t necessarily have to do that. There is a way to move through all of the literature at a meta level that I believe leads to the right answer and a viable plan for how to stop the autism epidemic. 

Let’s start with a quick introduction and then get into the different types of studies. 

In the early 1980s, vaccines were so harmful that vaccine manufacturers routinely lost in court. They lobbied the US Congress to pass the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to give themselves liability protection. And they pinky-swore to make vaccines safer but there was no legal mechanism in the bill to enforce that promise so they never did. 

Pharmaceutical companies proceeded to add as many vaccines as possible to the schedule. Prior to 1986, there were 3 routine vaccines totaling 7 injections. Today the CDC’s Maternal and Child and Adolescent vaccine schedules include 19 vaccines requiring 76 injections with 94 total doses of antigen (I’m actually less worried about the antigens than the other ingredients in the shots). 

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The Science on Autism and Vaccines Is Not Settled: What Studies Are Missing

Like many physicians, I was taught early in my training that any link between vaccines and autism had been completely disproven—that “the science is settled” and no longer open for debate. I repeated that message with confidence for years. But when I began researching for my book, “Between a Shot and a Hard Place,” I set aside assumptions and took an unbiased look at the data myself.

What I found wasn’t reassuring. It wasn’t the robust body of evidence putting the question to rest. Instead, I found a surprisingly limited collection of studies—filled with narrow designs and major gaps. As a board-certified pediatrician trained at top institutions, I expected certainty. What I found was an unsettled and incomplete landscape—one that calls not for dogma, but for open scientific inquiry and nuance.

Let me be clear: I am not claiming that vaccines cause autism. I am saying, with humility and urgency, that we do not know. And the truth is, no one can say with confidence that we do.

That’s the problem.

The Scope of the Problem

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition. While some children are only mildly affected, many face significant challenges with speech, motor skills, and daily functioning. The spectrum is wide—and growing.

According to the CDC’s latest numbers, 1 in 31 children in the United States is now diagnosed with autism. In California, the numbers are even higher: 1 in every 12.5 boys. While it’s true that changes in diagnostic criteria and increased awareness have contributed to the rise, they don’t explain the increase in severe cases.

Nearly two-thirds of children with autism today have borderline or profound intellectual disability—a rate that’s higher than in decades past. This is a public health crisis. One we cannot solve if we refuse to ask the hard questions about what may be contributing to it.

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The US Secretary of Health and Human Services Declares an Epidemic of Immune Dysregulation. MSM Will React by Blaming Parents and Falling Back on Miasma Theory

Last week, in an interview on Fox News, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Declares an Epidemic of Immune Dysregulation Yet no one seems to have responded to this monumental announcement. It’s almost as if he never even said it.

Instead, the MSM is going full-bore (and it’s summer!) switching into full denialist mode. Instead, they want to cite better diagnosis, and anything other than pharmaceutical products as the source of the problem.

Public messaging by some pharmaceutical-linked organizations, health authorities, and media outlets has at times tried, and failed to pin parental stress, children’s screen exposure, or home environment as causes of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) – claims not backed by solid science. For example, local news headlines have touted studies suggesting maternal stress in pregnancy “causes” autism, such as a Colorado news report on a study linking prenatal stress (combined with a labor drug) to autism fox4now.com. In reality, large epidemiological studies have not found ordinary stressful life events in pregnancy to increase autism risk thetransmitter.org. A 2012 analysis explicitly concluded that experiencing acute stress (e.g. a family death or illness during pregnancy) did not elevate autism odds – contradicting earlier small studies and casting doubt on stress as a trigger thetransmitter.org.

Similarly, excessive screen time in early childhood has been blamed in media and popular discourse for rising autism rates. The term “virtual autism” was even coined by a Romanian psychologist after he claimed some toddlers’ autism-like symptoms were reversed by removing hours of screen exposure madinamerica.com. This idea – amplified through blogs and even a recent documentary film – warns that young children who spend “more than four hours per day” on screens may develop autism-like behaviors, supposedly curable by cutting off gadgets madinamerica.com. While correlational studies have indeed found that children with ASD tend to have higher screen time on average madinamerica.com, even StatNews cautions this does not prove causation statnews.com. For instance, a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics study of 5,100 kids found >14 hours/week of screen time before age 2 associated with higher autism diagnoses by age 12 – but the authors emphasized underlying factors (e.g. socioeconomic and developmental differences) likely explain the link, not screens themselves statnews.com. Some specialists have even asked: could it be that children who are already autistic gravitate to screens more, rather than screens causing the autism statnews.com? (Does it take a statistician to know this?) Indeed, mainstream pediatric guidance recognizes that too much passive screen use can delay social and language development, but does not label it an ASD cause crossrivertherapy.com. As one overview flatly states: “Television does not cause autism. Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental condition with a genetic and environmental basis – it is not linked to watching TV or any specific media exposure” crossrivertherapy.com.

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Nearly Everything That We’ve Been Told about Genes and Autism Is Wrong

The University of Sydney caps doctoral theses at 80,000 words (excluding references). The theory is that external reviewers don’t want to read more than that (true!). One can apply to the Dean to increase the word limit to 100,000, which is what I did. But my doctoral thesis, as initially written, was closer to 140,000 words. So I had to cut three chapters that I really liked — the political economy of theories of genetic causation, how evidence-based medicine was captured by Big Pharma, and the history of the regulation of mercury.

I believe that some of the information in those excised chapters would be useful to policymakers in Washington, D.C. trying to figure out how to deal with the epidemics of chronic disease in children. So today I am sharing my original (slightly updated), never-before-seen, chapter 6, which challenges the entire paradigm of genetic determinism in disease causation. 

I. Introduction

In the first chapter, I showed that the rise in autism prevalence is primarily a story of environmental triggers (with some smaller percentage due to diagnostic expansion and genetics). The story of how genetic theories became the dominant narrative in the autism debate thus needs to be explained. The hegemony of genetic theories of disease causation comes at a tremendous cost to society because they crowd out more promising alternatives. This problem is particularly acute in connection with autism, where genetic research swallows up the vast majority of research funding — and has for more than twenty years. So, one of the keys to effectively addressing the autism epidemic will be to demonstrate the flaws in the genetic approach to disease causation and replace it with a more comprehensive ontology that has better explanatory power.

To put this debate in context, I want to recap the genetic argument in connection with autism as I have presented it thus far. In the 1990s, it was routine for scientists, doctors, and policymakers to assure worried parents that autism was genetic. To the extent that anyone ventured a guess, the explanation was that autism was 90% genetic, 10% environmental. Then the state of California commissioned 16 of the top geneticists in the country (Hallmayer et al. 2011) to study birth records of all twins born in the state between 1987 and 2004. Hallmayer et al. (2011) concluded that at most, genetics explains 38% of the autism epidemic, and they pointed out twice that this was likely an overestimate. Blaxill (2011) argues that the eventual consensus will be 90% environmental, 10% genetic. And in chapter 5, I showed a model from Ioannidis, (2005b, p. 700) that suggests that only 1/10th of 1% of “discovery oriented exploratory research studies” (which include nutrition and genetic studies with massive numbers of competing variables) are replicable.

And yet, a disproportionate share of federal research money in connection with autism is going to study genetic theories of disease causation. In 2013, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee spent $308 million on autism research across all federal agencies and private funders participating in research (IACC, 2013a). This is a shockingly low amount to spend on research given estimates that autism is currently costing the US $268 billion a year (Leigh and Du, 2015).

When one drills down into how the IACC spent the $308 million, it is largely focused on genetic research (especially if one examines the funding in the funding category “What Caused This To Happen And Can This Be Prevented?”) (IACC, 2013b). This is in spite of the fact that several groups of leading doctors and scientists including Gilbert and Miller (2009), Landrigan, Lambertini, and Birnbaum (2012), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (2013), and Bennett et al. (2016) have all concluded that autism and other neurodevelopment disorders are likely caused by environmental triggers.

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RFK Jr. Says Studies to Find Root Cause of Autism May Be Completed by March

Studies to help determine the root cause of autism are expected to be completed around March, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during a recent interview as his federal agency leads the effort in Making America Healthy Again (MAHA).

During an interview on The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Kennedy explained that some studies will be totally completed by September.

“And those studies will mainly be replication studies of studies that have already been done. We’re also deploying new teams of scientists, 15 groups of scientists. We’re going to send those grants out to bid within three weeks,” he explained, noting that other studies will be completed six months after September, which would be March.

“As I said, we’re going to begin to have a lot of information by September. We’re not going to stop the studies in September. We’re going to be definitive. And the more definitive you are, the more it drives public policy,” he continued.

In April Kennedy promised to get to the root of the autism epidemic, citing the stunning data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing that 1 in 31 children in the United States have autism. That reflects yet another rise in what Kennedy has described as an “epidemic.”

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Neurodiversity Is A Strawman

A dear friend had a beautiful, healthy, engaged baby boy. After his first round of childhood vaccinations he went blind, non-verbal, started head banging, having seizures, lost all engagement, and fell into the abyss of autism. Today that child is 40. He is incontinent, cannot speak or feed himself, and is totally dependent upon his father to survive. 

Another friend had a son and a daughter. The daughter, following her first round of childhood shots, experienced almost exactly the same scenario described above, minus the blindness. At the time my friend did not connect the dots and when it came time for his son to be vaccinated, the child began to seize. In the room, my friend put it together and stopped the rest of the shots. Today, his son is only mildly autistic while his daughter, at 26, is non-verbal, incontinent, and often uncontrollable. Since the son is only mildly autistic, I suppose we shouldn’t look into the cause of his issues? It’s a gift, right? 

A mother (a client in one of the many tragic cases) had a teenage daughter who, after a round of the Gardasil vaccine, suffered a seizure and went into a coma. The young girl had been captain of her volleyball team, top of her class, poised for a full and happy life. Today, at nearly 20, she lives in total darkness because she has seizures every 30 seconds – cannot have any light. The neurodegeneration is unquantifiable. She cannot read or watch TV, let alone go on her first date, go to prom…experience the life she should have and would have. 

Another friend had a perfect, beautiful young daughter who was exceeding all of her milestones. After her second round of jabs, she locked in, stopped talking or making eye contact, developed a severe learning disability, and is still struggling today, at 6. 

She, too, will never experience the “normal” milestones we all would like to see for our children. 

Those stories, anecdotal though they may be, are the tip of the iceberg. 

I could share thousands, each one worse than the next, that would make most people sit in a room and cry forever.

The media machinery has conflated mild spectrum disorder with what I just described above specifically so that people will have the reaction they are having right now. This is normalization of extremes by conflating them with non-extremes so that it’s a step-by-step incremental (and coordinated) attack on those who would expose the root cause of the terrible suffering experienced by so many.

It’s executed so that people like RFK, Jr. are hobbled from doing their job. 

How does questioning the environmental harms and risk factors for autism and/or neurodegenerative disorders threaten or even conflict with the idea of autism as neurodiversity? Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. 

No other disease has people normalizing a spectrum (no pun intended) of symptoms ranging from terrible to non-debilitating in order to argue that it’s actually great. We don’t say there’s a spectrum of neurodegenerative disorder from paralysis to neuropathy and there are benefits to neuropathy therefore neurodegeneration is great. This is normalization at its best. 

Suddenly everyone’s kid is Rain Man. Suddenly everyone is “on the spectrum.” Ergo, it’s normal. Being a little bit weird is beautiful and normal and we are all a little bit weird so that’s not a disorder. This is a psyop and everyone is falling for it. No one is saying there is something wrong with neurodiversity or that we shouldn’t also be looking into that. But when it comes to discovering the contributing factors and co-factors, the environmental insults, and the increase itself in autism to date, we’re not talking about that. We are talking about, and have only ever been talking about, the above scenarios. 

The tactics to muzzle debate and halt real investigation are duplicated across all levels. (This should all sound eerily familiar when we recall the conflation, normalization, media machinations, and strawmen to emotionally activate opposition tactics used during Covid.)

It should be a red flag and alarm every American that pharmaceutical companies have no liability for vaccines and that they have managed to increase the pediatric schedule from 3 to 72 in one generation, and it should alarm every parent to learn that HHS itself draws a hard line in 1989 for autism – the year when vaccine formulation was changed to allow for combinations because in 1986 the vaccine space became a financial free-for-all. 

Unfortunately, the media is adept at keeping dots that should be connected in silos so that most people do not connect them, and there is no shortage of sock puppet “experts” willing to run around doubling down on the narrative. 

The Burbacher Study, if anyone were to know about it, let alone read it, SHOULD have at least sparked research into these potential harms. Instead, the spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industrial complex assigned to discredit parents and advocates, Paul Offit, dissects a strawman in public view…in this case the strawman is ethyl vs methyl mercury.

Allow me to explain how this tactic works and why it’s effective: Offit’s argument (and also the error in his argument) is that ethyl mercury (Thimerosal) clears from the brain faster than methyl mercury. First of all, that’s omitting the fact that there are organic and inorganic types, and for the organic type, Offit is right, but for the inorganic type, he’s dead wrong. Ethyl and methyl mercury are different, that’s true, but they both break down into organic and inorganic subtypes. The Burbacher study shows that the organic form of Ethyl mercury clears from the brain faster. 

The inorganic clearance rate couldn’t be determined because the slope of the rate of clearance is zero. So, according to this study, that form of mercury is in the brain forever. Compared to mercury derived from Thimerosal, both organic and inorganic forms of methyl mercury clear from the brain. Which goes against Offit’s claim that ethyl mercury is safer. At least the inorganic form clears from methyl mercury, but it never clears from ethyl mercury. 

But the real issue is…why are we comparing different kinds of lighter fluid around matches? No kind is desirable. (Strawman identified!) And no one is suggesting we are going to inject people with methyl mercury either…so he’s wrong to make the comparison in the first place. But once he’s made the comparison, he’s also wrong according to the data if you consider the inorganic form. Simply put, the Burbacher study proves that mercury does cross the Blood Brain Barrier. Did we put a hold on this? No. Instead, we did away with animal studies for mercury. 

This is just ONE example of ONE strawman designed and implemented to marginalize and sideline a set of risks and harms (even if that’s minority harm) and, yes, injury. There are too many others to list. For example, why aren’t we looking into the connection between autism and HHV-6? 

Between autism and chemicals like Glyphosate and PFAS and forever chemicals in our air, our water, our soil, and our food? Hint: it isn’t because I just thought of it now in my living room. It’s because bottom lines, and corporate and regulatory capture and corruption to maintain those bottom lines, are valued above human lives – above our children’s lives. 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Only ONE vaccine has ever been properly tested, and even then, never fully. If you shine a spotlight over one small area on a dark street and don’t find what you’re looking for, do you presume the entire street is free of whatever it is? Do we abandon first principles in order to pour concrete on our confirmation biases and further our narratives? Or do we ask the difficult, complex, and nuanced questions, do the hard work, and search for the truth? It appears that question has been asked and answered in the affirmative for the former. The latter is vehemently opposed. 

The assertion that these issues have been looked into is false. In fact it’s been DISALLOWED thus far, and look what’s happening when we try to look into it now. We have everyone outraged over a strawman that was never the point in the first place. It’s all a smoke screen. Once everyone is distracted and chaos ensues, any actual progress is effectively halted, which is precisely the point. It’s not organic. It’s the model, it’s coordinated, and it works. 

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NIH Director Gives Update on New Project to Find Causes of Autism

The director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on April 22 that the new project to identify the causes of autism will likely involve patient records and outside researchers.

“We’d like to … get access to the medical records of a large portion of the American population,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, told reporters in Washington. “I think to answer a question like this—why is autism rising—you need very large samples of people.”

He also said, “Medical records, I believe, should be a very important part of this, because that’s maybe the best way to track the link between exposures and then what happens afterwards.”

The project could draw data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid as well as other parts of the government, such as the military, Bhattacharya said. Patient data would be deanonymized to protect privacy, according to the NIH director.

Bhattacharya had said during an NIH meeting on Monday that the NIH’s data platform would pull data from pharmacy chains, medical claims, federal partnerships, and health organizations.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told President Donald Trump earlier in April that health officials had launched a “massive testing and research effort” that would determine what caused the spike in autism. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released on April 15 showed the rate of autism is up to one in 31 children in America. Autism is a developmental disability that can cause an array of symptoms, including delays in learning skills and epilepsy.

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“It Dwarfs COVID”: RFK Jr Says Autism Is an “Epidemic”

Autism is an “epidemic” that “dwarfs COVID,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy has said.

In an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis, RFK Jr. said autism is a “debilitating” condition that should be taken more seriously than COVID because of its effects on the young.

“This is an epidemic. It dwarfs the COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people. Autism affects children and affects them at the beginning of their lives, the beginning of their productivity.”

“And it’s absolutely debilitating for them, their families, their communities,” he added.

RFK Jr. went on to talk about the massive economic cost of autism, in addition to its emotional toll.

“For our country, just the pure economic cost of autism is, will be by 2035, $1 trillion a year. That’s just the beginning because many of these kids are aging out and their parents worry every day. And I’m talking about people with severe autism, what’s called profound autism, which is about, which is about 26 percent of the total people who are diagnosed with autism,” he said. 

“Those families, those children are nonverbal, they’re non-toilet trained. They have all the stereotypical features of autism, head-banging, toe-walking, stimming, agonizing gut pain and head-banging. Those kids are kids that will not hold jobs. And many kids with autism, many of the higher functioning autism actually can, have tremendous potential to live independently, to get jobs, take care of themselves,” he continued. 

Secretary Kennedy also spoke about new research he has commissioned to identify the real causes of autism. He said he believes the focus on genetic causes is misguided, and that environmental factors need to be addressed.

“The problem is that NIH and CDC have blocked all the studies that would determine the environmental exposure. So we don’t know. And instead they’ve studied genes and genes contribute to autism, but they, you know, like I said, you need an environmental toxin. And that’s what we’re, that’s what we are now going to look for,” Kennedy said.

“And we’re going to identify it and using AI [artificial intelligence] and the best scientific protocols, all of it, very transparent. We’re deploying 15 teams to look at all the potential exposures and that could be mold. It could be food additives. It could be pesticides. It could be vaccines. It could be ultrasound.” 

Earlier last week, RFK Jr. was on the receiving end of sharp criticism for comments he made at a press conference, when he said “autism destroys families.”

Among those winging blows at Secretary Kennedy was Gwen Walz, wife of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

​​“This is deeply upsetting, especially coming from our nation’s highest-ranking health official,” Gwen Walz said in a post Thursday on X.

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