Tag: autism

An Evidence-Driven Critique of the Allegedly Reassuring Study on Aluminum-Adjuvanted Vaccines

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published a sharp and comprehensive critique of the recent study by Andersson et al., which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study made headlines for claiming that aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines administered in early childhood are not associated with increased risks of autoimmune, allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

Kennedy did not mince words. He described the study as “so deeply flawed it functions not as science but as a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry.” Among the many questionable features he identified, one stood out to me in particular. Kennedy wrote:

“These sleights of hand magnify the potential for allowing the authors to reach their absurd suggestion that higher aluminum exposure is somehow protective against asthma, allergies, and neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.”

This sentence stopped me in my tracks because I had noticed the exact same thing. While Kennedy voiced this concern from the standpoint of public health advocacy, I approached the same issue from an academic and data-driven perspective. What I found not only aligns with his observation but adds further empirical grounding to it. In fact, this very point was at the heart of a formal comment I submitted to the Annals of Internal Medicine. The authors of the study responded — but, in my view, did not adequately address the core contradiction. In this short article, I lay out the full story, supported by the data, to show why this implausible pattern of protective effects cannot be ignored.

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Calls Grow For Journal To Retract Danish Study After Corrected Data Show Link Between Aluminum And Vaccines

The authors of a recent Danish study widely reported on by mainstream media claimed they found no link between the aluminum in vaccines and autism.

However, corrected data added after the study’s original July 15 publication date show the authors got it wrong — in fact, the data in the study of 1.2 million children clearly indicate a link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, according to scientists with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) who reviewed the study and the corrected data.

On July 17, the Annals of Internal Medicine, which published the Danish study, added a disclaimer stating that it “included an incorrect version of the Supplementary Material at the time of initial publication.”

The updated materials are available with the link to the study at “Correction: Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood.”

CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski broke the news of the buried autism link on Monday’s episode of “Good Morning, CHD.” Today, Jablonowski told The Defender:

“According to the corrected data, nearly 10 (9.7) of every 10,000 children who were vaccinated with a higher dose of aluminum (compared to a moderate dose) developed a neurodevelopmental disorder — mostly autism — between ages 2 and 5.”

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Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say

Mainstream media widely promoted a new study by Danish researchers that found no link between aluminum in vaccines and 50 negative health outcomes, including autism, asthma and autoimmune disorders.

However, critics told The Defender the study used flawed methodology and “statistical tricks” that muddied the findings.

The authors published their report on July 15 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. On July 14, even before the study went live, mainstream and health industry media, including NBC News and STAT News, publicly announced the results.

Chris Exley, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of aluminum exposure, and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said that in order to determine if aluminum exposure is linked to health conditions, the researchers should have compared children with no aluminum exposure to children with aluminum exposure.

But that’s not what the Danish scientists did. Instead, they compared children who received vaccines containing aluminum to children who received vaccines with slightly less aluminum.

Not only that, but there was only a one-milligram difference between the amount of aluminum in the vaccine doses received by the children in one of the groups compared to those in another group. Comparing children with similar aluminum levels rather than comparing children with low levels of aluminum to children with high levels of the metal further muddled the findings, Hooker said.

The researchers examined national vaccination records of about 1.2 million children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018 and tracked the rates of 50 chronic health conditions.

Using statistical analyses, the authors concluded there was no link between aluminum content in vaccines and increased risk of developing autism, autoimmune diseases, asthma or allergic conditions, including food allergies and hay fever.

Anders Hviid, a professor and department head of epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut and lead study author, told MedPage Today, the results “provide robust evidence supporting the safety of childhood vaccines.”

“This is evidence that parents, clinicians, and public health officials need to make the best choices for the health of our children,” Hviid said.

In a press release, Hviid called the results “reassuring” and said large studies like his are important in “an era marked by widespread misinformation about vaccines.”

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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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