Tag: autism

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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“The Autism Epidemic Is Running Rampant” – RFK Jr Addresses Latest CDC Report Showing 1-In-20 Boys Diagnosed

A report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 15 showed that 1 in 31 children in America has autism.

The figures, which mark another jump in a long line of increases, stem from the CDC’s latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The report prompted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to say that “the autism epidemic is running rampant.”

“That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992,” Kennedy said in an April 15 statement.

“Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”

“We need to move away from this ideology that the prevalence of autism increases are simply from better diagnosis, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria,” RFK Jr began his address this morning.

“This epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media, and it’s based on an industry canard.” 

“There are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures.” 

“Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid.” 

“They weren’t missing all these cases.”

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Fired FDA Chief Is Now Out Trashing RFK Jr. and his Autism Study on the Fake News – Big Pharma Has Most to Lose

Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official and a key figure in the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, was ousted from his post earlier this month.

​Dr. Peter Marks is an American hematologist-oncologist who has served as the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2016.

As CBER director, Marks was responsible for reviewing and providing advice during product development, evaluating applications, and making approval decisions based on safety and effectiveness data.

He oversaw the FDA’s vaccine programs and played a pivotal part in the rapid development and approval of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines under Operation Warp Speed during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Sources close to the matter told the Wall Street Journal that Marks submitted his resignation on Friday after a blunt ultimatum from a Health and Human Services (HHS) official: step down voluntarily or face termination.

His exit, effective April 5, marks yet another victory for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive push to purge the federal health apparatus of what he calls entrenched bureaucrats peddling “misinformation and lies.”

It was very telling that Big Pharma stocks plunged following his resignation.

Shares of vaccine makers Moderna and Novavax, along with several other biotech companies, plunged following his resignation.

Now, Marks is out hitting the Sunday shows and attacking Robert Kennedy Jr.  It makes you wonder who is behind this?

The Disgraced former FDA official is ALREADY defending Big Pharma from RFK Jr’s groundbreaking study on autism.

This is how committed the Big Money players are with keeping the vaccines flowing no matter how many Americans will be injured or killed.

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Yet Another Study Links Water Fluoridation to Developmental Issues in Kids

Children exposed to fluoridated water before the age of ten have a higher risk of a number of serious neurodevelopmental issues, a new study suggests.

The paper, published in BMC Pediatrics, shows that autism-spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, intellectual disability and other delays in development were all visible at higher rates among children exposed to fluoridated water before their tenth birthday.

The researchers behind the study, David and Mark Geier, are warning that the risks of water fluoridation must be carefully reassessed.

They analyzed data from the Independent Healthcare Research Database, taken from de-identified healthcare records from the Florida Medicaid System during the period 1990-2012.

Since some counties in Florida have municipal fluoridation and others don’t, they were able to compare the health of children exposed to water fluoridation for their whole lives—over 25,000 children—with the health of around 2,500 children who weren’t.

The researchers examined fluoride exposure and health outcomes during the first year and the first ten years of life.

The results showed that in the first year of life, there was a statistically significant decrease in the risk of tooth decay with exposure to fluoridated water, as well as a statistically significant increase in the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders.

The ten-year results were much more striking. After ten years of fluoride exposure, the risk of tooth decay was nearly four times lower in exposed children, but the children had a significantly higher risk of developmental disorders—nearly seven times greater for autism and two times greater for intellectual disability, most notably.

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Elon Musk Fires Back After SNL Mocks Tesla and Musk’s Autism in Tasteless Sketch

Tesla owners across the country are being targeted—cars vandalized, keyed, painted with swastikas, or even set ablaze. According to reports, “Over eighty reports of Tesla vandalism have been filed since January.”

But instead of condemning the attacks or calling out the criminals, the cast of Saturday Night Live decided to point the finger at Elon Musk.

In the latest sketch, Mike Myers played a parody version of Musk and opened with this line:

“Recently, our dealerships have been the target of many attacks. And suddenly no one likes Tesla cars. So I asked myself why? And then I answered myself: ‘Because of me.’”

Then, Parody Musk introduced Tesla Model V, “the first electric car in history to be fully self-vandalizing.”

The fake ad included features like:

• Self-smashing headlights

• Self-slashing tires

• AI-powered graffiti

“You can choose from [graffiti] penises or swastikas, or my favorite, swastikas made out of penises,” Parody Musk announced.

Myers’ impression also mocked Musk’s autistic traits. This was something many viewers immediately called out as mean-spirited and out of line.

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