One of the most challenging things for me throughout my time in the medical field has been watching children become neurologically damaged by vaccines, and the widespread blindness of the medical profession to this issue. Unfortunately, because so much money has been spent to engineer the societal belief that vaccines do not cause autism, anyone who asserts otherwise is immediately subject to widespread ridicule, to the point it’s mostly a lost cause to convince medical professionals vaccines aren’t always safe. Sadly, in many cases, the only thing that can open their eyes is their own child being severely injured.
Since one of the central reasons the autism-vaccine link has always been dismissed is that there’s no established mechanism to explain how vaccines could cause autism, this article will focus on that question and why there has been so much resistance to understanding what is behind the autism epidemic.
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Note: this is a significantly revised and updated version of a previously published article.
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I believe much of the blindness to the toxicity of vaccines was a result of Clinton’s 1997 decision to have the FTC allow direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers. There are a lot of issues with this practice (the USA and New Zealand are essentially the only countries that allow it), and one effect it had was putting financial pressure on networks not to air stories critical of pharmaceuticals once they had become dependent on their advertising revenue.
Prior to this shift, news programs that were critical of vaccination would periodically be aired and were pivotal in awakening the public to the dangers of vaccination. Consider, for example, this 1978 program that was aired about a rushed experimental vaccine that ended up injuring a significant number of participants (and never would be aired today).
Note: while severe reactions (Guillain-Barré Syndrome) officially occurred in 1 in 100,000 people, when the vaccine came out, we saw numerous people it happened to, so I am relatively sure that figure greatly understates the actual harm.
In contrast, despite millions of people being severely injured or killed by the COVID vaccines and immense public interest in the topic, there was virtually no reporting in the mass media about the harms the vaccines were causing. Sadly, that is just one of many illustrations of how corrosive pharmaceutical advertising dollars are. For example:
•RFK Jr. was close friends with the chairman and CEO of Fox News. RFK Jr. has repeatedly shared that Ailes was very supportive of RFK Jr. producing a segment on the dangers of mercury in vaccines, but ultimately was forced to scrap the production because the majority of Fox’s advertisements came from the pharmaceutical industry (e.g., 17-18 of the 22 advertisements on a typical nightly news show).
•The only Fox News host who actively spoke out against the COVID vaccines was Tucker Carlson (as he was able to leverage his position as the most popular news anchor in America to air his opinions), but was fired immediately after he aired a scathing critique of how our media had sold out the American people for Pfizer and Moderna.”
Andrew Wakefield
Whenever the subject of vaccination and autism is raised (particularly within medical circles), you will immediately be told (often in a condescending manner) some variant of the following:
Andrew Wakefield was a dishonest doctor who was bribed by lawyers to torture children and publish a fraudulent and deeply flawed study that falsely linked vaccines to autism. His abhorrent actions deeply violated the profound trust we place in scientists, and tricked people into believing vaccines cause autism. Remarkably, even though his study has been totally discredited and he lost his medical license for the gross misconduct he committed, his fraudulent study cemented the lie that vaccines cause autism, and despite all the data we publish, nothing can undo the profound damage Wakefield did to science so nothing like this must ever happen again.
While most things do not get under my skin, this has become because of how nauseating it is to hear it repeatedly. This, in turn, touches on a key point. One of the most common ways the corporate propaganda apparatus (known as the Public Relations or PR industry) persuades the public is by sculpting the narrative best suited for swaying public opinion and then blasting it on every media platform while any opposing viewpoint is forbidden from being aired. These lies then become entrenched and everyone starts to independently repeat them as though the idea were their own (e.g., we witness one of the most over-the-top PR campaigns in history to sell the COVID-19 vaccines and before long much of the populace was zealously espousing its nonsensical talking points).
Since Wakefield’s study was published in 1998 (a year after pharmaceutical television advertising became permissible), it was able to initially gain immense traction in the press (as the media had not yet been bought out), but a few years later, when that monopoly had established itself, it was instead debunked on every platform.
Note: Sharyl Attkinson, a popular national news anchor for CBS and an Emmy-Award winning journalist shared that in the early 2000s, the pharmaceutical industry, feeling the pressure negative coverage of disastrous vaccination programs was creating for them, lobbied to prevent future negative coverage, and after this happened, it became impossible for her to air well produced segments which were critical of any vaccine initiative
In my eyes, there are three critical points to understand from Wakefield’s experience.
First, it cemented the lie that no one had ever thought to associate vaccination with brain injuries prior to Wakefield’s study (and hence that all subsequent associations were a product of Wakefield tricking them into seeing a connection that wasn’t there). As the 1982 news program shows, this is clearly not true and likewise the reason Wakefield did the study was because he was approached by parents who already thought vaccines caused their child’s autism.
More importantly, if you read through the early medical literature (prior to vaccine injuries becoming a taboo subject), many doctors over the decades had reported brain damage and characteristic neurological injuries (e.g., cranial nerve palsies) following vaccination that mirror what we see in vaccine-injured children now—many of which can be found within this excellent book by an eminent bacteriologist that summarized that early (forgotten) literature.
Second, it gave a very clear warning to every academic journal and researcher to never consider publishing anything that was critical of vaccination (as otherwise they would be raked over the coals for decades by the entire media apparatus like Wakefield was). This worked as intended (e.g., many scientists have confided to public figures that they know that autism is linked to vaccination but cannot publicly study it) and since Wakefield’s study, virtually no studies have been conducted on vaccine injuries, and of those that were, none could ever be published in a “reputable” journal. Likewise, it cemented the lie the few doctored studies that get through are immediately removed (whereas for example, trial participants and clinical investigators for the HPV and COVID vaccines repeatedly provided proof fraudulent data was published but the academic journals never even issues a correction).
Note: Wakefield’s study was published in one of the world’s top medical journals (The Lancet). Given how controversial the subject was, it was virtually guaranteed that an exhaustive peer review was conducted of his findings and that The Lancet chose to publish the study not because “Wakefield tricked them” but rather because his data was valid and did not claim anything more than what his data clearly showed.
Third, Wakefield determined a process that appeared to be contributing to the disease process in autism and that many have since found was effective in addressing the condition. However, rather than being considered, it was blackballed and forgotten.
Do Vaccines Cause Autism?
One of the primary purposes of propaganda campaigns is to defend things that are logically indefensible, and since there are a limited number of ways to pull that off, you will gradually begin to see the ways this is accomplished. This in turn is why many were able to see through the marketing campaign used to sell the COVID vaccines, and more importantly, why so many lost their trust in the childhood vaccines they had never questioned before.
For example, if you look at the vaccine-and-autism question, a few major issues emerge:
•While many parents have observed their healthy children suddenly regress and become severely impaired immediately after a vaccine (with the regression occurring in a characteristic and replicable manner), to my knowledge, there are no reported cases of rapid autistic regressions happening immediately prior to a vaccination.
I have met a fair share of people with identical experiences to the parents in this audience.
I suspect that in the near future we will see the same for those with COVID-19 injuries, and like before, almost everyone will deny they exist. pic.twitter.com/o9EtKcTgCs
— A Midwestern Doctor (@MidwesternDoc) December 26, 2022
In contrast, the most common argument used to dismiss a link between vaccines and autism is that “autism tends to emerge at the same age vaccines are given, so the association parents perceive is coincidental, which Andrew Wakefield tricked them into seeing.” If this were indeed true, there would be a roughly even distribution of autism cases before and after vaccination rather than what we actually observe.
2. Over the past 50 years, there has been an exponential increase in the rates of autism (e.g., it’s gone from affecting 1 in 10,000 children to 1 in 31). This rapid increase suggests something is causing it, and more importantly, that it is absolutely urgent for us to figure out what that something is as each autism case is immensely costly to society. This is not sustainable once it starts to affect a significant number of children. However, rather than identify that cause, the scientific community, for decades, has simply said “we need more research” to figure out what it is (while simultaneously declaring it is definitely not vaccines despite vaccines being by far the most probable culprit).”
Note: while I believe the strongest case can be made for vaccines causing the autism epidemic, there are a few other factors (e.g., excessive prenatal ultrasounds) that data suggest may also play a contributing role.”
3. The most common explanation given for the explosion in autism is that “it’s genetic,” and as the years go by and billions are spent on autism research, more and more genes are identified that are associated with autism. This train of thought, however, ignores:
•Despite all that research, the “autism gene” has never been found.
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•If autism suddenly became over 100 times more common in 1-2 generations, it is impossible that this could have been due to a genetic shift.
•In addition to this rapid change arguing for an environmental toxin (rather than genetics) causing the autism epidemic, many of the genes “linked to autism” share the common thread of increasing one’s sensitivity to environmental toxins.
Note: Peter Hotez is often used as a media attack dog to discredit anyone linking vaccines to autism and frequently cites his book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” as an authoritative debunking of any links between the two. I read Hotez’s book and noticed that he never proved his claim (rather, he just said it didn’t make sense to him how autism could be anything except genetic) and described a classic sign of vaccine encephalitis (a continual, very loud, and piercing cry) prior to his daughter’s autistic regression.
4. While many studies are published debunking the link between vaccines and autism, they never directly assess the question. Independent studies (whose validity is always questioned) continually find an indisputable link between the two (along with vaccination being linked to many other chronic illnesses). A schism like this would argue for a robust trial to settle the question (e.g., a randomized one that compared a group of vaccinated and unvaccinated children from birth), but each time that is proposed, it’s shot down because “it’s not ethical to withhold lifesaving vaccines from children” when the next best alternative is proposed (access to the CDC’s database that compared vaccinated children to unvaccinated children), for some reason, that too is always shot down.
Note: in one instance, a CDC whistleblower came forward and showed that after the CDC conducted a study to disprove the link between autism and vaccines, when they discovered it actually caused autism, the study was doctored to conceal this.
All of this hence suggests vaccines are strongly linked to autism and helps to explain why both the media and much of the Democratic leadership went hysterical after RFK Jr. stated he planned to conduct robust studies to determine what was actually causing the autism epidemic.
Note: For those interested in learning more about how vaccines cause autism, I would strongly recommend reading Steve Kirsch’s article. He does a good job of concisely presenting some of the most compelling evidence (e.g., specific cases where vaccination was irrefutably linked to autism and the hundreds of papers on the subject).
