Why the Claim ‘Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism’ Is Disinformation

Introduction

“Vaccines do not cause autism.” That is what we are continually told by government health officials, the mainstream media, and the pharma-centric medical establishment. It is the official position of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The idea that vaccines can cause autism is just misinformation spread by “anti-vaxxers”, we are told; it is a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by scientific research.

But has it?

Many parents take offense at the derogatory label “anti-vaxxer” being slung at them since they did vaccinate their children only to witness them being injured and, in some cases, developmentally regressing into autism. The concern that many parents have today is that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s routine childhood schedule can contribute to the development of autism in children with a genetic or environmentally caused susceptibility.

To state that “vaccines do not cause autism” is to claim that scientific research has falsified that hypothesis. But that is simply untrue. It is biologically plausible and has not been falsified by the scientific research conducted to date. This can be demonstrated by examining the CDC’s own cited sources.

The mainstream media, for their part, uncritically parrot the official position of the so-called “public health” establishment, thus serving to propagate official disinformation under the false pretext of combatting “misinformation” from “anti-vaxxers”.

One illustrative example of this that I’ve recently encountered is a CNET article by science editor Jackson Ryan titled “Meta Trained an AI on 48M Science Papers. It Was Shut Down After 2 Days”. The article, published on November 20, 2022, is about a search engine for the scientific literature built by Meta (formerly Facebook) that uses artificial intelligence to “summarize areas of research, solve math problems and write scientific code.” A demo launch of the tool, called Galactica, was deemed a failure due to it spewing gibberish answers to questions. To illustrate, CNET provides the following example:

Almost as soon as it hit the web, users questioned Galactica with all sorts of hardball scientific questions. One user asked “Do vaccines cause autism?” Galactica responded with a garbled, nonsensical response: “To explain, the answer is no. Vaccines do not cause autism. The answer is yes. Vaccines do cause autism. The answer is no.” (For the record, vaccines don’t cause autism.)

Ryan thus claims that studies have falsified the hypothesis. But is that so? He provides four sources to support that contention, so we can simply click those links to examine the sources and see if we find any studies that were actually designed to test the hypothesis. The result of this exercise illuminates how the claim that the hypothesis has been falsified is government-sanctioned disinformation propagated for the purpose of manufacturing consent for the CDC’s policy aim of achieving high vaccine uptake.

Mayo Clinic Mischaracterizes the Science

The first source cited by CNET is an article from Mayo Clinic published on March 24, 2022, titled “Link between autism and vaccination debunked”. That article likewise states, “Vaccines do not cause autism.” To support that statement, the article says:

In April 2015, JAMA published the largest study to date, analyzing the health records of over 95,000 children. About 2,000 of those children were classified at risk for autism because they had a sibling already diagnosed with autism. The study confirmed that the MMR vaccine did not increase the risk for autism spectrum disorder [ASD].

However, that characterization of the study’s findings is false. Notably, Mayo Clinic doesn’t provide a link to the study for readers to verify this characterization of its findings for themselves. Neither the name of the study nor any of its authors are provided, which would make the task of locating the study more difficult for any readers not already familiar with it. No further information is provided by Mayo Clinic about the study’s methodology or its findings.

I happened to know the study being referred to, however, having familiarized myself with it years ago after it had made the rounds in the mainstream media, who similarly mischaracterized it as a study showing that vaccines do not cause autism even in genetically susceptible children.

The JAMA study was conducted by Anjali Jain et al. and titled “Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With Older Siblings With and Without Autism”. It is true that the authors of the study concluded that “receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with increased risk of ASD, regardless of whether older siblings had ASD”; the authors did state that their findings “indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD.” (Emphasis added.)

The first point to be made is that a study looking only at the MMR vaccine cannot possibly support Mayo Clinic’s claim that “vaccines”, plural, do not cause autism. The study simply was not designed to test the hypothesis that vaccinating according to the CDC’s schedule increases the risk of autism in susceptible subpopulations of children.

Furthermore, the conclusion that the MMR vaccine is not associated with an increased risk of autism among genetically susceptible children does not logically follow from their findings. The authors’ conclusion is a non sequitur fallacy because, in fact, their study identified a selection bias sometimes referred to as a “healthy user bias”.

As the authors acknowledged, “As seen in our data and other studies, MMR immunization is lower in children with older siblings with ASD.” (Emphasis added.) Parents of older siblings diagnosed with autism, they rightly reasoned, “would be especially attentive to developmental delays in their younger children and decide to forestall immunization.”

The conclusion that logically follows from their findings, therefore, is not that receipt of the MMR vaccine does not increase the risk of genetically susceptible children developing autism but that children with an older sibling with autism are less likely to receive the MMR vaccine due to parental vigilance.

The true significance of this study was this insight that it provided into parental decision making. Parents whose first child received the MMR vaccine and who was subsequently diagnosed with autism were less likely to do the MMR vaccine with their second child. Likewise, parents of children who showed early signs of developmental delays might be less likely to vaccinate those children with the MMR vaccine.

The result is that children who are at higher risk of autism become pooled into the MMR-unvaccinated cohort, whereas children at lower risk of autism get pooled into the MMR-vaccinated cohort.

Consequently, the finding of no increased risk among children with an older sibling with autism can be explained by this healthy user bias, which is consistent with the hypothesis that vaccines can contribute to the development of autism in genetically susceptible children.

Mayo Clinic’s characterization of this study as having “debunked” the hypothesis is therefore false. The Jain et al. study simply does not falsify the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine can contribute to the development of autism in genetically susceptible children, much less that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s full schedule can do so.

Far from settling the matter, what this study contributed to our knowledge is that further studies are needed that are designed to carefully control for the identified selection bias.

Mayo Clinic is consequently spreading government-sanctioned disinformation by claiming that this study “debunked” the hypothesis that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s schedule increases the risk of autism in genetically susceptible children.

NAS Mischaracterizes the Science

The second source that Ryan cites in his CNET article is a webpage of the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) similarly claiming that “Vaccines do not cause autism”. To support that claim, the NAS states:

Over the past two decades, many scientists have done large, rigorous studies to find out if any aspect of vaccines could cause autism. For example, scientists compared vaccinated children who do and do not have autism, and compared children who have and have not gotten vaccines. Some studies focus on specific vaccine ingredients, such as preservatives like thimerosal or aluminum-containing adjuvants. Others focus on the possible effects of getting multiple vaccines in a short period of time.

None of these studies show any links between vaccines and autism.

Notice, however, what the NAS does not say. There is no mention of any study designed to test the hypothesis that vaccinating according to the CDC’s schedule increases the risk of autism among susceptible subpopulations of children. The simple explanation for that omission is that no such studies exist.

Instead, the NAS cites only studies looking at various “aspects” of vaccines, where each aspect was examined in isolation from all the other aspects of adhering to the CDC’s schedule.

Six sources are cited by the NAS to support its claim that studies have falsified the hypothesis.

The first link is to a page on the website HealthyChildren.org.

The second is to a study in Denmark by Anders Hviid et al. published in Annals of Internal Medicine in March 2019, titled “Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study”.

The third is a page on the CDC’s website titled “Thimerosal FAQs”, which claims that the form of mercury used as a preservative in vaccines is “safe”.

The fourth is another page on the CDC’s website titled “Adjuvants and Vaccines”, which claims that the aluminum used in vaccines as an adjuvant is “safe”.

The fifth is a 2013 review by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a suborganization of the NAS, titled “The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies”.

The sixth source is a 2002 IOM review titled “Immunization Safety Review: Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction”, which does not address the question of whether vaccines cause autism and so is irrelevant for our purpose here. It suffices to point out that this source does not support the major claim for which it is cited.

The other five sources also fail to support the claim made on the NAS webpage that studies have falsified the hypothesis that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in children with a genetic or environmentally caused susceptibility.

AAP Mischaracterizes the Science

The first link on the NAS webpage is to a page at HealthyChildren.org, which is a website of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a trade organization that shares responsibility for establishing the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule as “standard of care” in pediatric practices throughout the United States, and which organization therefore has an inherent conflict of interest. The AAP naturally has an incentive to selectively present information that is supportive of its recommendations while concealing from the public scientific research that calls its policies into question.

An illuminating illustration of this occurred in 2017, when the AAP issued a press release stating that the hypothesis that vaccines can cause autism had been “disproven by a robust body of medical literature”. Curious what robust body of literature the organization was referring to, I contacted the AAP to ask it to provide supporting evidence for its claim. I specifically requested any studies that considered the possibility of genetically susceptible subpopulations of children. In response, the AAP provided me with the link to that very same webpage on their HealthyChildren.org site.

I observed that none of the studies listed on that page had considered the possibility of some children being genetically predisposed to vaccine injury manifesting as symptoms of autism. So, I contacted the AAP again to point this out. I welcomed the organization to correct me if I was wrong about that observation and to pinpoint any studies that had actually been designed to test the hypothesis that the AAP was claiming to have been falsified, but the AAP refused to do so.

I was instead told that the AAP had already provided everything it was going to provide, and that they were not going to provide me with any additional information.

A Study Designed to Find No Association

That webpage of the AAP’s has since been updated, but it remains true that no studies are provided that were designed to test the hypothesis that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in children with a genetic or environmentally caused susceptibility.

For example, the first source cited on the page at this time is a May 2021 review by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), which is the parent agency of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Again, HHS has an obvious conflict of interest in that it bears responsibility for the health of the childhood population by virtue of its function in the vaccine industry. The government has an incentive to fund or conduct studies that support its policies while ignoring scientific findings that call those policies into question.

Particularly given the inherent conflict of interest of the source, the review is revealing. It shows that there have been no randomized controlled trials to test the hypothesis, but it nevertheless asserts that the strength of evidence from observational studies is “high” that the MMR vaccine is not associated with an increased risk of autism.

The reason why randomized controlled trials are considered to be the “gold standard” and higher quality evidence than observational studies is that they give researchers a greater ability to test one specific variable while controlling for other factors that might influence outcomes.

Observational studies are inherently prone to selection bias. We all know that “correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation”, which is because an observed association could be due to unforeseen confounding factors.

When an outcome is attributed to an association where none exists, it is known as a “Type I error”, a false positive result. There is also a “Type II error”, or a false negative, whereby researchers fail to find an association that does exist.

As explained in the Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, “If a type II error has been committed and that particular line of inquiry is not pursued further, the scientific community may miss valuable information.”

Curiously, whenever an observational study finds an association between vaccination and an adverse outcome, we are reminded that correlation does not equal causation; yet, whenever an observational study finds no association, it is upheld as proof that vaccines are “safe and effective”. Logically, though, if observational studies are by their very nature insufficient evidence to prove a causal association, neither can they disprove a causal association.

To support its assessment of the evidence from observational studies as “high”, the AHRQ review cites only two studies that even considered the possibility of genetic predisposition to vaccine injury manifesting as symptoms of autism.

The first of those is the Jain et al. study mischaracterized by Mayo Clinic, which study looked only at the MMR vaccine and identified the confounding factor of differing rates of vaccination among children with or without an older sibling with autism. Again, the reasonable conclusion to draw from that study’s findings is that there is a need for further studies that control for this healthy user bias, yet we can see how the authors themselves were content to accept the risk that they had committed a Type II error by leaping fallaciously to the conclusion that their findings were evidence of no association.

The second of the two studies, by Anders Hviid et al., was conducted in Denmark, where the government recommends a different vaccine schedule than the one recommended by the CDC here in the United States. Published in Annals of Internal Medicine in March 2019, the study is titled “Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study”.

That study was funded by the Danish Ministry of Health, which of course has an interest in producing studies supportive of its policies, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which owns a holding company that is the majority shareholder of Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical corporation whose products include a “quaternary ammonium compound” utilized in the manufacture of vaccines. The study’s authors are also associated with the Statens Serum Institut, which is involved in vaccine development and operates under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Health, bearing responsibility for the purchase and supply of vaccines for the Danish childhood vaccination program.

While purporting to be a study testing the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine can cause autism in genetically susceptible children, in fact, the authors excluded children who had any one of a number of genetic conditions that placed them at an increased risk of autism. Thus, the authors fallaciously treated these children’s genetic condition as a competing hypothesis for the development of autism rather than as a potential risk factor for vaccine injury.

Following the lead of Jain et al., the researchers limited their definition of “genetic predisposition” to having a sibling with autism, but they did not control for possible healthy user bias as identified in that prior study.

They stated in their paper that there were “no appreciable difference in vaccine uptake according to . . . autism history in siblings”, but that statement appears to be contradicted by their own data.

For example, their data show that 4.8 percent of children among the general study population were MMR-unvaccinated compared to 9.4 percent among the subpopulation of children with an autistic sibling. Hence, the percentage of genetically susceptible children who did not receive the MMR vaccine was nearly double that of the general study population.

Additionally, their data show that 0.12 percent of MMR-vaccinated children had an autistic sibling compared to 0.25 percent of MMR-unvaccinated children. Hence, the percentage of children who were considered genetically susceptible and who remained unvaccinated was likewise twice that of those who received the vaccine.

Also, 5.16 percent of children without siblings and 5.31 percent of children who had siblings without autism were MMR-unvaccinated, which compares to 9.43 percent among children considered genetically susceptible. Hence, looked at in this way, too, children considered to have genetic susceptibility were considerably more likely to not receive the MMR vaccine.

Moreover, the researchers considered environmental risk factors and ranked children according to “very low”, “low”, “moderate”, or “high” risk. The rate of children skipping the shot was 3.97 percent among those at very low risk, 4.40 percent among those at low risk, 5.44 percent among those at moderate risk, and 6.94 percent among those at high risk. These data, too, thus show that the likelihood of children receiving the MMR vaccine decreased with increased risk.

Consequently, when the authors state that there was “no appreciable difference” in vaccine uptake between the general population and those considered at high risk, it is unclear what data they are referring to. The data they do present contradicts that assertion, indicating healthy user bias.

Citing Jain et al., the authors of the Danish study acknowledged the earlier finding of “lower MMR uptake rates in children with affected siblings”, but the only significance they attributed to this was to say that it was “a potentially important public health issue with increasing autism prevalence”. Thus, they appeared to be more concerned about increasing numbers of children not receiving the MMR vaccine than about addressing the healthy user bias identified by the Jain et al. study.

In fact, they acknowledge that their findings could be biased in favor of finding no association if early onset of symptoms “results in avoidance of vaccination”, but they curiously did not acknowledge that their findings would be likewise biased if having an older sibling with autism results in avoidance of vaccination.

They also acknowledged that their conclusion that MMR vaccination was “unlikely” to increase the risk of being diagnosed with autism was dependent on the assumption that their findings were “unbiased”.

Since Hviid et al. were well aware of the findings of Jain et al., they must have anticipated that if they conducted a study excluding children precisely because they had a genetic condition placing them at higher risk and failing to control for the tendency of parents to skip the MMR vaccine for later-born children who had an autistic older sibling, due to the consequent pooling of children at lower risk for autism among the MMR-vaccinated cohort, the result would be a finding of no association between the vaccine and autism risk.

In other words, the study authors must have been cognizant of how their methodology biased their study away from risking a Type I error in favor of a Type II error, and yet they were content to conclude that their findings were evidence of no association “assuming unbiased results.”

This simply illustrates how studies can be designed to find no association where one plausibly exists. This evident intent is explainable by the conflicts of interests of the study authors and funders and a desire to produce data supporting the Danish government’s recommended vaccine schedule.

CDC Mischaracterizes the Science on Aluminum Toxicity

As noted, the fourth source cited on the NAS webpage cited in turn by CNET is a page on the CDC’s website about the use of aluminum in some vaccines as an “adjuvant”, or a substance eliciting a more inflammatory immune response and thus inducing a higher level of circulating antibodies.

The CDC’s “Adjuvants and Vaccines” page claims that “the amount of aluminum exposure in people who follow the recommended vaccine schedule is low and is not readily absorbed by the body.”

To support that claim, the CDC cites an FDA study by Robert J. Mitkus et al. published in the journal Vaccine in 2011. However, to cite that study as proof that it is “safe” to inject infants with the cumulative levels of aluminum that children are exposed to by the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule is tantamount to scientific fraud.

For a detailed explanation of how the CDC’s claim that it is “safe” to inject children with aluminum is scientifically fraudulent, see my article “How the CDC Lies about the Safety of Aluminum in Vaccines”.

To briefly summarize, the CDC’s conclusion is premised on the FDA’s use of a “minimal risk level” of aluminum exposure that had already been falsified by other research showing that the FDA’s “safe” limit is at least several times too high. That “safe” level of aluminum was also based on a study examining ingestion of a soluble form of aluminum in adult mice.

Furthermore, the FDA researchers considered only the amount of aluminum from vaccines that dissolves and is absorbed into the blood as contributing to the body burden of aluminum toxicity, ignoring the particulate aluminum that remains elsewhere in the body, including the amount of aluminum that is transported to and admittedly accumulates in the brain.

As noted by Grant McFarland et al. in a study published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology in December 2019, the government’s claim that the cumulative exposure from vaccines is “safe” rests on studies of aluminum levels in the blood, which “offers little useful information to toxicology” because blood levels are not a good indicator of the amount of aluminum retained in the tissues and organs. “Thus, rapid serum or blood clearance rates can be misleadingly reassuring when considering chronic or even acute toxicity of aluminum injected with vaccines.”

They cited prior research showing that, contrary to popular claims that fail to take into consideration the fact that only a fraction of a percent of ingested aluminum is absorbed into the body compared to 100 percent of injected aluminum, “human infants have higher exposure to aluminum from vaccination than from food, water, and formula.” Their own calculations “confirm that for the CDC schedule, infants up to six months of life receive most of their metabolically available aluminum from vaccines.”

Under federal regulations, in the absence of data “demonstrating that the amount of aluminum used is safe and necessary to produce the intended effect”, and as determined by analysis of the vaccine by assay, there is a legal prohibition against including more than 850 micrograms of aluminum per dose. However, there is apparently no regulation prohibiting administration of multiple aluminum-containing doses at once.

Furthermore, the FDA’s “safe” limit was determined for adult body weight based on oral doses in mice. The authors therefore corrected the “safe” limit for infant body weight, as previously calculated in a separate study published in April 2018, and applied the adjusted limit to the CDC’s schedule. The result was that:

None of the individual vaccines violates the guidance of a maximum of 850 μg of aluminum for an adult. However, because of multiple vaccines typically given together at 2, 4, and 6 months, the CDC schedule violates this limit even assuming an adult weight. Adjusting the safe dose limit based on a child’s weight at these ages therefore results in doses that far exceed the estimated safe limit of acute toxicity.

Their calculations showed that following the CDC’s schedule, “a child will be over the safe level of aluminum in the body for 149 days from birth to 7 months, constituting about 70% of days in this period. This points to chronic toxicity.” This data was presented in the following graph comparing the CDC’s schedule as of 2019 with two alternative schedules characterized by reduced aluminum exposure.

CDC Mischaracterizes the Science on Mercury Toxicity

The third source cited by the NAS webpage, which was again the second of the three sources cited by CNET, is a page on the CDC’s website titled “Thimerosal FAQs”, which claims that the form of mercury used as a preservative in vaccines is “safe”. This brings us also to the third source Ryan cites in his CNET article, which is another page on the CDC’s website similarly claiming that “Vaccines do not cause autism.” This page in turn links to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.

The CDC asserts that “Research shows that thimerosal does not cause ASD [autism spectrum disorder].” To support that claim, the CDC cites a 2004 review by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) titled “Immunization Safety Review: Vaccines and Autism”, which concluded that “the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.”

Thimerosal is a preservative that is about half ethylmercury by weight. It was previously used in numerous childhood vaccines but was withdrawn from most vaccines around the turn of the century due to concerns about its neurotoxicity. It continues to be used in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccines, which are recommended by the CDC for everyone aged six months and up, including pregnant women.

Turning to the primary source, we can see once again how the CDC mischaracterizes the evidence by taking the IOM’s conclusion out of context.

Notably, the CDC does not inform that the 2004 IOM review also acknowledged that “the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines could be associated with neurodevelopmental disorders” is “biologically plausible” and that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between thimerosal exposures from childhood vaccines and the neurodevelopmental disorders of autism, ADHD, and speech or language delay.” (Emphasis added.)

So why does the CDC reject this conclusion of the IOM by rejecting the biologically plausible hypothesis that thimerosal-containing vaccines could be associated with neurodevelopmental disorders including autism? This is a clear illustration of how the CDC mischaracterizes its own cited sources to serve its own policy goals.

The logical inability of the IOM to draw the same conclusion for which the CDC cites its review was “based on the fact that there were no published epidemiological studies examining the potential association” between thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism (emphasis added). The IOM reviewed two unpublished studies, but they “provided only weak and inconclusive evidence”.

The CDC instructively does not inform the public that the IOM review acknowledged that the mercury in vaccines is a “known neurotoxin” that “accumulates in the brain” and “can injure the nervous system.”

The CDC’s webpage also does not disclose that, as the IOM pointed out, the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule in the 1990s was exposing infants “to cumulative doses of ethylmercury that exceed some federal safety guidelines established for ingestion of methylmercury, another form of organic mercury.”

While the CDC kept adding more thimerosal-containing vaccines to its schedule, apparently, nobody in the government ever bothered to consider the potential harm to children from the increasing cumulative levels of mercury to which they were being exposed. When the FDA finally got around to doing the calculations, it became public that the cumulative levels were in excess of safety guidelines.

That is the reason why the decision was made to withdraw the use of thimerosal in most childhood vaccines. (The reason cumulative levels were compared to guidelines for methylmercury exposure, which is the form of mercury found in contaminated fish, is that the government had never established safety guidelines for ethylmercury. Also, no guidelines had been set for injected mercury of either form, as opposed to ingested mercury.)

Additionally, the CDC declines to inform that the IOM acknowledged that the existing studies that had found no association between vaccination and autism had not been designed to determine whether there might be a “genetically susceptible subset of children who develop autism following vaccinations”.

To further illustrate how the CDC deliberately mischaracterizes its own cited sources, on its FAQ page about thimerosal, the CDC repeats its claim that the mercury in vaccines is “safe”.

To support that claim, the CDC cites an FDA study published in Pediatrics in 2001 in which FDA researchers, having finally gotten around to doing the calculations, admitted that the CDC was responsible for exposing children to cumulative levels of mercury in excess of the government’s own safety guidelines, that ethylmercury is toxic even at low doses, and that it is possible that this exposure from vaccines could cause neurodevelopmental abnormalities in children. (Hence the concurrent withdrawal of thimerosal-containing vaccines from the schedule in favor of single-dose vials that do not require the preservative.)

As later discovered through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, after the FDA finally did those calculations, the lead author of that study, Leslie K. Ball, privately expressed the concern that “toxicologists seemed reluctant to state any Hg [mercury] was ‘safe’”, which legitimized the criticism that government agencies were “arbitrarily designating a certain level as acceptable when there continues to be so much uncertainty about the science in this area.”

Another study that the CDC cites to support its claim that the mercury in vaccines is “safe” was published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2005. That study has been described by FDA researchers, including none other than Robert J. Mitkus, as “the most relevant study on which to base a comparative assessment of infant mercury exposure or risk from thimerosal [ethylmercury] relative to MeHg [methylmercury].”

This 2005 study compared the levels of mercury in the brains of infant monkeys after exposure from either ingested methylmercury or thimerosal-containing vaccines at doses relatively comparable to the infant exposure from the CDC’s childhood schedule. They confirmed that ethylmercury from vaccines is more rapidly eliminated from the blood than methylmercury, and also that less total ethylmercury enters the brain.

However, what the CDC declines to inform the public is that the study also found that, far from being more readily eliminated, ethylmercury is more persistent in the brain than methylmercury.

Contrary to the CDC’s characterization, the study authors themselves did not draw the conclusion that the mercury in vaccines is safe. Far from it, they actually concluded that the government’s use of methylmercury toxicology as a reference for risk assessment from thimerosal exposure is scientifically invalid, and that the use of mercury in vaccines represents a significant cause for concern.

In fact, they even expressed the concern that the mercury from vaccines that accumulates in the brain has been “associated with a significant increase in the number of microglia in the brain” and that “‘an active neuroinflammatory process’ has been demonstrated in brains of autistic patients, including a marked activation of microglia.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, contrary to the CDC’s purpose in citing this study, its authors expressed the concern that it is biologically plausible that the neurotoxicity in the brain resulting from ethylmercury exposure from vaccines could contribute to the development of autism.

In their concluding remarks, they also expressed dismay that the Institute of Medicine, in its 2004 report, implicitly recommended that further research not be undertaken to test the biologically plausible hypothesis that vaccines can cause autism. “This approach is difficult to understand,” they remarked, “given our current limited knowledge of the toxicokinetics and developmental neurotoxicity of thimerosal, a compound that has been (and will continue to be) injected into millions of newborns and infants.”

Far from supporting the CDC’s claim that science has shown that mercury exposure from vaccines is “very safe”, this study actually concluded that more research into the neurotoxic potential of thimerosal and its breakdown product ethylmercury was “urgently needed” to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions about “the potential developmental effects of immunization with thimerosal-containing vaccines in newborns and infants.”

It would be superfluous to further demonstrate how the CDC grossly mischaracterizes its own cited sources to support its policies. The fact that the CDC brazenly lies about the science is sufficiently proven by these examples.

CDC Mischaracterizes the Science on Vaccines and Autism

Coming back to Ryan’s third cited source, the CDC’s “Vaccines and Autism” webpage, aside from specific concerns about thimerosal, the CDC asserts that “studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing ASD.”

To support that claim, the CDC cites a 2012 IOM review titled “Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality”.

The IOM committee reviewed twenty-two studies, only five of which were of sufficient quality to be considered as epidemiologic evidence. Each of these looked only at the MMR vaccine, and therefore this review does not support the CDC’s claim that “vaccines”, plural, do not cause autism.

It is true that none of the included studies found an association between the MMR vaccine and autism, and the IOM concluded that “The evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism.”

However, what the CDC obfuscates is the fact that this conclusion was practically meaningless in light of the fact that none of the studies that the IOM reviewed had been designed to test the hypothesis that vaccinating according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible subpopulations of children.

The IOM drew its deceptive conclusion despite acknowledging that available evidence indicated that “individuals with certain characteristics are more likely to suffer adverse effects from particular immunizations” and that the available observational studies “can fail to detect risks that affect a small subset of the population”. As the IOM further admitted, “nor can one be certain” based on the available evidence “that the risk is homogeneous across potentially vulnerable subgroups within the general population (e.g., the developing fetus and infants under 24 months, immunologically compromised individuals, or individuals with a rare genetic predisposition).”

As the IOM reiterated (emphasis added):

Both epidemiologic and mechanistic research suggest that most individuals who experience an adverse reaction to vaccines have a preexisting susceptibility. These predispositions can exist for a number of reasons—genetic variants (in human or microbiome DNA), environmental exposures, behaviors, intervening illness, or developmental stage, to name just a few . . . .

In some metabolically vulnerable children, receiving vaccines may be the largely nonspecific “last straw” that leads these children to reveal their underlying genotype.

The IOM therefore acknowledged the need for further research to identify risk factors for vaccine injuries, including injuries that might manifest as symptoms of autism.

While the CDC does not mention it, another IOM review published in 2013 titled “The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety” acknowledged this important limitation of the evidence, as well as the fact that no studies had been done to determine the safety of the CDC’s schedule as a whole. In that review, the IOM admitted (emphasis added):

No studies have compared the differences in health outcomes that some stakeholders questioned between entirely unimmunized populations of children and fully immunized children. Experts who addressed the committee pointed not to a body of evidence that had been overlooked but rather to the fact that existing research has not been designed to test the entire immunization schedule.

The committee believes that although the available evidence is reassuring, studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.

The IOM acknowledged “the lack of research on vaccine safety for subpopulations that may be potentially susceptible to adverse events”, which might include, for example, “children with family histories of adverse vaccine events, autoimmune diseases, allergies, and neurological diseases”. It admitted that “additional information is needed to address parental concerns” about following the CDC’s schedule, and it acknowledged the lack of research into risk factors for vaccine injury.

The IOM stated that “there is no evidence that the schedule is not safe”, but that assertion is again practically meaningless in light of the acknowledged fact that no studies had been done to examine the safety of the schedule.

Among their reviewed studies, “None has compared entirely unimmunized populations with those fully immunized for the health outcomes of concern to stakeholders.” The evidence available from existing studies was admittedly “fragmentary and inconclusive on many issues.”

The IOM nevertheless recommended that HHS should not conduct randomized controlled trials, which would be the highest quality evidence, on the grounds that it would be unethical to deprive a control group of the benefits of vaccination, which simply begs the question by presuming the proposition to be proven, which is that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s schedule results in healthier children.

The IOM further recommended that the government not dedicate much funding to studying the safety of the CDC’s schedule by reasoning that this risked spending wastefully, which was once again the fallacy of begging the question (the petitio principii fallacy, also known as circular reasoning).

The IOM did, however, recommend that HHS utilize the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which is a surveillance network run by the CDC in collaboration with several health care organizations, to satisfy the public demand for studies comparing health outcomes between fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children. To date, the government has continued to refuse to do such a study.

Coming back to the 2012 IOM review cited by the CDC, on questions of causation, the IOM acknowledged that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” and that “it is virtually impossible to prove the absence of a relationship with the same certainty that it is possible in establishing the presence of one.” The types of observational studies that had been done “may not rule out the possibility that the reaction is caused by vaccine in a subset of individuals”.

This is precisely why the IOM adopted the language that the evidence “favors rejection of a causal relationship” rather than saying it “establishes or convincingly supports no causal relationship.”

Hence, the CDC’s citation of that review to support its claim that “vaccines do not cause autism” is an illustration of how the CDC actually rejects the standards of evidence adopted by the IOM. It cites the review to support its claim even though the IOM in fact explained at length and explicitly why the CDC’s conclusion cannot be logically drawn based on the available evidence.

Despite the IOM’s acknowledgment of the plausibility of the hypothesis that vaccines can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible subpopulations, as indicated on its “vaccines do not cause autism” page, the CDC went on to fund or conduct nine additional studies that also failed to consider the possibility of susceptible subpopulations.

Hence, one might reasonably interpret this body of research by the CDC as aiming not to find an association between vaccination and neurodevelopmental harms including autism.

After all, the CDC has an inherent conflict of interest. It would be natural for the CDC to wish to conduct studies not designed to test the hypothesis since, if true, the CDC would bear responsibility for the harm caused to susceptible children with its one-size-fits-all approach. The CDC has every incentive to design studies to fail to find an association and not to do the types of research that concerned parents are demanding, such as studies comparing long-term health outcomes between fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children.

In sum, to support its claim that “vaccines do not cause autism”, the CDC cites IOM reviews that in fact acknowledge the possibility that vaccines might contribute to the development of autism in susceptible children.

Thus, to support its claim that “vaccines do not cause autism”, once again, the CDC grossly mischaracterizes its own cited sources, which further illustrates the CDC’s complete untrustworthiness.

The mainstream media, for their part, simply ignore the CDC’s repeatedly proven untrustworthiness and instead irrationally take the CDC’s word as gospel truth, uncritically parroting the CDC’s false claim that studies have tested and falsified the hypothesis.

The Government Has Admitted that Vaccines Can Cause Injury Manifesting as Symptoms of Autism

The CDC perpetrates this deception despite the US government having acknowledged that some children are more susceptible to being harmed by vaccines and that, in susceptible individuals, vaccine injury can manifest as symptoms of autism.

Since autism is defined by its symptoms, that is equivalent to acknowledging that vaccines can cause autism.

This was acknowledged in a case adjudicated in 2008 under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which was established under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which law granted broad legal immunity to the pharmaceutical industry against injury lawsuits for vaccines recommended for routine use in children by the CDC. The law thus shifted the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the pharmaceutical companies and onto the taxpaying consumers.

At nineteen months of age, a girl named Hannah Poling, who had been developing normally, received nine vaccine doses at once. She developed a fever and encephalopathy, which is a type of brain injury that the government acknowledges can be caused by vaccination under the VICP. As a result, she developmentally regressed into diagnosed autism.

Hannah, whose father is a neurologist, happened also to be a patient of an expert witness used by the government in VICP cases: Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and director of medical research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders.

Dr. Zimmerman, incidentally, was also among the reviewers for the IOM’s 2004 review cited by the CDC as ostensible proof that “vaccines do not cause autism”.

In one VICP case, the government’s lawyers used Zimmerman’s testimony to deny compensation to a child with autism. Dr. Zimmerman expressed his professional medical opinion in that particular case that vaccines did not cause the patient’s autism. As Zimmerman has since stated in a sworn affidavit, he specifically told the government’s lawyers that his opinion in that case was not generalizable to others.

Having witnessed what happened to young Hannah, Zimmerman told them that “in a subset of children with an underlying mitochondrial dysfunction, vaccine induced fever and immune stimulation that exceeded metabolic energy reserves could, and in at least one of my patients, did cause regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.” (Emphasis added.)

In a later case, the government’s lawyers nevertheless proceeded to deliberately misrepresent Dr. Zimmerman’s view by citing his opinion from the earlier case to deny compensation to another child with autism on the grounds that it was Zimmerman’s view that vaccines do not cause autism.

In fact, the conclusion Zimmerman arrived at for the latter case, after reviewing the child’s medical records, was that he “suffered regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder as a result of a vaccine injury”.

In Hannah Poling’s case, the government conceded that the vaccines she received “significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.” (Emphasis added.)

On March 29, 2008, CDC Director Julie Gerberding admitted on CNN, “Now, we all know that vaccines can occasionally cause fevers in kids. So, if a child was immunized, got a fever, had other complications from the vaccines, and if you’re predisposed with a mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage. Some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism.” (Emphasis added.)

As acknowledged in an interview in 2014 by the long-time director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, Dr. Frank DeStefano, “it’s a possibility” that vaccines could cause autism in genetically susceptible individuals, but the problem is that it is “hard to predict who those children might be”, and research designed to identify underlying cofactors that place certain children at greater risk of vaccine injury is “very difficult to do”.

In other words, the CDC’s own head of vaccine safety has tacitly admitted that the CDC is falsely claiming that the hypothesis has been falsified when in fact there is an urgent need for further research designed to address the concern that vaccines can cause autism, including studies designed to identify genetic and environmental risk factors for vaccine injury.

Studies Find That Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier

While the government continues to refuse to do studies comparing health outcomes between children vaccinated according to the CDC’s routine childhood schedule and children who remain completely unvaccinated, independent researchers have forged ahead, with several studies now indicating that parents who do not vaccinate their children achieve superior health results.

The strongest of these is a study by research scientist Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas, who used Dr. Thomas’s patient data to compare a broad range of health outcomes between variably vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children. The results indicate that Dr. Thomas’s unvaccinated patients are the healthiest children in his practice.

Mere days after that study was published, despite having demanded that Dr. Thomas provide peer-reviewed evidence to support his approach of respecting parents’ right to informed consent rather than pushing them to comply with the CDC’s schedule, Dr. Thomas’s license was emergently suspended by the Oregon Medical Board on false pretexts, as I detail in my book The War on informed Consent.

That study by Dr. Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Thomas was subsequently retracted by the journal editors without the editors specifying any flaws in the study that would warrant this drastic action. Instead, the pretext for retraction was a hypothesized selection bias. The editors’ decision was based on an anonymously written letter of complaint that insultingly suggested that parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are less “sensitive to the health of their children”. The children of these parents are just as unhealthy as the vaccinated, the anonymous critic argued, but those children just never received a diagnosis for their health conditions because their parents failed to take them in to see a doctor.

In fact, the retraction occurred despite Dr. Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Thomas providing data in their study indicating that the unvaccinated patients were not less likely to show up for routine “well child” visits.

In a follow-up study, Dr. Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Russell Blaylock conducted further analyses to test the hypothesis that their findings could be attributed to parents of unvaccinated children utilizing health care less, and they further demonstrated that, in Dr. Thomas’s practice, these children’s parents did take them in for routine checkups at least as regularly as parents of vaccinated children.

Consequently, the findings of Dr. Thomas’s study stand: his patient data show that his unvaccinated patients have less incidence of a broad range of health conditions, including asthma, allergic rhinitis, breathing issues, ADHD, respiratory infection, otitis media, eye disorders, eczema, dermatitis, urticaria, anemia, gastroenteritis, and food allergy.

There were too few patients with autism in his practice to meaningfully conduct these analyses for that condition. It is remarkable, however, that only 0.36 percent of patients born into Dr. Thomas’s practice had autism compared to the CDC’s estimated national rate of 1.85 percent. Therefore, without insinuating anything about causality, we can fairly say that being born into Dr. Thomas’s practice is associated with a fivefold decreased risk of being diagnosed with autism compared to the general population of highly vaccinated children.

Just as remarkably, there were zero unvaccinated patients in the study population with ADHD compared to 5.3 percent of the variably vaccinated, which in turn compares with the US national rate, according to the CDC, of 9.4 percent.

Conclusion

So, we may now return to the question of whether CNET science writer Jack Ryan provided sufficient support for his claim that “vaccines don’t cause autism.” The answer is that he did not. Evidently, like so many journalists, Ryan simply places faith in “public health” officials despite their demonstrable untrustworthiness, and so he just repeats the false claim implicitly propagated by the pharma-centric medical establishment that many studies have tested and falsified that hypothesis.

In truth, not only has the hypothesis not been falsified, but the government refuses to do the types of studies that would be required to truly test the hypothesis; and, moreover, the government has acknowledged that, in genetically susceptible children, vaccines can cause brain damage manifesting as symptoms of autism.

Thus, the objective journalist has an ethical obligation to report that, although many studies have failed to find an association between vaccines and autism, most failed to consider the possibility of susceptible subpopulations of children in the first place. Among the primary source studies relied upon by Jack Ryan in his CNET article, there are apparently only two which even considered this possibility in terms of their methodological design.

The findings of the 2015 Jain et al. study, however, do not support the conclusion that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism in genetically susceptible children; instead, the findings of that study demonstrate the need for researchers to conduct further studies that carefully control for the healthy user bias revealed by this study. Setting aside the authors’ own fallacious conclusion, their findings suggest not that children who received the MMR vaccine were no more likely to develop autism but that children at higher risk of developing autism were less likely to receive the MMR vaccine.

While the 2019 Hviid et al. study purported to consider the possibility of genetically susceptible subpopulations, in fact, the authors excluded children with conditions known to place them at higher risk, treating these conditions as competing hypotheses rather than potential risk factors for vaccine injury. They followed the lead of Jain et al. by defining genetic susceptibility as having a sibling with autism while failing to control for the healthy user bias revealed by that prior study. This study, like the CDC’s own body of research failing altogether to consider genetic susceptibility, can therefore be reasonably interpreted as having been designed to not find an association.

Additionally, both of those studies focused on the MMR vaccine, and, as acknowledged by the Institute of Medicine, no studies have been done to determine the safety of the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule as a whole. The IOM was able to identify zero studies that compared long-term health outcomes between fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children, and the government continues to refuse to conduct such a study.

While the incentive of the US government is to fund or conduct research aimed at supporting its existing policies, findings of studies by independent researchers comparing health outcomes among variably vaccinated and unvaccinated children indicate that unvaccinated children are generally healthier, which illustrates how the “public health” establishment serves the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of public health.

For more detailed documentation of that reality, read my book The War on Informed Consent. For much more information revealing how the public has been bamboozled with the scientifically meaningless claim that all vaccines recommended by the CDC are “safe and effective”, and to understand the institutionalized corruption that enables the so-called “public health” establishment to sustain the illusion that public vaccine policy is evidence-based, check out the book Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccines Science and Myth.