No, the Vaccine-Autism Hypothesis Has NOT Been Falsified

Yesterday, while visiting X, at the top of my feed was a post thread by a guy named Nicholas Fabiano, MD, who started out by repeating the claim we are all so familiar with that “Vaccines don’t cause autism.”

To support that claim, he cited a study I am very familiar with, by Anders Hviid et al., published in Annals of Internal Medicine in March 2019 and titled “Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study“.

In his thread, Fabiano summarizes the study’s finding of no association between the MMR vaccine and autism. He concludes by stating, “Overall, these findings strongly support that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination.”

Here is his full thread:

I responded with a thread of my own explaining why the conclusion “Vaccines don’t cause autism” cannot be drawn from that study.

Here for your convenience are the points I made:

Show me a study designed to test the hypothesis that vaccines administered according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible children.

It hasn’t been done.

Therefore, the claim “Vaccines don’t cause autism” is disinformation.

Let’s take a closer look at the Hviid et al. 2019 study

@NTFabiano cites to support the claim that the hypothesis has been falsified. First, it considers only the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine causes autism — not “vaccines”, plural. It’s not a vax-unvax study.

Therefore, his conclusion that “vaccines”, plural, do not cause autism is unsupported by the study.

Second, earlier studies had been criticized for failing to consider the possibility of genetically susceptible subpopulations of children.

Hviid et al. 2019 is routinely characterized as addressing that failure. However, it does not. Fabiano actually shows that here. Children with genetic conditions placing them at higher risk of autism were actually EXCLUDED from the study.

That exclusionary criteria biased the study in favor of finding no association between MMR vaccine and autism. Hviid et al. treated those conditions as competing hypotheses instead of potential risk factors for vaccine injury manifesting as symptoms of autism.

Genetic susceptibility was instead defined by Hviid et al. as having a sibling with autism. In doing so, they took a cue from Jain et al. 2015. But the key finding of that prior study was that younger siblings of autistic children are less likely to receive the MMR vaccine.

It’s not that MMR-unvaccinated children are no more likely to develop autism but that children who are at higher risk of autism are less likely to receive the MMR vaccine.

Parents who vaccinated their first child only to see them develop autism are understandably more hesitant about doing the MMR vaccine with younger siblings. Similarly, if a child shows early signs of developmental abnormalities, parents are more likely to skip the shot.

This is a known selection bias in such studies, called a “healthy user” bias, or in this case a healthy vaccinee bias. Researchers know that children at higher risk get pooled into the “(MMR) unvaccinated” cohort.

Hviid et al. knew this. In fact, they cite Jain et al. But they did nothing to control for this healthy user bias. One could therefore argue that they DESIGNED the study to find no association.

It was great to see Tom Woods repost my thread!

I’ve been a guest on Tom’s show several times, including in February 2021 to discuss Facebook’s faux “fact checking” on COVID-19, in September 2022 to again discuss how faux “fact checkers” were censoring truth, and in April 2023 to discuss my book The War on Informed Consent and how studies show that unvaccinated children are healthier.

I am very familiar with the study by Hviid et al. because I have spent many hours examining it and critiquing it. The points I raised above are sufficient to demonstrate the problem with citing it to support the claim that “vaccines do not cause autism”, but my thread barely scratched the surface of all the problems with the study.

I have spent a great deal of time writing a lengthy paper detailing its methodological flaws. It’s a project I started back in 2019, but then COVID-19 appeared and I had to put it on the back burner to focus 100% on fighting the lockdown madness and its coerced mass vaccination endgame.

However, I was finally able to get back to it this year, and while I usually work solo, in this case, I have now teamed up with a couple of scientists who aim to help me get it published in a peer-reviewed journal.

This forthcoming paper will fully illuminate why the claim that “vaccines do not cause autism” is disinformation.

I don’t want to disclose more than that for now, but please sign up for my email newsletters to stay updated.

And on the same topic, see my recent post about a mom schooling a PhD who totally mischaracterized the findings of another study that actually affirmed the finding of Jain et al. that children at higher risk of autism get pooled into the “unvaccinated” (or “undervaccinated”) cohort:

Also see this detailed article of mine from 2022:

And listen to my discussion with Bretigne Shaffer about that article:

Finally, if you haven’t yet read it, be sure to get your hands on a copy of my book The War on Informed Consent, which details how the regime of medical licensure is being used to enforce a medical cartel and penalize doctors who respect parents’ right to make their own informed choices about childhood vaccinations instead of bullying them into vaccinating according to the CDC’s schedule.

(I get copies from the publisher at an author discount and pass along the savings to you! Plus, I sign the copies I sell directly from this website.)