We are told that science has proven that “vaccines do not cause autism”, and we are supposed to believe this is true as a matter of faith.
In a recent conversation with Bretigne Shaffer on her podcast What Then Must We Do?, I explain why that belief is irreconcilable with the scientific evidence.
I always enjoy having intelligent conversations with Bretigne, who honored me by saying, “Jeremy is one of the best investigative independent journalists out there right now.”
The main topic of the show is my recently published paper, coauthored with Dr. Jeet Varia and Dr. Brian Hooker from Children’s Health Defense, critically analyzing the 2019 study out of Denmark by Hviid et al. that purported to show that the MMR vaccine is not associated with autism even in genetically susceptible children.
This is a discussion you will not want to miss! Listen with the player below or click here to watch the full video of the interview on Bretigne’s Substack.
A quick correction: at one point, Bretigne asked me if there were any good studies on vaccines and autism, and while her question was specific, in my mind at the moment, I was just thinking about good vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies comparing long-term health outcomes so immediately mentioned the study by Dr. Paul Thomas and Dr. James Lyons-Weiler that is largely the subject of my book The War on Informed Consent.
To clarify, that study was not designed to test the vaccine-autism hypothesis specifically. As I explained in the interview, in fact, there were too few children with autism in Dr. Thomas’s practice to be able to meaningfully compare rates based on vaccination status. But this is why the study leapt to mind when she asked me the question, because that fact alone is astonishing. What we can safely conclude from the data is that Dr. Thomas’s approach of respecting parents’ right to make their own informed choice about childhood vaccinations is that it is associated with a dramatically lower rate of autism than is observed among the general population of highly vaccinated children.
So, my apologies for mistakenly suggesting the study aimed at comparing autism rates, but hopefully you can see why it leapt immediately to mind as a relevant well-designed vaccinated versus unvaccinated study aimed at comparing a broad range of health outcomes.
I also explained how that study was wrongfully retracted without any legitimate cause by the cowardly journal editors.
In sum, the retraction was based on complaints in an anonymously written letter absurdly arguing that the measure of “relative incidents of office visits” for various diagnosed conditions had never been “validated”. As I observed, if studies should not be published just because they use a new approach, no scientific progress could ever be made! And as I rhetorically inquired, “How does a method ever get validated unless it’s published?”
And the retraction gets even more absurd because the other basis for it was a hypothesized selection bias. The argument in the letter was that the unvaccinated children were really just as unhealthy as the vaccinated, but their parents just didn’t bring them in to see the doctor, so they were never diagnosed. As I stated during the interview,
Well, I’m sorry, but if you’re going to retract a paper based on a hypothesized selection bias, you have to retract every single observational study in the scientific literature. So that’s how ridiculous the retraction was. And it gets even more ridiculous because right in the study they had a control for that. They tested that hypothesis right in the study.”
And Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Russell Blaylock later analyzed the data in several different ways and falsified the hypothesis of healthcare non-utilization by showing that, if anything, the unvaccinated children showed up for regular “well child” visits even more consistently than the vaccinated.
For the full details on the wrongful retraction and that follow-up study, please read my article “Breakthrough Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier”.
Summary
Here’s a bullet-point overview of topics Bretigne and I discussed:
- What the Hviid et al. study purported to find, and why, out of all the studies supposedly debunking the vaccine-autism hypothesis, I chose to critique this one.
- How the CDC’s claim that “vaccines do not cause autism” is contradicted by its own cited sources.
- How I confronted the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and got it to tacitly concede that no studies exist that were designed to properly test the vaccine-autism hypothesis.
- Why the logical interpretation of the findings the 2015 Jain et al. study is not that MMR-vaccinated children are no more likely than MMR-unvaccinated children to develop autism, but that children at greater risk of autism are less likely to receive the MMR vaccine.
- How the government has completely perverted science.
- How Hviid et al. was touted as a very large study looking at hundreds of thousands of children, when in fact most of that is just noise because the key population of children defined as “genetically susceptible” was very small (only 838 children).
- How, out of those children, only 37 had autism, within which population there was a 2.69 times higher risk of autism among the vaccinated; and why the statistical non-significance of that finding could very well have been due to tiny sample size.
- How Hviid et al. borrowed an inadequate definition of “genetic susceptibility” from Jain et al. while failing to control for the “healthy user bias” found in that prior study.
- How nearly half the study population in the paper by Hviid et al. were defined as not genetically susceptible by virtue of being an only child.
- How the US government has already admitted that vaccines can cause autism.
- How Hviid et al. claim that there was no “appreciable” difference in vaccination rates between children considered genetically susceptible and those not, and yet, no matter how we looked at the data, my coauthors and I found evidence for the same healthy user bias identified by Jain et al.
- How Hviid et al. state that their findings indicate no association between the MMR vaccine and autism “assuming unbiased results”, and why these researchers must know that their results are likely to be biased.
- Why, if you were going to design a study to fail to find an association, this is how you would do it.
- The story of how the Oregon Medical Board first demanded that Dr. Paul Thomas produce peer-reviewed evidence to support his alternative approach of respecting informed consent, instead of pushing the CDC’s schedule on parents, but then as soon as he published that evidence, they emergently suspended his license.
- How that study was retracted without any legitimate reason whatsoever.
- How Dr. Thomas lost his license not because he was a threat to public health but because his practice—and his atypically large population of unvaccinated and healthy children—posed a threat to the corrupt “public health” establishment.
- How it is not the case that medical licensing is weaponized in certain circumstances because the whole purpose of the medical licensing regime from the start was to target doctors who took a more naturalistic approach to health and medicine.
- The role of the American Medical Association (AMA) in the creation of the regime of medical licensing, and why we do not have a “health care” system in the US but a government-enforced medical cartel.
As Bretigne put it, “So all you have to do is just scratch the surface of the whole medical licensing industry, and it’s very clear, it’s not protecting anybody. Well, it’s protecting someone! It’s protecting this group of people who gets to make a ton more money.”
And as I added, “It’s protecting the group of people who have been given government authority to define ‘standard of care’. So, we don’t have a health care system in the United States. We have a government-enforced medical cartel.”
- How every observational study finding an association between vaccination and some harm is dismissed offhandedly as “flawed”, whereas every flawed study finding no association is touted as absolute proof of no harm.
- How the CDC’s claims about the non-toxicity of ethylmercury in vaccines are similarly contradicted by its own cited sources, including the Institute of Medicine and a 2005 study whose authors literally criticized the FDA for not establishing safety guidelines for ethylmercury exposure and expressed the concern that mercury from vaccines accumulates in the brain and causes a chronic state of inflammation that is in turn associated with autism!
- As I summarized, referring to the CDC’s claim that science has proven that vaccines don’t cause autism, “The CDC’s claim is a hoax. There’s no better way to put it. It’s a hoax claim.”
- How the CDC gets away with spreading vaccine disinformation because the mainstream media do vaccine policy advocacy instead of honest and objective reporting, which professional propagandists masquerading as “journalists”.
- How I confronted Lena Sun from the Washington Post for lying that no vaccine is added to the CDC’s schedule until it has been tested for safety when given with other vaccines on the schedule, and how she and her editors refused to issue a correction even after I showed them an Institute of Medicine review pointing out that no studies have ever examined the safety of the CDC’s schedule as a whole.
- As I summarized that episode, “This is a case where I can prove that it’s willful lying. It’s not a ‘mistake’. It’s not a case of journalistic malfeasance. No! That’s an understatement. It’s a deliberate deception. Deliberate.”
- How the CDC selected Lena Sun to be among the first to report about a CDC study finding flu shots during the first trimester to be associated with miscarriages because they knew she would dutifully spin it as nothing to be concerned about.
- Why the problem with the so-called “public health” agencies isn’t that they are “captured” by the pharmaceutical industry but that agencies like the FDA and CDC exist to be captured in the first place.
Bretigne asked me how I would answer the argument that “‘It’s not the government that’s the problem, it’s the corporations.”
I responded, “Well, I think the way to answer that is that it’s misdiagnosing the problem because, if we had a free market, these industries would not be able to leverage so much power and influence. And how is it that they’re able to leverage that? And, so, people will say that they’ve ‘captured’ government agencies. It’s ‘corporate capture’, right? That’s the argument. Well, if those agencies didn’t exist to be captured—problem solved!”
- How the idea that we just need to get the right people into positions of power, and then they will fix the broken system, is misguided because the CDC et al. aren’t broken but are working exactly according to design.
As I stated during our discussion, “If you have a government exercising power, you are going to have people trying to lobby the government to be able to utilize that power for their own gain. That’s just the nature of government. That’s the nature of the state. And that’s unavoidable, it’s not—as you once said—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
- How we are taught in the government school system that monopolies are bad yet at the same time that we need the government to intervene in the market to establish monopolies to protect us all!
As Bretigne put it after we discussed the examples of the AMA, the AAP, and the Federal Reserve, “You know it’s crazy because we’re taught in our government schools that monopoly is bad, and monopoly is something that arises in markets—which it doesn’t, but, leave that aside—monopoly is bad, and here’s why: because it’s unresponsive to customers, it can charge whatever it wants, it can produce crappy products, etc., etc. etc. … but not this monopoly! You know, not the biggest monopoly of them all, that works to run your whole life. It’s like we’re taught not to make logical connections.”
To which I added, “Everyone suffers this cognitive dissonance. We’re taught that the free market leads to monopoly, monopolies are bad, so the government needs to intervene; and the government is intervening to create these monopolies, but those are good.”
And regarding the public so-called “education” system, I observed, “We’re all indoctrinated into the state religion, a subsect of which is the vaccine religion.”
- What you can learn about the history of the controversy over vaccines from my critically acclaimed book The War on Informed Consent, including the real reason the mercury-based preservative thimerosal was phased out of most childhood vaccines around the turn of the century and how, when it comes to the 1998 Lancet study by Wakefield et al., the real hoax is the mainstream media’s propaganda narrative about why it was retracted.
- How the US government in 1986 granted broad legal immunity to the vaccine industry against injury lawsuits while shifting the financial burden for vaccine injuries onto the taxpaying consumers, and why the solution is a free market.
As I put it during our discussion, “The whole purpose [of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act] is to protect the industry. They passed that law to literally save the industry from the injury lawsuits that were occurring. And, so, if we had a free market, where they had to compete without government implementing mandates, and without the government protecting them from injury lawsuits, it would be a completely different story—our children’s health would be completely different today.
- How it is very difficult to raise an unvaccinated child because of all the coercion imposed on us, including how even your own family members are turned against you merely for exercising your right and duty to make your own informed choices about what is in the best interests of your own child.
I hope you will enjoy this conversation I had with Bretigne Shaffer as much as I enjoyed having it, so if you are able, please make time to listen or watch the video of this important discussion!
Additional Resources
- Hammond et al., “Hviid et al. 2019 Vaccine-Autism Study: Much Ado About Nothing?”, Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, May 7, 2025
- The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board
- Breakthrough Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier
- Debunking the ‘Settled Science’ on Vaccines and Autism
- American Academy of Pediatrics Refuses to Back Vaccine Claims with Science
- Interview: Should Medical Licensing Be Abolished?
- The CDC’s Criminal Recommendation for a Flu Shot During Pregnancy
- Lena Sun, the Washington Post’s Resident Vaccine Propagandist
- The Mainstream Media’s Reign of Error: Correcting the Record about RFK Jr.’s ‘Deadly Immunity’
- How the CDC Lies about the Safety of Aluminum in Vaccines
- Is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Evidence of Vaccine Safety?
