The Playbook Used to ‘Disprove’ Vaccines Cause Autism

The New York Times last week published an interactive feature titled “The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism”, which criticizes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), for suggesting that vaccines can cause autism and directing resources toward studying the question.

The Times’ argument is a familiar one: all valid scientific research has found no association, and all studies suggesting otherwise are junk.

What I will show you here is how this familiar argument used to deny that vaccines can cause autism is itself straight out of a propaganda playbook.

The Times’ interactive provides a useful case study of how this propaganda works to deceive Americans into believing government-approved vaccine disinformation in service to the pharmaceutical industry.

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The Big Lie about the 1998 Lancet Study by Wakefield et al.

The interactive feature focuses heavily on Kennedy’s decision to bring David Geier on board an initiative to examine the vaccine-autism hypothesis, which the Times insists is a “long-debunked theory”.

As you scroll down the page of the Times’ feature, you come to the claim that “The controversy started when Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, published a study in 1998 that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine to autism.”

And that talking point is certainly straight out of the propaganda playbook. It is virtually obligatory for the media to reference the Lancet case series by Wakefield et al.

No matter how many times the mainstream media tell you, though, that the 1998 Lancet study by Wakefield and coauthors claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, it will remain untrue.

In fact, Wakefield et al. explicitly stated in their paper that they did not prove an association. The only “link” they reported was that made by the parents of children in the study between receipt of the MMR vaccine and subsequent developmental regression.

The sin Wakefield et al. committed was to merely hypothesize an association and suggest further research to examine the question.

The Times adds that the paper was retracted because Wakefield was “found to have falsified data”.

But that’s not true, either. Here’s an excerpt from my book The War on Informed Consent—which features a Foreword by RFK, Jr.—setting the record straight on that:

The Lancet retracted the article in 2010, over a decade after it was published and in response to the General Medical Council (GMC) in the United Kingdom having stripped Wakefield and his coauthor John Walker-Smith of their medical licenses. Walker-Smith was the gastroenterologist who examined the children and the senior author listed on the study (in the literature, the first author listed may be the primary but not the senior author, whose name is listed last).

The reason stated for the retraction was not that the paper had been found to be based on fraudulent data. Rather, the GMC had judged that the authors falsely stated that the children were “consecutively referred” and that their investigation with these children was not approved by the local ethics committee.

The GMC had found Wakefield and Walker-Smith guilty not of fraud but “professional misconduct”. What the mainstream media never tell the public, despite bringing up the study incessantly, is that Walker-Smith appealed the GMC’s decision and won. He was reinstated in 2012 on the grounds that the GMC’s charges against him were “untenable” and unsupported by the evidence.

The children were indeed consecutively referred according to the authors’ plainly intended meaning of having been “referred successively, rather than as a single batch”. Furthermore, they did not require ethics approval for the procedures the children underwent under Walker-Smith’s care because the procedures were clinically indicated for diagnostic purposes. In some of the children, this process of clinical diagnosis led to treatment resulting in marked improvement of symptoms.

The reason Wakefield did not join his colleague in appealing the GMC’s ruling is that the legal costs were not covered by his insurance carrier.

It’s also a lie that the controversy about vaccines causing autism started with the 1998 Lancet study. As I also wrote in The War on Informed Consent:

Those concerns preexisted the clinical investigation of the twelve children included in the case series. In fact, the Institute of Medicine had issued a report in 1991 discussing widespread parental concerns that vaccines might be causing autism.

The IOM found “no evidence” to support a causal relationship between the DTP vaccine and autism, which was unsurprising since, as the IOM also observed, no studies had been done to test that hypothesis.

Judging Studies Based on Whether They Produce the Desired Outcome

Without providing any links or specific references for readers to review the list, The Times’ interactive continues by saying there have been “some 70 studies” testing the vaccine-autism hypothesis, 26 of which “linked vaccines to autism in some way”, and 43 that found “no connection”.

Two-thirds of those “that claimed to have found a link” were written by David Geier and his father, Mark Geier.

The Times characterizes those studies as having been “heavily criticized for using deceptive research techniques and flawed data”, as well as for having “undisclosed conflicts of interest.”

By contrast, “independent scientists” conducting “more than 40 high-quality studies” that were “rigorously designed” all “found no connection between vaccines and autism.”

What utter garbage from the New York Times!

Of course, numerous of those studies were done by CDC researchers, and if you believe the CDC is “independent” and without conflicts of interest, I’ve got an oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.

This nonsense is utterly insulting to the intelligence of any free-thinking individual.

Here are salient truths sufficient to expose the great deception:

• The working hypothesis is that vaccinating children according to the CDC’s childhood schedule can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible subpopulations of children.
• No studies have been done to test that hypothesis—and consequently it cannot possibly have been falsified.
• Almost all the studies that have been done considered only one vaccine, the MMR, or one vaccine ingredient, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.
• No studies have examined the safety of the CDC’s schedule as a whole, i.e., by comparing long-term health outcomes between fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children. (The CDC is now being sued, in fact, for the absence of safety data supporting its pediatric schedule.)
• Almost all the existing studies finding no association failed to consider the possibility of susceptible subpopulations, such as children with a genetic susceptibility to vaccine injury manifesting as symptoms of autism.
• The only study I’m aware of that claims to have been designed to test the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine is associated with autism in genetically susceptible children was so fatally flawed that it appears to have been designed to find no association.

And calling that lone study “high-quality” and “rigorously designed”, written by “independent scientists” with no conflicts of interest, is farcical—although not in a funny way.

But that’s the playbook used by the Times and the rest of the mainstream media to pretend as though the vaccine-autism hypothesis has been falsified.

It is an insult to your intelligence!

I am referring to the study out of Denmark by Anders Hviid et al. published in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2019 that the media hailed as conclusively proving, once and for all, that “vaccines do not cause autism”, even in “genetically susceptible” children.

For the full details about how that study was effectively designed to find no association, read the peer-reviewed paper written by myself, Dr. Jeet Varia, and Dr. Brian Hooker published on May 7 in the Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine.

Our rebuttal paper is titled “Hviid et al. 2019 Vaccine-Autism Study: Much Ado About Nothing?”

For a simplified summary of the key points we make, read my May 14 article “Debunking the ‘Settled Science’ on Vaccines and Autism”.

Citing the Debunked Danish Study on Aluminum-Containing Vaccines

After dismissing the idea that neurotoxic mercury in vaccines—which accumulates in the brain and can cause a state of chronic brain inflammation—could possibly be associated with autism, the Times tries to dismiss any link between autism and neurotoxic aluminum in vaccines.

To that end, the Times cites “a Danish study published in July of 1.2 million children born from 1997 to 2018” that supposedly “found no association between aluminum exposure from vaccines and increased risk of 50 disorders, including autism, even among kids who received the highest doses.”

The senior author of that study was none other than Anders Hviid. (The lead author being Niklas Worm Andersson.)

To see how utterly ludicrous it is to characterize that study as so methodologically perfect that we can consider its findings conclusive, see my critical analysis titled “How the Danish Study on Aluminum in Vaccines Was Designed to Find No Harm”.

Also, the Times’ claim is false because the study authors’ own data do show evidence of harm from aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines—as Secretary Kennedy accurately reported in an article in Trial Site News calling for the study to be retracted.

Here’s what Kennedy wrote:

The data show a statistically significant 67% increased risk of Asperger’s syndrome per 1 mg increase in aluminum exposure among children born between 2007 and 2018. Compared to the moderate exposure group, for every 10,000 children in the highest aluminum exposure cohort, there were 9.7 more cases of neurodevelopmental disorder, 4.5 more cases of autistic disorder, and 8.7 more cases of the broader category of autism spectrum disorder. Yet the authors gloss over these harms to children by claiming they “did not find evidence” for an increased risk.

For a detailed breakdown of the data that will enable you to verify that information for yourself, see my August 2 article “HHS Sec. Kennedy Calls for Retraction of Bogus Study on Aluminum in Vaccines”.

Red Flags for Pro-Pharma Propaganda

To further illuminate the hypocrisy of the New York Times, consider how the paper says it’s “highlighting tactics” used by Mr. Geier to ostensibly deceive people.

The example provided is a study he coauthored titled “Increased risk for an atypical autism diagnosis following Thimerosal-containing vaccine exposure in the United States: A prospective longitudinal case-control study in the Vaccine Safety Datalink”, published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology in 2017.

We can show how the Times uses a double standard, selectively applies criticisms only to studies that suggest vaccine harms while refusing to apply the same logic to studies ostensibly vindicating vaccines.

Studies with the ‘Right’ Results Don’t Need to Explain Implausible Findings

“The first red flag”, the Times asserts, “is in the title: The authors looked only at children with atypical autism, a former diagnosis for people who didn’t meet the standard autism criteria.”

The Times argues, “In proper scientific research, the authors would provide a reason that vaccines might affect this form of autism and not autism more broadly.”

Well, we can use that exact same logic to show how the recent Danish study by Andersson et al. is not proper scientific research.

See, it wasn’t just that the data from their primary analysis found no association between aluminum-containing vaccines and long-term health harms including atopic and allergic diseases, autoimmunity, or neurodevelopmental disorders—including autism.

In fact, they found statistically significant negative associations.

Of course, it is biologically implausible that aluminum in vaccines is protective against those health outcomes.

So, we could just as well use the Times’ own logic to conclude that if Andersson et al. had set out to do proper scientific research, they would have provided an explanation for their finding of negative associations.

Instead, Andersson et al. are absolutely silent about the implausibility of their own findings—for the obvious reason that it just goes to show what a junk study it is, systematically biased in favor of the null hypothesis.

Studies with the ‘Right’ Results Don’t Need to Properly Account for Number of Doctor Visits

The Times again illustrates its own hypocrisy for criticizing Geier for his study on the grounds that it failed to consider how “Children who see doctors regularly are more likely both to get vaccines and to have developmental concerns noticed and diagnosed.”

“You have to account for that”, the Times says.

In other words, to be considered “proper scientific research”, a study must account for how the number of doctor visits may be directly related to both exposure and outcome.

Well, guess what!

Andersson et al. treated the number of office visits before age two as a confounder and adjusted their data for it, which falsely assumes this number is a factor independent of both vaccine exposure and diagnoses.

As the Times itself notes, more office visits could result in more vaccinations. And it might be that children who see the doctor more frequently are more likely to be diagnosed; but there is also the possibility, overlooked by the Times, that children presenting with symptoms of vaccine injury require more frequent office visits.

But do you hear any criticisms of the Danish study by the Times for this inappropriate “correction” of their data introducing what is known as “collider bias”, which can suppress real associations?

Of course not!

Why not?

Simple.

Because the Danish study produced the desired result. Ergo, it is considered unassailable, its methodology presumed sound a priori—as an article of faith.

I discussed this collider bias in my own critical analysis of the study, and Dr. James Lyons-Weiler goes into much more detail about it in his article “Designed to Fail: Brand New Hailed Study Exonerating Aluminum Has a Fatal Flaw”.

Don’t Let Them Fool You

So, as you’ve just seen, by the New York Times’ own reasoning used to dismiss findings of studies supporting the vaccine-autism hypothesis, we must also reject the findings of key studies it cites to support its claim that studies have proven that “vaccines do not cause autism”.

Once again, that is a lie. The hypothesis cannot possibly have been falsified because no studies have ever been done that were properly designed to test it.

On the contrary, the argument can reasonably be made that professional propagandists masquerading in their role as scientists have been hard at work for the government and pharmaceutical industry producing results that support public vaccine policy.

After all, to produce any results to the contrary amounts to the crime of heresy against the vaccine religion.

To borrow an apt description from Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, they conduct “science-like activities” all the while designing studies to support predetermined conclusions.

The New York Times feature attacking Secretary Kennedy for his courageous public stance favoring genuine scientific inquiry is a useful case study in how the mainstream media manufacture consent for public vaccine policies that systematically violate individuals’ right to properly informed consent.

You cannot have informed consent when the government and media systematically deceive the public about the science.

A key tactic from their propaganda playbook is dismissing every study indicating vaccine harms because of methodological flaws while any study supporting the political and financial agenda are treated as absolutely conclusive—even if the study is not merely flawed but transparently designed to find no association. 

The interactive goes on, but it would be superfluous to continue exposing how the New York Times refuses to do journalism on the topic of vaccines because it prefers advocating the medical tyranny inherent to the CDC’s one-size-fits-all approach—as though the science hasn’t been screaming at us that an individualized risk-benefit analysis is always required for every vaccine and every child.

For a detailed case study in how the regime of medical licensing is used to keep pediatricians in line, see my book The War on Informed Consent.

As RFK, Jr. wrote in his Foreword for my book,

In exquisite detail, independent journalist Jeremy R. Hammond details the story of a heroic physician in The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board. Hammond lays bare the twisted, corrupt, and biased prosecution of a doctor who put his patient’s health first and who possessed the moral courage to speak truth to the corrupt and powerful. The forces aligned against Dr. Thomas seek to silence dissent as they promote an intolerable status quo that places the pharmaceutical industry’s profits before children’s health.”

Dr. Thomas is also a plaintiff in a recently filed lawsuit against the CDC for its dangerously unscientific one-size-fits-all approach to vaccination. For more information about this development, see my article “CDC Sued Over Absence of Childhood Vaccine Schedule Safety Data”.

For much more about how the Times does policy advocacy instead of journalism on vaccines, sign up for my newsletters to get free access to my e-book The New York Times vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: How the Mainstream Media Spread Vaccine Misinformation.