Gavin de Becker is a world-renowned criminologist and bestselling author of The Gift of Fear. His firm provided security for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during his presidential campaign (while the Biden administration was refusing to provide RFK Jr. with Secret Service protection).
His most recent book is titled Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression About Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccines, which brilliantly exposes the ludicrousness of the official denial that vaccines can cause autism.
With scathing wit and sardonicism, de Becker observes how vaccines are acknowledged to cause brain damage in some children, but if the resulting symptoms are diagnosed as “autism”, suddenly vaccines can no longer possibly be the cause.
De Becker cuts through the constant gaslighting to reveal the forbidden truth that has always been staring us all in the face.
The Government’s Partner in Crime: the IOM
The core focus of the book is to reveal how the cover up has been accomplished. You’ll hear people tell you that the idea that vaccines can cause autism has been “debunked”, but if you ask them who debunked it and how, most can’t answer.
Everyone just “knows” it because it’s what we’re constantly told.
To open the reader’s mind to the possibility that, yes, official cover ups can and do occur, de Becker starts with a discussion of how the Institute of Medicine (IOM) helped the government conceal the harms caused by Agent Orange, which the US military sprayed in Vietnam ostensibly as a defoliant, but which in effect was a chemical weapon prohibited under the 1925 Geneva Protocol.
Besides poisoning Vietnamese civilians, American soldiers suffered from the toxic effects of Agent Orange.
Obviously, the government had a motive to deny that its use of the chemical was a war crime and to deny compensation to veterans, and to assist in maintaining the façade that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that Agent Orange was responsible for veterans’ ailments, it turned to the IOM.
Listing numerous other examples where the IOM has helped to “debunk” health harms, de Becker draws the inescapable conclusion, “IOM helps the Government with crisis management, not science.”
De Becker proceeds to document how the IOM has served just as dutifully on the question of vaccines and autism.
Brain Damage Yes, Autism No?
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was established under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to effectively shift the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the pharmaceutical industry and onto the taxpaying consumers.
Under the VICP, the government has officially acknowledged that encephalitis, or brain inflammation, and encephalopathy, or brain damage, can be caused by vaccines.
In numerous instances, compensation has been paid to families of children who suffered brain damage from vaccinations.
Yet when the brain damage manifests as symptoms of autism, we’re told vaccination can’t possibly be the cause.
This cognitive dissonance is highlighted by attorney Mary Holland and coauthors in a paper published in Pace Environmental Law Review in 2011, which notes that “the VICP has been compensating cases of vaccine-induced encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder associated with autism since the inception of the program.”
Holland et al. found “eighty-three cases of autism among those compensated for vaccine-induced brain damage.”
De Becker quotes the conclusion, “Based on this preliminary assessment, there may be no meaningful distinction between the cases of encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder that the VICP compensated over the last twenty years and the cases of ‘autism’ that the VICP has denied.”
Ignoring Genetic Susceptibility
A stark admission of the government’s lack of interest in determining what risk factors place some children at higher risk of vaccine injury manifesting as symptoms of autism came from former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bernadine Healy.
In an interview with Sharyl Attkisson for CBS News, Healy admitted that the vaccine-autism hypothesis could not be rejected because studies hadn’t been done to determine whether certain subpopulations of children are at higher risk.
“The reason why they didn’t want to look for those susceptibility groups”, Healy confessed, “was because they’re afraid that if they found them, however big or small they were, that would scare the public away.”
IOM Charged to Produce a Predetermined Answer
In chapters fourteen through sixteen of Forbidden Facts, de Becker quotes extensively from a leaked transcript of a secret meeting of the IOM’s Immunization Safety Review Committee on January 12, 2001 (archived here and here).
The committee chair, Dr. Marie McCormick, stated (p.33) that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which had contracted the IOM (p.72), “wants us to declare, well, these things are pretty safe on a population basis.”
The CDC was “worried about immunization coverage rates”—and any determination that vaccines can cause autism would undermine the policy goal of keeping vaccination rates up (p. 53).
Kathleen Stratton, who led the IOM’s 2004 review on thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, said (p. 74), “The point of no return, the line we will not cross in public policy is pull the vaccine, change the schedule.”
Further into the meeting, Dr. McCormick said regarding autism that “we are not ever going to come down that it is a true side effect” (p. 97).
The predetermined conclusion was stated by Dr. Johnston (p. 127), “Then take the inadequate to accept or reject. That is a statement. That is our statement about causality. We don’t have good data that allows us to clearly say whether it is causal or not. . . . Basically, that is what they want us to do. I think we have got to do that in some way.”
Questioning Childhood Vaccines
De Becker’s book does not only address the official disinformation that studies have proven that “vaccines do not cause autism”. It also challenges popular beliefs about childhood vaccines in general, emphasizing the need for an individualized risk-benefit analysis for each vaccine and each child.
While the public messaging is that if you don’t get your child vaccinated, they are going to get the disease, the reality is that parents must weigh the very low risk of their child even being exposed to many of these pathogens, and the low risk from most of these disease if they do become infected, with the potential harms from the vaccine.
The book includes a chapter explaining how pharmaceutical companies, whose financial interests have been protected by the CDC and IOM, have repeatedly been fined for criminal offenses, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Merck, and Eli Lilly.
Normally, I’d use an affiliate link so if you buy the book I can generate some revenue to support my journalism, but Amazon has excluded Forbidden Facts from its Associates program. See, the facts it contains really are forbidden.
Order Forbidden Facts from Skyhorse Publishing.
Skyhorse, incidentally, is the publisher of my book The War on Informed Consent, which you can purchase directly from me on this site. It features a Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Order The War on Informed Consent from me.
Gavin de Becker on Joe Rogan
Watch Gavin de Becker discuss the topics covered in Forbidden Facts and much more with Joe Rogan:
During their discussion of HIV and AIDS, and how the Fauci-touted treatment AZT was killing patients, de Becker mentions a documentary called House of Numbers, which I found here:
I haven’t watched it yet so can’t comment, but I figured since I’d located it, I might as well share it, too.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses the AZT fiasco in detail in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, which I also highly recommend.
