On May 18, an X user going by the moniker “Brushfire Fairytale” (@mothrfunkr) mentioned me in a post, saying “@jeremyrhammond is brilliant when detecting the pro Pharma propaganda and gaslighting. MMR-Autism-Denmark Study.”
He’s referring to my paper in the Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine coauthored with Dr. Brian Hooker and Dr. Jeet Varia, titled “Hviid et al. 2019 Vaccine-Autism Study: Much Ado About Nothing?”
In it, we critique the 2019 MMR-autism study out of Denmark by Anders Hviid et al., which purported to show that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is not associated with autism even in genetically susceptible children.
We showed how that study was systematically biased in favor of the null hypothesis. That is, it was designed to find no association.
I also contributed to a paper in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology titled “Aluminium adjuvants and childhood health: a call for science”, which similarly critiques the 2025 study out of Denmark by Andersson et al., which purported to show no association between aluminum-containing vaccines and chronic illnesses including allergic diseases, autoimmunity, and neurodevelopmental disorders.
That study, too, was designed to find no association.
Brushfire Fairytale in his post announced he’d be hosting an X Space to discuss the topic on May 21, so I decided to join him, and we had a great conversation.
Listen to our in-depth discussion:
When announcing the Space, he also shared a link to a supposed “fact check” article by Dr. Adrian Wong in Tech ARP purporting to debunk the claim that a study by Nicolas Hulscher et al. in the Journal of Independent Medicine, titled “Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder”, proves a link between vaccines and autism.
Wong’s article begins,
Did a new “Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder” study published in the Journal of Independent Medicine prove a link between childhood vaccines and autism? Here is the definitive fact-check of the controversial paper circulating on social media.
It’s a useful example of how the real issues are completely avoided by self-proclaimed “fact checkers”.
The “verdict” is that it is “false” to claim that the paper “proves” that vaccines cause autism.
But the paper itself does not claim to prove this. Rather, it assesses evidence and argues that vaccines very well may be a significant contributing factor to the autism epidemic, and that studies should examine the health effects of the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule as a whole—which has never been done.
Wong argues that the publishing journal isn’t recognized as “reputable”. But that doesn’t make it wrong.
Wong argues,
A closer look at the bibliography used to build the “107 positive association studies” reveals a textbook case of circular reporting. Rather than synthesising independent, universally replicated data, the paper uses the oft-challenged or retracted work of its own authors and immediate ideological circle.
But this is a ridiculous argument. Wong in fact goes on to cite Hviid et al. 2019 as “gold standard evidence” showing that “vaccines do not cause autism”. But it was not “independent” and produced irreproducible findings!
Talk about hypocrisy!
And the claim that the 107 studies were the authors’ own or their “ideological” colleagues’ begs the question. It amounts to dismissing all of this scientific literature on the grounds that it doesn’t conform to the official dogma that vaccines are “safe and effective”.
Wong further argues that all of these studies are “scientifically invalid” for one of three reasons.
First, some were retracted. Wong claims, “A retracted study holds zero scientific validity and cannot be used as evidence.”
But that is false. It is possible for a scientifically valid study to never be published in the first place, just as it is possible for a valid study to be retracted for unscientific reasons.
Such is the case with the study by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and Dr. Paul Thomas, which showed that his unvaccinated patients were far healthier. The journal’s retraction of that paper was totally unjustified, a cowardly act based not on scientific but on political considerations.
The story of how Dr. Thomas was persecuted and lost his medical license for having a goal of healthy children instead of a high vaccination rate is told in my book The War on Informed Consent.
Wong’s next argument for considering cited studies as having “zero scientific validity” works strongly against him. He asserts that animal and lab studies “cannot be equated to the complex, real-world biological response of a human child following a standard vaccine schedule.”
Ergo, by his own standard, we must reject the CDC’s claim that injecting infants with aluminum-containing vaccines is “safe’—based on an assessment of orally administered soluble aluminum in rodents and not the insoluble particulate aluminum injected into human infants.
Again, Wong’s whole argument debunks itself with his glaring double standard, which reveals his true criterion for judgment: if a study supports official vaccine orthodoxy, it’s good, but if it doesn’t, it must be dismissed outright.
Wong also faults the paper for including ecological studies—but of course, again, ecological studies cited to support public vaccine policy are not considered invalid.
Wong argues that the paper equates the rising rates of autism with the increasing numbers of vaccines children are subjected to as though correlation equals causation.
But that is simply false. On the contrary, the authors explicitly emphasize that a correlation does not equal causation. So, Wong is himself engaging in a logical fallacy here: that of strawman argumentation.
Next, Wong argues that four of the ten authors of the paper have had studies retracted, including Dr. Andrew Wakefield, about whom Wong claims:
His 1998 Lancet paper was fully retracted in 2010 after an investigation proved it was based on falsified data, unethical procedures on children, and undisclosed financial motives.
But that narrative is itself false.
The paper was not retracted on the grounds that it included “falsified data” or “undisclosed financial motives”. The retraction was based on a claim of “unethical procedures on children”. But a subsequent ruling by the UK’s High Court judged that accusation to be totally baseless.
Specifically, the accusation was that the children were subjected to medical research without approval from an ethics board. But as the High Court observed, ethics approval was not required since the procedures the children underwent were clinically indicated for diagnostic and treatment purposes.
Wong also argues, “The Hulscher et al. paper completely ignores the largest, most robust epidemiological studies ever conducted on this topic.”
To support that claim, Wong cites three studies:
1. Taylor et al. (2014): A meta-analysis of five cohort studies involving 1,256,407 children and five case control studies involving 9,920 children found no association between vaccinations and autism.
2. Hviid et al. (2019): A nationwide Danish cohort study of 657,461 children followed over 5 million person-years showed that there was no increased risk in vaccinated children. More importantly, subgroup analysis of siblings with history of autism also showed no increased risk.
3. Jain et al. (2015): A retrospective cohort study of 95,727 children with older siblings with and without autism, showed that MMR vaccination was not associated with an increased risk of ASD.
But here Wong is just brazenly lying. In fact, Hulscher et al. do cite the respective studies by Taylor, Hviid, and Jain.
Wong’s characterization of Jain et al. 2015 is also false. In fact, that study was not designed to test the hypothesis that MMR vaccination is associated with an increased risk of autism.
Instead, it was designed to test the hypothesis that parents of children with an elder sibling with autism are less likely to do the MMR vaccine with young siblings.
And that is exactly what they found: it wasn’t that children who received the MMR vaccine were no more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who didn’t; rather, children at higher risk for autism were less likely to receive the MMR vaccine.
That is, children at higher risk are pooled into the “MMR-unvaccinated” cohort—a selection bias called “healthy user bias” that needs to be controlled for.
Hviid et al. 2019 knew about that selection bias. They cited it and even adopted from Jain et al. their definition of “genetic susceptibility”, which was having an older sibling with autism. And yet Hviid et al. did nothing to control for this healthy vaccinee bias.
That is a strong indication that the study by Hviid et al. was designed to find no association.
Wong concludes:
Verdict: False & Misleading—”Determinants of Autism” Paper Does Not Prove Vaccines Cause Autism
But of course, that is a strawman fallacy since the paper does not claim to “prove” this; it instead provides a reasonable argument, based upon scientific evidence, that studies to date have not ruled out vaccinations as a significant causal factor in the autism epidemic—and it consequently calls for studies to examine the long-term health effects of the CDC’s schedule as a whole.
Wong’s article includes the following image intended to convey his key point:
Utilizing ChatGPT, I have fixed it:
We’re supposed to believe that studies have proven that vaccines do not cause autism. But here’s the truth:
No studies have been designed to test the hypothesis that vaccinating children according to official recommendations can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible subpopulations of children—and consequently, it isn’t logically possible for that hypothesis to have been falsified.
I reveal that fundamental reality in a 45-minute presentation title “A Tale of Two Studies”, which aired on CHD.TV in April. Watch it here:
