Major Pharmaceutical/Biotech Donors (Examples from Recent Years) Here are recurring or notable pharmaceutical-related donors from FY 2020–2023 reports (and similar in other years):

• Amgen Inc. (and Amgen Foundation) — Frequently listed in higher tiers.

• AstraZeneca PLC — Regular supporter.

• Bayer Corporation (and related entities).

• Genentech (Roche subsidiary).

• GlaxoSmithKline (GSK, including Biologicals and Foundation).

• Johnson & Johnson (and Foundation).

• Merck & Co., Inc. (Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Merck Foundation)

• Moderna Charitable Foundation.

• Pfizer Inc. (and Pfizer Foundation)

• Roche Diagnostics (and related).

• Sanofi (e.g., Sanofi-Aventis).

• Takeda Pharmaceuticals (and related entities).

Other frequent or notable mentions include: AbbVie, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead, Novartis, Regeneron, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics/lab companies like Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, and Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics.

cdcfoundation.org

Context and Notes

• Scale and transparency: The Foundation has received hundreds of millions from corporations overall (e.g., ~$80M from companies in FY2014–2018). It publishes donor lists and program-specific funding. Some critics have raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest (e.g., donations tied to specific drugs or campaigns like flu prevention from Roche). The Foundation and CDC use disclaimers on materials.

  science.org

• Recent trends: Lists evolve yearly; government grants and large foundations (e.g., Gates, Robert Wood Johnson) often dominate totals, but pharma companies contribute notably to infectious disease, vaccines, and chronic disease efforts. Check the latest FY reports on cdcfoundation.org for full, current lists.

  cdcfoundation.org

• Examples of funded work: Pfizer for cryptococcal disease prevention; Merck for maternal mortality; Biogen for newborn screening.

  lowninstitute.org

Cumulative support from the Gates Foundation appears to be in the range of tens of millions of dollars (likely $40–80+ million) in the last decade.

"From: Bowman, David (HRSA) [mailto:DBowman@hrsa.gov]
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 5:22 PM
To: 'dkirby@nyc.rr.com'
Subject: HRSA Statement
David,
In response to your most recent inquiry, HRSA has the following statement: The government has never compensated, nor has it ever been ordered to compensate, any case based on a determination that autism was actually caused by vaccines.
We have compensated cases in which children exhibited an encephalopathy, or general brain disease. Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.

Some children who have been compensated for vaccine injuries may have shown signs of autism before the decision to compensate, or may ultimately end up with autism or autistic symptoms, but we do not track cases on this basis.

Regards, David Bowman
Office of Communications Health Resources and Services Administration 301-443-3376"

So... The HHS official and public position for the last 17 years is not that vaccines can cause autism, it is that vaccines can cause brain damage that progresses into autism.

Narrow it down to ten? Have you met me? My blog is called, “In Many Words” https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/what-do-we-want-see-below-when-do

1. An end Autism Wandering/Drowning deaths.

2. Vaccine - autism causation specifically the differential diagnosis in the literature to differentiate between Autism and Vaccine Induced Encephalopathy, if there is a difference. https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/is-it-vaccine-induced-encephalopathy. A clear path to a standard of care diagnosis when a vaccine injury is suspected by parents, and a clarification of the responsibility of doctors to a child when a potential vaccine injury is reported. https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/dear-secretary-kennedy

3. Demanding answers from, or decoupling from, the AAP as they neither answer the questions of parents, offer parents any standing before the organization, nor treat autism.

4. The the prioritization of NIH funded research on the known successful treatments of autism that have arisen from the community since the 1960s, and an end to autism research funds being used as a jobs for science nerds program rather than serving struggling kids and adults . https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/the-standard-of-care-for-autism-is

5.Financial support and debt relief for autism families. https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/my-invoice-to-government-21m

6. A national registry of, and partnerships with, doctors who medically treat autism and associated disorders, and an end to the attack on dissident doctors.

7. Guidance for physicians on recommendations for individual medical treatments for autism and its associated disorders such as dietary interventions, Gastrointestinal treatments, Anti-inflammatories, hyperbaric, detoxification, addressing infections , autoimmune conditions an others. Again, https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/what-do-we-want-see-below-when-do

8. The recognition and prioritization of individuals with severe autism. https://gingertaylor.substack.com/p/america-discovers-that-severe-autism

9. Maternal and caregiver health.

10.Ending the conflict between the Neurodiverse and the vaccine injured. All those diagnosed with autism, and their caregivers, need to be served and treated honorably.

And as an aside can we stop putting stock images of people with perfect eye contact and big smiles on the cover of the strategic plan?

KThanksBye

After much consulting with my constituency, I have narrowed down the list of things that we would like addressed to a mere list of 166 points.

I have further pared that down to a digestible, categorized, two pager:

Prevention

-Vaccines

• Hold vaccine manufacturers liable again

• Vaccine-Specific Reactions

• Differentiate between autism and vaccine induced encephalopathy

• State Medicaid waiver use after vaccine injury

• Open access to vaccine safety databases.

• Education for doctors: Make them read the vaccine inserts and VICP table.

-Diet

• Diet while pregnant (standard American diet vs. Weston Price type diet or organics)

• Brain protection potential of vitamin K2-MK4, D3 and vitamin A in cod liver oil

Diagnostics

• Autism biomarkers for diagnosis in to sub categories of Autism.

• Restoring the DSM to its pre 2013 functional status regarding diagnostic criteria of autism.

• Evaluation of MTFHR Polymorphisms, Glyphosate toxicity, and microbiome ecology.

• Diagnosis and treatment of whole body apraxia. This apraxia changes the definition of what we thought autism was. What has been described as “behavior ,” for years, is a brain-body disconnect they cannot control.

• Regression in adults with autism

Medical research

-Co occuring conditions

• PANS, PANDAS, autoimmunity and neuro-inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, toxicities, oxidative stress, parasites, mold, viruses, bacteria, heavy metals, insecticides, cumulative toxicity,EMF Sensitivity, adrenal fatigue, Vagus Nerve involvement, acid in food and cerebral folate deficiency, and Cell danger response .

-Treatments to research and implement accordingly

• We need facilities that actually TREAT for autism, etc... inpatient - medically, integrative approach - treat the underlying cause rather than just throwing psych meds at them and locking them up in facilities.

• Various dietary and nutritional interventions.

• Research on THC, IV platelet therapy, Sequential amino acid modulation injections not yet approved in USA, Suramin, Ketamine, Clozapine, antivirals for autism, probiotics, methylation, Stem Cell treatment, Homeopathy, MrtRed light therapy, Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, Micro-current Neurofeedback, Gcmaf, chlorine dioxide, effective safe heavy metal detox methods, Vitamin and mineral replacement like mB12.

• The impact of food, sugar, food dyes, preservatives, pesticides, oxalate, processed food

• biochemical pathway of OCD

Support Services

• Alternative Communication + Nonverbal Intelligence- Study the efficacy of, visual-symbol systems, spelling boards, AAC tech, and other flame-based modes

• “We need homes for our adult children once we’re gone. We need activities and a life for our adult children.”

• Presuming competence in this population!!! They are ALL in there – trapped!

• Compensation. “I need vacation from advocating and crying.”

• Improved communication between parents and the federal system

• Each of our children needs their own different schooling that can teach them accordingly.

• Track And support mothers who are having strokes, heart failure, Cancers, assault injuries and PTSD.

• End the medical neglect our kids suffer at the hands of medical professionals.

• Classify autism as a medical disorder instead of just a developmental disorder, let the systems open for insurance reimbursement, medical treatment and research opportunities.

Dear Secretary Kennedy,

I am writing to you as the mother of a young adult son named Chandler.

Chandler is diagnosed with autism having suffered developmental regression following vaccines received at his 18-month well-baby visit in 2003. Although we long understood that his autism was caused by his vaccines, I did not learn until 2007, when somebody literally handed me a copy of the Vaccine Injury Table (the “Table”), that his autism resulted from Pertussis Vaccine Encephalopathy (VE), a recognized vaccine adverse event associated with the DTaP vaccine he received at his 18-month pediatrician visit.

While we had heard of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), the only legal recourse to those injured by vaccines like the DTaP, we did not think that we had the evidence to show what we knew to be true – that Chandler’s autistic regression was caused by a vaccine. Unfortunately, when I first saw the Table in 2007 and it was clear to me that he had what should be a compensable Table Injury, the three-year statute of limitation had already passed. Thus, we were barred from filing for compensation in the VICP on his behalf.

Even though we could not file in the VICP, we still tried to have him evaluated for vaccine encephalopathy. However, we could not find a doctor – including Chandler’s pediatrician – to perform such an evaluation.

We asked our pediatrician for a standard of care evaluation for the adverse event. Such an evaluation would be conducted in the manner that a competent similarly-trained medical provider would provide under similar circumstances, i.e., following the standard of care. I truly believed that there must be a rigorous standard of care for physicians to follow in such circumstances. She said that she would look into it what such an evaluation would entail and get back to us. After six weeks elapsed with no response, I made another appointment and again asked her what she had learned on how to proceed. She claimed that she really didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I walked her through the Table (with which she did not seem familiar) and repeated that I was looking for a standard of care evaluation for pertussis vaccine induced encephalopathy. She again said that she would look into it. However, when almost a year had passed with no contact from her office, it became clear that she was not going respond to my request in any way.

I filed a simple one page complaint against her with the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine (attached). I asked the Board the following question:

What is the duty of a physician to his patient when a parent reports a suspected vaccine injury?

The Board accepted my complaint for processing and asked the doctor to respond to some questions. In a written statement through her lawyers, the pediatrician dishonestly answered the Board’s questions, gaslighting me in the process. In reply, I submitted an additional ten pages of information to address her demonstrably untrue statements.

As the doctor involved had spent so much time “playing dumb,” in responding to my complaint, I also included a more pointed reiteration of my question involved in this inquiry:

So the very simple, central and precedent setting question I am putting before this board is:

(1) If the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), associated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has federally recommended a vaccine, and

(2) if the State of Maine has in turn mandated that vaccine for daycare and school admission, then
(3) if a parent or guardian has vaccinated his or her child with this vaccine, and
(4) that parent or guardian suspects that the child has suffered an adverse vaccine reaction,
is that child entitled to a formal evaluation for vaccine injury by a qualified doctor based on an established medical standard of care?

I then asked the Board to consider the following questions related to my initial inquiry:

The resulting questions then follow in this case are:

• If not, why not?

• If so, is there a standard of care for the assessment of Vaccine-induced encephalopathy?

• If not, why not, as the condition defined by HHS more than 25 years ago, and the VICP has paid more than 1,000 cases of VE, thus presumably must have medical assessment criteria.

• Did Dr. John Smith have access to that standard of care assessment?

• If not, why not?

• If so, why was that standard of care assessment not implemented?

• If Dr. Smith didn’t know of a standard of care, what measures did he take to find one?

• What agencies or organizations are responsible to Dr. Smith to provide him the information he needs to properly assess his patients, and how does he go about getting that information?

• Was Dr. Smith obligated to do a cursory screening and document that my son does meet the minimum requirement laid out in the table for VE, a neurological change following pertussis vaccine accompanied by diminished eye contact?

• If Dr. Smith exhausted all of his means of finding the standard of care for this vaccine injury, was he obligated to make contact with us to tell us, make further recommendations, or tell us that he would not be attempting to pursue this matter any further?

• Has this system set Dr Smith up for failure to perform his ethical duty to provide medical assessment and treatment for my son, and my son up for a life time of medical neglect in the event he has sustained vaccine induced brain damage?

• What are my rights as a parent and Chandler’s as a patient? What is my remedy to this very upsetting turn of events?”

At that point, the Board seems to have abandoned the pursuit of truth and reason my questions presented. Instead, the Board inexplicably and contrary to fact ruled that the episode was merely a misunderstanding between doctor and patient. Moreover, the subtext of the ruling was that this was a communication problem on my part. I was offered no further input on the matter, nor any path forward. The Board ignored my subsequent communications. Additionally, the doctor threw me out of the medical practice because they said that I “didn’t trust them.” However, they retained my children as patients.

I believed it was the duty of the Board to educate the doctor from the literature on the standard of care for vaccine encephalopathy as presented by the VICP. This episode seemed to confirm my suspicion that there was no discussion in the medical training literature on how to offer standard of care diagnosis for vaccine induced encephalopathy.

The Board’s tacit answer to my question was that the standard of care for assessing a reported vaccine injury is essentially medical negligence. In other words, the standard of care did not require the doctor to do anything, not even respond to me.

For more than a decade, I have attempted to find training in the medical literature for pediatricians that will educate them on what a vaccine-induced encephalopathy looks like, but I have not been able to find any.

Additionally, I have been trying to get an answer to the question that Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding on CNN in 2008, “What is the difference between autism and vaccine encephalopathy.” Dr. Gerberding never answered the question and I can find no such answer anywhere in the medical literature.

My request to you and to those who are working with you so earnestly on issues related to vaccines, the VICP, the ACIP, and other challenges, is that you please either differentiate between regressive autism and vaccine induced encephalopathy or define that they are, in many cases, the same thing, and that you mandate training for doctors to recognize this VICP Table Injury and other adverse events potentially related to vaccines.

Frankly, I believe that a doctor unable or unwilling to recognize the potential connection to vaccines for both Table Injuries and the adverse events listed in vaccine package inserts is not qualified to administer a vaccine. For too many years, families affected by vaccine injury have been gaslit, ignored, and mocked. Please close the loopholes in medical education concerning vaccine injuries. Recognition of these potential injuries, a proper standard of care diagnosis, identifying and providing treatments to vaccine injured children and adults, and fair compensation to families so that they may care for their injured loved ones are morally and ethically imperative.

Sincerely,

Ginger Taylor, MS

Attachment: https://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-brought-my-doctor-before-state.html

Full account for documentation purposes. (Although Chandler’s doctor was female, in this account I call her “he” in order to preserve her privacy)

Since the passage of the 2006 Combating Autism Act and its subsequent iterations over the last 20 years, Federal agencies have been given $3.08 billion to provide for federal efforts to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent autism spectrum disorders.

The current law directs the creation of programs to provide, “evidence-based interventions to meet the needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorder or other developmental disabilities across their lifespan and the needs of their families through Federal programs.” Autism Families are explicitly recognized as the direct beneficiaries of these programs.

So do the outcomes of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants , “meet the needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorders and their families”?

Timeline of Federal Autism Research Funding (21st Century)

Year / Period: 2000

Legislation / Bill: Children’s Health Act (P.L. 106-310)

Funding Authorized: No specific dollar figure; established programs

Focus: Created NIH Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE), started federal autism research coordination

Year / Period: 2006–2011

Legislation / Bill: Combating Autism Act (P.L. 109-416)

Funding Authorized: $950 million over 5 years (~$190M/year)

Focus: Research, early diagnosis, intervention, and CDC surveillance; created Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)

Year / Period: 2011–2014

Legislation / Bill: Combating Autism Reauthorization Act (P.L. 112-32)

Funding Authorized: Continued $190M/year ($570M total)

Focus: Extended prior funding; maintained IACC and research programs

Year / Period: 2014–2019

Legislation / Bill: Autism CARES Act (P.L. 113-157)

Funding Authorized: $1.3 billion over 5 years (~$260M/year)

Focus: Expanded NIH ACE research, Health Resources and Services Administration

(HRSA) services, CDC epidemiology; coordinated federal autism programs

Year / Period: 2019–2024

Legislation / Bill: Autism CARES Act Reauthorization (P.L. 116-60)

Funding Authorized: $260M/year ($1.3B over 5 years)

Focus: Continued research, expanded focus on adults, lifelong support, and services; strengthened coordination by IACC

Coordination of Federal refunded autism research in the 21st century has been guided by the IACC, created in 2006 and maintained in all reauthorizations. NIH has received the largest share of funding, primarily for research, longitudinal studies, and the Autism Centers of Excellence. CDC funding steadily increased to improve epidemiology and prevalence tracking. HRSA’s share grew under CARES, reflecting more investment in direct services, family support, and training for healthcare providers. Overall, total annual funding increased from ~$190 million/year under the 2006 Combating Autism Act to ~$260 million/year under CARES.

Yet a the vast amount of research funding has not been used to further the stated goal of meeting “the needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorders and their families,” used to justify the expenditure of these taxpayer dollars.

This piece will discuss our advances in knowledge on ASD before, during, and after the early 21^st century federal funding era.

PART 1

OUR UNDERSTANDING, DIAGNOSIS, TREATMENT, AND PREVENTION OF AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS,

1943-2005

Kanner

Autism is defined by Leo Kanner in his 1943 paper, Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact

written during his tenure at Johns Hopkins University. The disorder defining paper begins, “Since 1938, There have come to our attention a number of children whose condition differs so markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far that each case contains merits – and, I hope, will eventually receive a detailed consideration of its fascinating peculiarities.”

The paper assessed eleven patients from The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic and The Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Child Study Center of Maryland . The first person reported to be diagnosed with autism was “Donald T.” born in 1931. Had Donald received the “detailed consideration” of his condition, the world may have learned that Donald recovered from Autism at age 12 via cheation, as a side effect of medical treatment for juvenile arthritis.

Instead the world learned of this dramatic turn of events in 2005, a full 68 years later, when a reporter, trying to learn about the history of autism, tracked down Donald Triplett, “Donald T.” in his home town of Forest, Mississippi.

Olmsted

Dan Olmsted, reporting for the Associated Press, after meeting Donald’s brother, retold his brother’s account of Donald’s recovery:

“At age 12 Donald had been living with a nearby farm couple. “One February day, I think it was, they came to (town) with Don. He had a bad fever and was obviously sick.” His joints were swollen and stiff, his brother said.

“My father and mother took him to all various places for examination — they went to Mayo Clinic, brought him back. He lost his appetite and was terribly emaciated. But anyway, my father was talking to a doctor (in a nearby town) he happened to run into and said, ‘It looks like Don is getting ready to die.’”

The doctor said, “What you’re describing sounds like a rare case of juvenile arthritis.” Diagnosis in hand, his parents took Donald to the eminent Campbell Clinic in Memphis, where he was treated with the then-standard remedy, gold salts. “He just had a miraculous response to the medicine,” Donald’s brother said. “The pain in his joints went away.”

And here’s the kicker: “When he was finally released the nervous condition he was formerly afflicted with was gone. The proclivity toward excitability and extreme nervousness had all but cleared up.” He also became “more social.”

In other words, Donald got a lot better. He went on to college, joined a fraternity, worked at a bank, owns a house, drives a car, belongs to the Kiwanis and the Presbyterian Church and plays a good game of golf despite one fused knuckle left over from the arthritis attack.

And now, in retirement, he travels the world. That explained why he wasn’t in town — he was off having a good time. Last stop: Italy. Favorite city: Istanbul.”

Donald was successfully treated for arthritis in 1947 during which he was also successfully treated for his “Autism.” Although Kanner reported Triplett’s recovery from autism he, did not report the fact that it followed a treatment with gold salts which address both mercury toxicity and autoimmunity, but rather Kanner reported but he believed that it was due to Triplett’s living circumstance with the family in the country.

In this first episode of the first recorded autism case we see the gestalt that is repeated over the last 8 decades. Families reporting successful autism treatments after treating the medical symptoms of the person with autism and the failure of the medical community to learn from the families and further the research on those successful medical interventions.

Olmsted continued, “Donald’s brother told us Johns Hopkins researchers have been in touch every decade to check on Donald, but we’re not aware of any published accounts of Donald’s improvement following the gold-salts treatment — something his brother volunteered to us in a half hour of conversation.”

Because of the misattribution of Donald’s recovery to his change in circumstance rather than medical intervention for a toxic/autoimmune disorder, two paths were set. The path of the medical community’s approach to autism became one of change in external circumstance rather than recognition of autoimmune and toxicological impacts and medical treatment for them. Here begins the split between the medical community and autism families in their approach to autism treatment.

The same disconnect between families and medical providers existed on autism causation is evident in Kanner’s reporting on the initial 11 cases. Ms. Miller, the mother of the third case, reported autistic regression and gastrointestinal symptoms following a smallpox vaccine.

“Case 3. Richard M. was referred to the Johns Hopkins Hospital on February 5, 1941, at 3 years, 3 months of age, with the complaint of deafness because he did not talk and did not respond to questions.”

“Following smallpox vaccination at 12 months, he had an attack of diarrhea and fever, from which he recovered in somewhat less than a week.”

“In September, 1940, the mother, in commenting on Richard’s failure to talk, remarked in her notes: I can’t be sure just when he stopped the imitation of words sounds. It seems that he has gone backward mentally gradually for the last two years.”

The timeline for William Richard Miller’s, “Richard M” regression as reported by his mother, is:

November 1937 – Born
November 1938 – Vaccinated with Smallpox vaccine
September 1940 – Mother reports developmental regression beginning approximately two years previously, in 1938
February 1941 – Referred to Hopkins for evaluation

So within the first 11 cases diagnosed with “Autism” we have parental reports of regression following vaccination, gastrointestinal distress, autoimmunity, and successful autism recovery via a mercury chelator. All were observed by families beginning in the 1930s, before autism had a name, and those same reports are still being made today by the tens of thousands, 82 years later.

Subsequent to Kanner’s reporting on the disorder, Bruno Bettelheim set the treatment standard for autism for the next decade teaching that autism was caused buy so-called refrigerator mothers who hated their children. Bettelheim believed that children with autism knew that their mothers hated them and as a response turned inward away from all social connection. Treatment then became removal from the parents and placement in a facility run by Bettelheim. Mothers were then placed in Freudian Psychoanalysis to help them understand why they hated their children. This is one of the most abusive and disturbing episodes in the evolution of mental health interventions in the 20th century.

Rimland
Bettelheim’s pernicious reign over autism treatment did not end until the 1960s when a Navy psychologist by the name of Bernard Rimland issued a publication announcing that his son’s autism was not a mental disorder caused by his parents lack of love for him but rather a medical condition. Rimland’s 1964 book Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implication for a Neural Theory of Behavior, lead to the opening of Rimland’s Autism Research Institute in 1967. Shortly thereafter mothers of children with autism began writing to Rimland to report that when their children were given B vitamins, their behavioral symptoms improved. Initially Rimland did not take the maternal reports seriously until he had received more than X letters, when he then decided to undertake a research project on the effect of B vitamins on those with autism in 1974 . Rimland found that B12 supplementation provided health and behavioral improvement in those with autism, and set out on a lifelong journey to find medical interventions that improved the lives of those with an autism diagnosis which lasted until his death in 2006.

Eggers
Contained within Leo Kanner’s first 11 cases was the groundwork for both the causes and potential treatments for autism . Although Case number 3 , William Ritchey Miller, was reportedly a regressive case of autism onset following vaccination, and accompanied by gastrointestinal symptoms, no research on whether or not vaccines were causative in autism would be published until in 1976 German paper by G. Eggers who would report that vaccines have a triggering effect on autism cases.

“Autistiches Syndrom (Kanner) und Pockenschutzimpfung.” Translation: Autistic Syndrome (Kanner) and Vaccination against Smallpox, when translated into Engish, reads, “3-4 weeks following an otherwise uncomplicated first vaccination against smallpox a boy, then aged 15 months … gradually developed a complete Kanner syndrome. The question whether vaccination and early infantile autism might be connected is being discussed. A causal relationship is considered extremely unlikely. But vaccination is recognized as having a starter function for the onset of autism.”

The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act
By 1986 the questions on whether or not vaccines can cause autism were so widely discussed that Congress included in the act the directive that, “the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall complete a review of all relevant medical and scientific information (including information obtained from the studies required under subsection (e)) on the nature, circumstances, and extent of the relationship, if any, between vaccines containing pertussis and... Autism.”

The Autism Research Institute
Bernard Rimland’s work at the Autism Research Institute evaluated autism treatments already being independently implemented by parents who had long since abandoned the wait for the medical community to give them solutions to their struggling children’s conditions. Since 1967, the Autism Research Institute has been collecting feedback about the usefulness of a variety of interventions.

Ratings of Behavioral Effects of Biomedical Interventions Survey

“Data have been collected from the more than 26,000 individuals and family members who have completed our questionnaires designed to collect such information. ARI’s ratings report responses on a six-point scale combined into three categories: “made worse” (ratings 1 and 2), “no effect” (ratings 3 and 4), and “made better” (ratings 5 and 6). The “Better:Worse” column gives the number of children who “Got Better” for each one who “Got Worse.”

ARI began publishing evaluations by parents scoring the still experimental interventions that they were trying. A 2008 report listed the effectiveness of no interventions as follows.

Parent ratings 2009

83.2KB ∙ PDF file

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PART 2

OUR UNDERSTANDING, DIAGNOSIS, TREATMENT, AND PREVENTION OF AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS,

2006 – 2025

In 2006, finally convinced that autism represented an urgent health crisis in American children, Congress passed the 2006 Combating Autism Act , and 3 subsequent laws authorizing approximately $3.08 billion for autism research and related programs. The last of which expired at the end of FY 2024, September 30, 2024.

Of the medical interventions that parents reported as having beneficial effects between 1967 and 2008, no advancement on our understanding of these interventions took place via the research funded by the NIH. Of the nutritional interventions that have showed dramatic improvements in the medical conditions and behaviors of children diagnosed with autism, none of them were studied by NIH.

Although parents reported dietary intervention for autism as the highest rated and most effective intervention medical intervention at the beginning of the 21st century funding cycle, the current AAP recommendations In their baseline recommendations for the treatment of autism, after $300 million worth of research by NIH …

AAP has not advanced in their medical understanding of autism since the dawn of the 21st century.

CLINICAL REPORT Guidance for the Clinician in Rendering Pediatric Care, The American Academy of Pediatrics

Executive Summary: Identification, Evaluation, and Management of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“Many interventions, including many nutritional interventions, do not have evidence to support their use at this time.”

Even as it acknowledges that ...

“Examples of common co-occurring conditions are disorders of sleep, feeding problems, gastrointestinal symptoms, obesity, seizures, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, wandering or elopement, and others.”

This was the position held by the AAP before the NIH funded research.

Their clinical care guidelines do not reflect the experiences of parents of the late 20th century but rather like the early medical paradigms, focus on the care and support of the child in the family and community. While such wrap around support is vital for the development and care of the person with autism, It reflects the bias from the beginning of the autism era the medical interventions should be ignored by the medical community, it seems to reject any medical evaluations, interventions, or research that could further the notion that autism is iatrogenic. The same way Kanner credited community support For Donald T’s miraculous recovery while ignoring medical interventions going back to late 1940s , The AAP in 2025 teaches physicians to emphasize community support and discourages medical interventions.

AAP and NIH has not advanced in their understanding of Autism since NIH Funding began in 2006.

NIH has failed to provide, “evidence-based interventions to meet the needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorder or other developmental disabilities and their families.”

And AAP is fine with that, even recommending against Leucovorin.

Today, in 2025, despite NIH being granted more than $300 million in research funds, the Standard Of Care is still the Medical Neglect of Children and Adults With Autism.

Please go read Katie Wright's piece, The Medical Neglect of Children and Adults with Autism, about the medical neglect of AAP and NIH, and her attempts to discuss vaccine research with NIH. Long story short they won't even tell the mother of the child whose vaccine regression resulted in the founding of Autism Speaks, the names of the people that are supposed to be working on these federally funded projects.

I am pleased to announce that today I took my oath of office to serve on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee along with my esteemed cohorts John Gilmore, Honey Rinicella, and Caden Larson. I am grateful to have been invited by Robert F Kennedy Jr., to have the chance to ask the difficult questions that our community has been posing, and which still await recognition.

The tremendous reversal of fortune that God has orchestrated today is not lost on me. Over the course of the last 20 years God has taken me from naive young mother who worked hard to get the original Combating Autism Act passed by Congress, to one of Tom Insel’s harshest critics, to organizing dignified protests inside the committee room, to abandoning the committee altogether as a lost cause and a waste of money, to eventually becoming a member of the IACC.

My personal timeline tells quite a story, and it is also our collective community’s story, one of being complete outsiders with the door, locked to us, fighting for entry for 20 years, becoming a part of a national movement to overthrow the pharmaceutical control of government, and finally getting to be a part of the solution to the autism epidemic. I am sure I am not the only one who is looking forward to fighting from the inside and having an actual seat at the table.

The 2006 Combating Autism Act directs the creation of the IACC, and programs to provide, “evidence-based interventions to meet the needs of individuals with autism spectrum disorder or other developmental disabilities and their families through Federal programs.” Autism Families are explicitly recognized as the direct beneficiaries of these programs.

What has resulted from this law in reality, is that NIH was given $308M over the course of 20 years to research autism and service to those with ASD and their families. However, they have not advanced our understanding of autism causation or treatment at all. It has not been interventions to meet the most urgent needs of people with autism and their families. What has resulted from this 20 year injustice is the reinforcement of the horrible reality that The Standard Of Care For Autism Is Medical Neglect. It is my intent to continue to work for the well-being of our children to the best of my ability, and to reverse this injustice so that our loved ones get care and support that they have been promised.

I ask you for the for a few things in support of this new battlefield.

First that you reengage with the IACC. Most of us started ignoring this committee at least a decade ago as it was clear they were simply going to keep ignoring us.

1. Please re engage as those of us on the committee will need your support and your voices.
2. Next if you could pull up any letters that you have previously written to this committee and resend them. To submit a Public Comment to the IACC contact the NIMH Office of National Autism Coordination (ONAC), please email IACCPublicInquiries@mail.nih.gov.
3. Watch the meetings, have watch parties with your friends, and send us comments through the IACC portal when it is over.
4. Start paying close attention to what NIH is spending their research dollars in regard to autism.

Third, Follow me on X and Substack.

Forth, follow my favorite NIH watchdog, Katie Wright, on X https://x.com/katiewr31413491/ and Substack https://katiewright.substack.com/

I would like to thank Kim Spencer for agreeing to be my Sherpa and accompany me to DC for meetings.

Additionally, I want to recognize my former partners Mark Blaxill and Jennifer Larson. When we started the Canary Party in 2011, it was because Mark, and the late, great Dan Olmsted, had recognized that we had won the research debate in 2008, and that the establishment was never going to recognize it, so this had become a political fight. We then began to pull together various parts of the health freedom community to work as one political movement. We have gone from tilting at windmills, to becoming a foundational part of the international movement that is now known as MAHA to joining “the establishment”. Mark is now working inside CDC and Jennifer will be at the side of her son Caden who has gone from being a nonverbal 11 year old when we started the Canary party, to a nationally known adult Speller who will be advocating for people like himself on the IACC, with me. To all of you who joined with us to storm the castle, you have my eternal love and gratitude.

It should never have been so hard help these precious little ones. Many of whom are now precious large ones.

Finally, I would like to let you know that when I submitted my resume for this position I sent the following version which is as vaccine heavy as I could make it. https://gingertaylor.org/resume/ I thought if I make this obnoxiously vaccine related and they don’t want me, then this is not a committee I want to be on, because I don’t wanna sit and spend the next five years being ignored. I can do that from the comfort of my home without hauling myself up to DC.

The fact that the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary has chosen someone like me, being as unapologetically vocal as I am about my vaccine stance, encourages me that the Trump administration is very serious about tackling our issues. So I hope that my appointment is encouraging to you, that they are truly working toward doing what we asked them to do in the 1st place in 2006.

Pray for me, I’m going in. Seriously. Pray for me.

“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 1:6

The medical term for brain and spinal cord inflammation is Encephalomyelitis.

Both encephalitis and encephalomyelitis can cause brain damage.

The medical term for brain damage is Encephalopathy.

This week I was on a thread where Dr. Nick Mark claimed that vaccines did not cause encephalopathy, and recommended a fellow medical provider Harry Fisher be reported to his medical board for claiming that it did. https://x.com/nickmmark/status/1993806532090450191

I, and many others, explained to him that he was incorrect and showed him how he was incorrect.

Jessica Rojas offered him the Merck manual’s definition of encephalitis (brain swelling that causes brain damage) as vaccine induced:

Dr. Mark ignored it.

We further explained that it is the conclusion of all departments in HHS is that it vaccines do cause brain damage. I offered him the list of vaccine maker created, FDA approved, vaccine package inserts of the shots that state that they are associated with/ contraindicated for encephalitis/encephalomyelitis/encephalopathy:

• DTaP (Infanrix, Daptacel)

• Tdap (Boostrix, Adacel)

• DT

• Pentacel

• Kinrix

• Quadracel

• Vaxelis

• Pediarix

• MMR (M-M-R II, Priorix)

• MMRV (ProQuad)

• Varicella (Varivax)

• Hepatitis B (Engerix-B, Recombivax HB)

• Influenza (Fluzone, Fluarix, etc.)

Dr. Mark ignored them.

Then we offered him the HRSA Vaccine Injury Compensation Program table of injuries that included vaccine induced encephalopathy.

Dr. Mark's capacity for ignoring official information exceeded anyone's expectation.

Another doctor recommended that I ignore the federal government and go and look at the research. That’s when I remembered an Italian researcher years ago had given me a list of papers that showed vaccine induced brain damage spanning from 1926 to 2008. I pulled it up and found that it was 382 pages long, and had 8,546 citations. I have opened a few of these, however I have not vetted the entire list. It is presented here for your edification.

Silence. He never even acknowledged any of this.

Even when given all of this factual information, some doctors will cling to their completely wrong information rather than just accept the very old recognition of vaccine injury. Or even learn from their own medical authorities about a vaccine adverse events if they don't want to.

And now you are armed with this information to teach those who are willing to learn.

Their child is vaccinated in the first two years of life with dozens of doses vaccines, often 8 at a time, including either a pertussis containing or measles containing vaccine.

The child exhibits the symptoms of “decreased level of consciousness,” an HHS defined symptom set of vaccine injury, including of eye contact and not recognizing daddy anymore when he comes home from work.

Mother takes child back to the pediatrician and says my child is not OK. He won’t look at us, he won’t talk to us, he doesn’t even seem recognize us anymore.

Doctor says "Your child has autism.”

Mother says, “This started right after his 18 month vaccines, could the vaccines have done this??

The doctor, who has likely never read the Vaccine Injury Table, may not know that vaccines can cause brain swelling and brain damage, and has been trained to see the symptoms of loss of eye contact and disconnect from family as “autism.” His training teaches him to do no medical examination whatsoever, so he does not look for brain inflammation, but instead sends the child for an autism evaluation, and then to a speech therapist.

But not before he shames the mother for reporting what he does not know is a textbook vaccine injury case, and tells her that “vaccines do not cause autism.”

The child is never properly medically assessed, not medically treated, lives for years with ongoing brain inflammation, and is not compensated for lifelong brain damage due to the vaccine adverse event.

The pediatrician then continues to vaccinate the child according to the CDC schedule, causing further damage.

This is a 35 year old con perpetuated by the Department of Health and Human Services and their financial partners in the American Academy of Pediatrics.

For years when I tried discussing this with doctors who continue to insist that “vaccines do not cause autism,” I have explained the similarities between the autism that they are trained to diagnose, and the HHS defined vaccine encephalopathy that has been hidden from their view, and I have asked them this question:

“When a 2 year old child is presented to a physician and displays the symptoms of loss of eye contact, and failing to recognize familiar family members, then mom reports that these symptoms began shortly after his 18 month vaccines, what is the differential diagnosis used in order to determine whether or not this child is experiencing vaccine encephalopathy, or Autism? Or both?

Show me, from the literature, where doctors are taught to differentiate between the two.”

I have never received a response. If this question is asked on Twitter said doctors usually ghost me. When Sanjay Gupta asked the head of CDC Julie Gerberding a version of this question on CNN in April of 2008, she didn't answer the question either. So I leave this question here so we can just cut straight to the point and post it directly to doctors making these uninformed claims about vaccine safety.

Vaccine Induced Encephalopathy, per the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Human Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Vaccine Injury Table established by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), is just a medical rebranding of vaccine induced autism. HHS reports that the vaccine injury, known to be caused by both pertussis containing vaccines and measles containing vaccines, displays symptoms including:

“Encephalopathy. A vaccine recipient shall be considered to have suffered an encephalopathy if an injury meeting the description below of an acute encephalopathy occurs within the applicable time period and results in a chronic encephalopathy, as described in paragraph (d) of this section.

(i) Acute encephalopathy.

(A) For children less than 18 months of age who present:

(1) Without a seizure, an acute encephalopathy is indicated by a significantly decreased level of consciousness that lasts at least 24 hours.

(2) Following a seizure, an acute encephalopathy is demonstrated by a significantly decreased level of consciousness that lasts at least 24 hours and cannot be attributed to a postictal state - from a seizure or a medication.

(B) For adults and children 18 months of age or older, an acute encephalopathy is one that persists at least 24 hours and is characterized by at least two of the following:

(1) A significant change in mental status that is not medication related (such as a confusional state, delirium, or psychosis);

(2) A significantly decreased level of consciousness which is independent of a seizure and cannot be attributed to the effects of medication; and

(3) A seizure associated with loss of consciousness.

(1) A significant change in mental status that is not medication related; specifically a confusional state, or a delirium, or a psychosis;

Significantly decreased level of consciousness is indicated by the presence of one or more of the following clinical signs:

(i) Decreased or absent response to environment (responds, if at all, only to loud voice orpainful stimuli);

(ii) Decreased or absent eye contact (does not fix gaze upon family members or otherindividuals); or

(iii) Inconsistent or absent responses to external stimuli (does not recognize familiar people or things).”

“Significantly decreased level of consciousness” are simply descriptors of an autistic regression.

In 2011 a study was published looking into the cases of VICP compensated cases to see how many of them had “autism.” It found that 47% of them were children with autism.

“Pace Environmental Law Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011

Unanswered Questions: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury

Mary Holland, Louis Conte, Robert Krakow and Lisa Colin

Executive Summary
In 1986, Congress created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (1986 Law). This Program has original jurisdiction for children’s claims of vaccine injury. Because almost all children receive multiple vaccinations for daycare and school, it is critically important that the Program provides fundamental fairness, due process and transparency.

This empirical investigation, published in a peer-reviewed law journal, examines claims that the VICP compensated for vaccine-induced encephalopathy and seizure disorder. The VICP has compensated approximately 2,500 claims of vaccine injury since the inception of the program. This study found 83 cases of acknowledged vaccine-induced brain damage that include autism, a disorder that affects speech, social communication and behavior. In 21 published cases of the Court of Federal Claims, which administers the VICP, the Court stated that the petitioners had autism or described autism unambiguously. In 62 remaining cases, the authors identified settlement agreements where Health and Human Services (HHS) compensated children with vaccine-induced brain damage, who also have autism or an autism spectrum disorder.

Parents reported the existence of autism in telephone interviews and supplied supplemental materials including medical diagnoses, school records, and completed, standard autism screening questionnaires to verify their reports. In 39 of the 83 cases, or 47% of the cases of vaccine injury reviewed, there is confirmation of autism or autism spectrum disorder beyond parental report.

This finding of autism in compensated cases of vaccine injury is significant. U.S. government spokespeople have been asserting no vaccine-autism link for more than a decade. This finding calls into question the decisions of the Court of Federal Claims in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding in 2009 and 2010 and the statement of Health and Human Services on its website that “HHS has never concluded in any case that autism was caused by vaccination.”

Using publicly available information, the investigation shows that the VICP has been compensating cases of vaccine-induced brain damage associated with autism for more than twenty years. This investigation suggests that officials at HHS, the Department of Justice and the Court of Federal Claims may have been aware of this association but failed to publicly disclose it.

The study calls on Congress to thoroughly investigate the VICP, including a medical investigation of compensated claims of vaccine injury. This investigation calls on Congress to get answers to these critically important unanswered questions.”

So, is my son suffering from vaccine induced encephalopathy, is he suffering from autism, or is it the same thing for him? If you can find this differential diagnosis that should have been used in his case anywhere in the literature, please post it here.

It’s a “keep your enemies closer” offense. While every president since Reagan has had their foot on the gas of the Vaccine Injury Industry, Trump seems to have shifted to a strategy of hitting the brakes, then the gas, then the brakes again, and so on. This allows him, if he chooses, to gradually hit the gas less often and the brakes more often over time.

I see him holding out a “bait” package that includes waiving 100% tariff that he was going to impose on their drugs boosting their stock that makes Pharma/Bio obligated to him. Grok estimates this is worth more than $500 billion to pharma . He has essentially bought them, and now he can set the rules of the game. This way he can move much further on the vaccine/toxicity/Autism issue than he could otherwise—and Pharma/Bio will still have to genuflect to him.

Gas, brakes, repeat.

Many people in MAHA are upset that he isn’t all brakes all the time. But in this political reality, you can’t just slam on the brakes. You have to slow the velocity dramatically so the car isn’t torn apart by stopping at full speed. Eventually, you can stop using the gas pedal, but you’ll still need to pump the brakes—or you’ll skid and hit a wall.

This looks to me like a controlled demolition of the vaccine injury problem.

And remember: Trump can give Pfizer all the money in the world, but if they can’t make a product that passes the new gold-standard science, it will never get FDA approval… and Trump controls the FDA.

Trump looks to be moving on the pharmaceutical industry so that it becomes obligated to him. He’s just purchased a huge chunk of Bobby’s enemy.

This is an important thread by Kevin McKernan. He’s right about Trump’s tactic, but wrong to say it’s something to be upset about. Read this thread about how to “CROSS RUFF.”

I’ve been fighting the vaccine injury problem for 21 years, ever since my son was harmed. I am NOT “pissed that your injuries are a negotiation game,” as Kevin McKernan thinks I should be, because for the first time in four decades a president is moving forward to fix the problem. I’ve chosen to believe that Trump will make sure our families are compensated for what was done to us.

First, because they’ve already said they’ll soon announce changes to the vaccine injury compensation program. Second, because Bobby has been walking beside us and showing up for us for 20 years, and I know his heart is making sure all of our children are cared for and healed as much as possible.

As a rule, I never trust politicians. But I’ve never trusted a politician as much as I trust Bobby Kennedy.

As long as Trump stays loyal to Bobby, I will stay loyal to Trump.

I think that’s probably the sentiment of most every MAHA person.

I came across the article again today and laughed, as the illustration I used turned out to be a premonition of the events in my own life.

Last year I suffered a stroke. The kind where you can't walk. And can't type. And can't make scrambled eggs. When I did try to learn to cook again, and found that it was exhausting, once I mastered scrambled eggs I gave up after that. And now, every day, all year, I have eaten 5 scrambled eggs.

So the article I wrote two years ago for my audience, today asked me the question, “Now that I can only make scrambled eggs, am I of a lesser value than back when I could make a five course meal? Or am I different, but not less.

I had a much smaller readership when this article was originally posted to sub stack. Sending it out again because we are in a new era and we need to all agree that regardless of how our loved ones with autism function, or how they got autism in the first place, that they are as beloved and valuable as everyone else. On this the biomedical parent network, the vaccine injury community, and the autistic self-advocates, must be in complete step with one another.

Your Function Does Not Equal Your Value

The Very American Lie needs to die

Jun 27, 2023

There is a coffee shop chain called Bitty & Beau’s that is staffed with entirely disabled individuals, mostly those with Down Syndrome. There is one in Savannah that is a JOY for me to visit. I get weepy seeing our kids valued and given proper places in society rather than being underestimated and tucked away needlessly and to their detriment.

We have a few of their coffee cups in our cabinets, and on the back they say, #NotBroken. It is a beautiful sentiment that is meant to be a lifting up of those who have been treated as if they are “lesser than,” but it is factually incorrect.

The reality is that EVERYONE is broken. There is a functioning difference between those who are described as “neurotypical” as opposed to “neurologically impaired” (insert whatever terms from what ever time period and/or society you choose) that has become confused with a difference in value. It is the phenomenon that Temple Grandin was referencing when she and her mother defiantly declared that she was “different, not less.”

If you have read anything I have written you know that I believe that the single, unifying character trait of all humans is their brokenness. You, Me, Mother Theresa, and Hitler. If I could order wrap around services for all of us, I would do it. But there is no budget for that. Or rather God’s plan was for those services to come from Him and from all of us holding each other up, but humanity has not really embraced that plan as much as I still hope it will.

All of us are broken. It is not that those with Autism or Down Syndrome, or insert diagnosis here need to be “brought up to our level” it is that the rest of us need to face our impairments, walk humbly with them, and understand that our higher functioning in some areas does not put us on any other value level than those with “lower functioning” in those areas.

President Trump certainly is higher functioning in life than my son, but one of these two men has a crippling hubris problem, while the other is quite good at learning humbly. I will leave you to guess which.

Is one of these two men more broken than the other? Is one more valuable than the other?

I got into a discussion today with someone on Twitter, and it was a discussion I have been having with people online since I started my little mommy blog in 2004. That somehow those who are vaccine injured are “less than” those who are not.

In 2007 I wrote a six part series on this called, “Autism in God’s Economy. This article serves as an updated, digest version of the lengthy discussion I wrote there, so feel free to read the original if you are so inclined.

This idea, that, if your “autism” is the result of vaccine injury you are “damaged” but if you are born with it, you are… what… more than? Somehow better off? Has anyone really thought that through? I feel like if more people did, they would reject it outright.

If two 25-year-olds sit next two one another in a day program, both learning the task of making scrambled eggs, one has trisomy 21 and the other was in a massive car accident on the way home from his first day of Harvard Law, which one is of more value? Which one is less than? Which one one is broken? Which one is damaged? Why is this even a discussion?

Are they not two beloved and valuable individuals who need to learn how to cook breakfast? Why is there a distinction?

Will my value be less if one day I become more impaired by any mechanism and need to learn how to cook breakfast again?

I have been blessed with an exceptional mother who has cared for me in a million ways over all my decades (and for anyone who ever entered our home), but she can’t make breakfast for herself anymore. The thought of anyone believing that she is “less than” makes me very, very angry.

Back in the bad old days one society actually had formal titles for individuals that distinguished “Gentlemen” from “Morons.” We fully recognize how evil that was and we don’t do that any more.

And isn’t every unspoken “less than” judgement made in our hearts just us lying to ourselves that we are somehow “more than?” Better than? Morally and/or functionally superior to? How we do love to be generous with ourselves, pile up our accomplishments and attributes into a tiny mole hill, and stand on it to look down on others in our superiority. It is the true, American past time. Would Twitter be anywhere without our collective narcissism?

So why, if an unvaccinated person with “autism” since birth, is put next to my vaccine injured son, is there a distinction made that the former is somehow in a more desirable state than the latter?

Honestly, it kinda makes me want to fight those who believe my WONDERFUL son is in a lesser state. He is not “lesser than” in any way from anyone else with or without autism, vaccine injury, any other diagnosis, or any other impairment great or small. Or no detectable impairment at all.

My beautiful, joyful son is not “lesser” than anyone alive. He is broken, and so is everyone else.

The Christian worldview, and the American value system based on it, is that EVERYONE matters to the same extent. That everyone is created equal. That a creator God determines our value, that we are all impaired, and that he considers us all bearers of his image.

No one is any more than anyone else, and we are all “less than God.” But God does not care! That he loves us all and died for us all and “stands at the door and knocks” for us ALL!

So I reject any value system that says my son is more “damaged” than anyone else.

You are not your brain functioning.

You are not your sense of smell.

You are not your mitochondrial output.

You are not the quality of your handwriting.

You are not your resume.

You are a soul created and loved by God, who was given a body that is subject to all of the vulnerabilities that individual bodies have in this fallen world.

And EVERY BODY is broken.

The source of your “autism” has nothing to do with your value. Autism causation and the value of individuals with “autism” are as far apart as Los Angeles and Wakanda. They are not even on the same map. One is a matter of science, the other of philosophy.

So let us all collectively reject the Very American Lie that our functioning is our value. IMHO it is a much better lie than ye Olde European Lie that your rank at birth is your value, but it is a lie nonetheless.

It is not, “vaccines cause autism OR those with autism are valuable.”
It is, “vaccines cause autism AND those with autism are valuable.”

Again, I reject any philosophy that equates causation with value. They are two different, mutually-exclusive things, and I am happy to have two separate discussions of each. But they should NEVER be considered together.

Everyone is broken, AND everyone has value.

Things are really coming to a head for the Vaccine Industrial Complex. Before the end of the year the vaccine industry may be facing:

1. the repeal of their vaccine injury liability protection,

2. the repeal of the Prep Act,

3. the HHS report on vaccine autism causation,

4. the removal of pharmaceutical advertising on TV ( Ending their ownership of the legacy media),

5. the reform of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (which could also end up determining the vaccines can cause autism)

6. a Trump requirement that religious vaccine exemptions be available in all 50 states.
   
   It is the perfect storm of all their nightmare scenarios.

Will 2025 be the year industry that did the most FAs in modern history have all the FOs fall on them at once ?

The vaccine injury industry is further decrying the fact that so many people are opting out of vaccinating their children and even though religious vaccine exemptions have been taken away in four states, the national rate of vaccine exemption usage is rising.

The vaccine sales team is very upset that they are losing market share. They overplayed their hand in 2020, in their insistence that everyone join them in the vaccine religion, and do not want to deal with the backlash.

AAP is decrying the measures that seek to make them accountable, insisting that all religious exemptions be removed in all states. This would mean that all non homeschooling families would have to go to their local AAP affiliated Vaccine Store how much to talk to one of their sales representatives on why they think their products are right for your child.

Spoiler alert: it doesn't matter what you think, the law says you have to buy it anyway.

Team Vaccine has been vociferously complaining about the threat that Secretary Kennedy is to their business model, (even plotting his ouster) but the irony is that Kennedy is not the only threat. All three branches of the federal government are becoming involved.

And none of this can be a surprise to them.

They knew there was a problem with vaccines and autism from 1943 from the 1st paper on autism that reported onset of a case following a smallpox vaccine.

It was reported again in Germany in 1976 that the smallpox vaccine triggered autism.

And if those in charge of the vaccine program hadn't noticed those two papers in 1985 Congress ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate a link between the pertussis vaccine and autism.

in 1991 the report that Congress ordered was released and it found that there was no place to look to find a link between vaccines and autism because nobody was paying attention to vaccine adverse reactions that did not have a diagnosis after 30 days.

That same year a memo was circulated at vaccine maker Merck when someone at the company discovered that as the vaccine schedule had increased dramatically after the 1986 national childhood vaccine injury act, that there was a large amount of mercury in the vaccine program. They did not act on this, or report it out of the company, and a 15 years later the LA Times discovered the“Merck Memo,” and published it.

In the mid 90s the mother of a child with autism, noticing how much autism she was seeing, went door to door in her town in brick Township New Jersey asking people if they had children with an autism diagnosis. She found an inordinate number of cases. So she called the CDC and they came to Brick and found that yes, she had discovered an autism cluster. They then left town and never came back. They did nothing.

In 1999 someone in HHS noticed what Merck had noticed eight years earlier, that there was a lot of mercury in the vaccine schedule. So they did what governments do and issued a press release saying that they had found a lot of mercury in the vaccine schedule, butnot to worry, there was no evidence of harm, before they had even looked for any evidence of harm. Shortly there after when they started finding evidence of harm they had a meeting in Simpsonwood, Georgia test figure out how to cover up the evidence of harm.

Then in 2005 an intrepid reporter published a book called “Evidence of Harm.” Blowing the whole operation wide open. CDC put a note on their web page that said they were reviewing the book and would have a response shortly. After a few months they took the notice down and never mentioned it again.

Our intrepid reporter followed it up with an expose in Rolling Stone, Deadly Immunity, Co-written by none other than Robert F Kennedy jr., democratic royalty and darling of the environmental movement. Subsequently the Democrats and the environmental movement became instrumental in the corporate attack on Mr. Kennedy that has lasted until this day.

Cut to current day and my 18 year read of the scientific literature has found 239 papers that build a rich tapestry of evidence of harm to our children from the vaccine program specifically demonstrated that vaccines can cause autism. In that 20 years parents in ever growing numbers have walked away from Pediatrics because of the harm done to their own children followed by the denial of medical treatment for these injuries, and harassment of families that ask for help.

A more detailed accounting of this history, with links to sources, can be found here.

In 2025 this problem has reached a crescendo to the point where Kennedy is now in charge of the entire health infrastructure that he was urging the reform of at the beginning of the century. Voters put him there when Donald Trump partnered with Kennedy and became a vehicle for the MAHA movement that only exists because no president or anyone in health authority in 1943, or 1976, or 1986, or 1991, or 1998, or 1999, or any of the 2000s, did anything about the vaccine injury problem.

If they were ever going to face the consequences of what they had done I think it would have been in 2005 when David Kirby published evidence of harm, Robert F Kennedy junior joined in the effort, the small group of parents working on the issue became many large groups of parents working on the issue, and the blogosphere communication network was launched. Every year the evidence of harm pile becomes higher and higher, and every year the vaccine injury industry doubles down.

And even now the Naked Emperor is still demanding that you appreciate his couture, and launching attacks on the MAHA movement which they consider a monster, without recognizing that, if it is a monster, it is the monster that they made.

The Vaccine Injury Industry is Baghdad Bob standing on a rooftop declaring that everything is fine as you can hear the boots of the American soldiers approaching from blocks away.

They are literally addicts. Giving liability protection to corporations turns them into junkies who feast on money and power.

The practice of medicine has been nothing if not a “God Complex” dispenser to those who practice it. The amount of pride and hubris that is baked into the system now is completely demonic. They will never stop with the propaganda because they are addicted to the propaganda. They fully believe, as all narcissists do, that nothing is their fault and everything is the fault of the people that they have abused.

Bruno Bettelheim, who took over autism treatment in America in the mid 20th century, was the biggest villain in the history of autism, until the current era. He believed that autism was caused by mothers who hated their children, I'm at the proper treatment for autism was removing children from their mothers and raising them in Group homes that taught them that their mothers hated them. The mothers were then put into psychoanalysis with the freudians so they could understand why they hated their children. In the 1960s a hero Navy psychologist, Bernard Rimland, PhD, put the horrifying theory and practice to bed, when he announced that his own beloved son with autism was not mentally ill, but physically sick. Even so Bettelheim went to his grave believing that he was right, and the mothers were the problem.

Long after everyone had dispensed with his horrible, evil destructive theory, he stood by it even on his deathbed. It is the same disease that vaccine promoters are suffering from now, and they will never believe that they were the problem. They will continue to abuse mothers and children until someone stops them.

That is the way this ends.

Chapter Eighteen

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA, by Ginger Taylor

REVELATION OF HIGH MERCURY LEVELS IN THE CHILDHOOD VACCINE SCHEDULE

The most recent chapter in the long and controversial history of vaccine safety began in the United States in July 1999. That is when the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) issued a joint statement through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on mercury and vaccines. They stated that in the U.S. vaccine program at the time, “some children could be exposed to a cumulative level of mercury over the first six months of life that exceeds one of the federal guidelines.”ⁱ

The truth was that the amount of mercury in the childhood vaccine schedule grossly exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) maximum daily adult exposure for methylmercury, the form of mercury most closely related to thimerosal for which the government had established a guideline. The EPA sets the daily limit at 0.1 microgram per kilogram of weight.ⁱⁱ Based on that guideline, a baby weighing approximately five kilograms (eleven pounds) at two months of age should not receive more than 0.5 micrograms of mercury on the day of a doctor’s visit. At the time the AAP and USPHS joint statement was issued, infants at their two-month visit routinely received 62.5 micrograms of mercury, or 125 times the EPA’s limit. Studies have suggested that, for thimerosal (ethylmercury), “the accepted reference dose should be lowered to between 0.025 and 0.06 micrograms per kilogram per day,” meaning that the exposure at the two-month visit could be as high as 500—rather than 125—times the safe level.ⁱⁱⁱ

In November 2002, Dr. Neal Halsey, director at the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the New York Times:

My first reaction was simply disbelief . . . if the labels had had the mercury content in micrograms, this would have been uncovered years ago. But the fact is, no one did the calculation.^iv

At the time, USPHS claimed that, “there [are] no data or evidence of any harm caused by the level of exposure that some children may have encountered in following the existing immunization schedule.”^v

However, the government made this safety claim before it had begun to look for evidence of harm. In November 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiated a study to evaluate whether children receiving the highest amounts of thimerosal had suffered any ill effects. Thomas Verstraeten,^vi the study’s lead epidemiologist, did not begin the study until four months after the government’s “no evidence of harm” claim. The CDC did not publish the results until 2003.^vii The first phase of the Verstraeten study found an association between higher doses of thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders. In the second phase of his study, Verstraeten described his findings as “neutral.”^viii

HHS further asserted in July 1999:

Given that the risks of not vaccinating children far outweigh the unknown and much smaller risk, if any, of exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines over the first six months of life, clinicians and parents are encouraged to immunize all infants even if the choice of individual vaccine products is limited for any reason.^ix (emphasis added)

With this single statement, the government took the position that the risk posed to children from exposure to thimerosal was both “unknown” and a “smaller risk” than exposure to childhood diseases. This suggested that public health officials could perform a risk-benefit analysis with no risk information for half of the equation.

HHS further asserted, “[i]nfants and children who have received thimerosal-containing vaccines do not need to be tested for mercury exposure.”^x On what basis could HHS make this statement? It had not done (and still has not done) the underlying research to show that these children were not at risk and should not be screened for mercury toxicity. Without hard evidence, government nonetheless seemed eager to reassure parents that “no evidence of harm” meant “no harm” – even as it failed to look for evidence.

The mainstream media did not investigate HHS’s claims or recommendations, nor did it investigate those of vaccine safety advocates. None of the problems with the joint statement, the investigation, or the CDC’s handling of the thimerosal question came to light until 2005, when investigative journalist and author David Kirby’s book Evidence of Harm was released. The searing and detailed account exposed the questionable behavior and judgments of the CDC and HHS.^xi Likely sensing the potential for public outrage, the CDC quickly took action and posted a notice on its website explaining that it would review the book and respond. By the end of 2005, however, the CDC had taken the notice down without responding. To this day, the government has offered no response to the book, and the media has done nothing to hold public health authorities accountable.

THIMEROSAL-CONTAINING VACCINES ARE LEGALLY CLASSIFIED AS HAZARDOUS MATERIAL

As potential hazards from vaccination began to be explored by the autism community, the EPA’s rules on mercury disposal and their application to thimerosal-containing vaccines became a focus. The realization that mercury levels in vaccines were so high that they were legally classified as hazardous materials, and that the law required they be disposed of according to hazmat protocols, led many to further doubt the government’s safety claims.

For example, Wisconsin’s hazardous waste disposal guidelines state that:

Some vaccines are preserved with 1:10,000 or 0.01 percent Thimerosal (see the vaccines in the table titled “Thimerosal Content in Some U.S. Licensed Vaccines” at www.vaccinesafety.edu/thi-table.htm that have .01% in the Thimerosal Concentration column). Thimerosal contains about 50 percent mercury by weight. Vaccines with 1:10,000 or 0.01 percent Thimerosal have about 50 mg/L mercury, which exceeds the 0.2 mg/L hazardous waste toxicity characteristic regulatory level for mercury. According to state and federal hazardous waste management requirements, discarded Thimerosal-preserved vaccines may need to be managed as hazardous waste, using waste code D009 (mercury). . . . It is illegal to manage Thimerosal-preserved vaccines as infectious waste or trash.

The mercury concentration in the previously used thimerosal-containing vaccines and the current flu vaccines is exponentially larger than what is considered hazmat material, or that is even allowed in safe drinking water, as outlined in Pediatrics:

0.5 parts per billion (ppb) of mercury kills human neuroblastoma cells.

2 ppb of mercury is the US EPA's limit for mercury in drinking water.

20 ppb of mercury destroys neuritis membrane structure.

200 ppb of mercury is the level in liquid that the EPA classifies as hazardous waste.

25,000 ppb of mercury is the concentration in the hepatitis B vaccine administered at birth in the United States from 1990 to 2001.

50,000 ppb of mercury is the concentration in multi dose DTaP and Hib vaccines, administered four times each in the 1990s to children at two, four, six, twelve and eighteen months of age; it is also the current "preservative" level in multi dose flu vaccines (in 94 percent of the supply), meningococcal vaccines, and tetanus vaccines (for children age seven and older). This can be confirmed by analyzing the multi dose vials.

Parents who reviewed this information understood the inherent problem with the CDC's recommendation that was in place until approximately 2003, which stated that hazardous material should be injected into infants beginning days after birth, and with its current recommendation to inject hazardous materials into all Americans beginning at six months of age, via the current yearly flu vaccination campaign. They did not overlook that the vaccine being injected into children in flu shot clinics, if spilled onto the floor, would trigger laws requiring immediate evacuation of the building and clean up by hazmat teams. This information was, however, seemingly lost on the media, who neither carried the information to the public nor demanded that the federal government explain this dramatic contradiction.

The media's failure to bring this to light continued through the conclusion of the 2009-2010 flu vaccine campaign, even as toxic-waste management companies promoted their services to dispose of the more than eighty million unused doses of the H1N1 vaccine in publications like Occupational Health and Safety Magazine:

Clean harbors, based in Norwell, Massachusetts, is offering the service to healthcare providers because multiple doses of the vaccine contain enough mercury-based Thimerosal to be treated as hazardous waste. . . . Clean Harbors of Norwell, Massachusetts, now offers H1N1 Vaccination Incineration Services that will profile, collect, and dispose of unused 2009 H1N1 vaccine for healthcare customers nationwide. Multiple doses of the vaccine contain enough mercury-based Thimerosal to be treated by the EPA as hazardous waste and will be incinerated.

VACCINE ENCEPHALOPATHY AND AUTISM

The Health Resources and Services Administration’s^xii (HRSA) Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has a table of known vaccine injuries for which government offers compensation. The table lists “encephalopathy” as an outcome for the combination MMR (or any of the various individual measles, mumps, or rubella vaccines) and for the DTaP (or any pertussis containing vaccines). The symptoms of this encephalopathy (a medical term meaning brain disorder, brain damage, or a change in brain functioning) in a child who is eighteen-months or older include a “significantly decreased level of consciousness” which HRSA describes as:

(1) Decreased or absent response to environment (responds, if at all, only to loud voice or painful stimuli);

(2) Decreased or absent eye contact (does not fix gaze upon family members or other individuals); or

(3) Inconsistent or absent responses to external stimuli (does not recognize familiar people or things).^xiii

Many parents have reported these symptoms in their previously typically functioning children after neurological regression following measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) and pertussis containing (DPT or DTaP) vaccines.These parentshowever, reported that those symptoms were not used to diagnose their children with a vaccine-induced encephalopathy, but rather to diagnose them with autism. In addition, one of the signs of encephalopathy is seizure activity. Estimates suggest that one-quarter to one-third of those with an autism diagnosis also suffer from seizures.^xiv

Were “vaccine-induced encephalopathy” and “autism” merely the same phenomenon, described from the vantage point of two different disciplines, medicine and mental health? Were cases of autism merely undiagnosed vaccine-induced encephalopathy, due to the lack of physician training regarding the recognition of vaccine injury? These questions never surfaced when the media ran stories regarding parental concerns about vaccine-induced autism—that is, until 2008, when the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) became national news.

THE HANNAH POLING CASE

In early 2008, Jon and Terry Poling announced to the press that HHS had conceded their daughter’s case of vaccine-induced autism. Ten-year-old Hannah Poling had regressed into autism after receiving nine vaccines in five shots during one office visit. The Polings argued that their daughter had a preexisting, asymptomatic, and undiagnosed mitochondrial dysfunction and sustained a neurological regression into autism from receiving vaccines at eighteen months of age. Jon Poling is a well-respected neurologist who was at Johns Hopkins at the time. and his wife Terry a registered nurse and an attorney. The Polings' medical testing following their daughter's regression was so thorough and their case so strong that HRSA conceded the case and elected to pay compensation without a hearing before the VICP. The government acknowledged, albeit in very evasive language, that vaccines were the culprit that led to Hannah Poling’s autism.

While the media had yet to rigorously scrutinize the vaccine-autism story, national and local consumer-safety and autism-awareness groups were organizing to share information and advocate for change. When CNN broadcast the Polings’ press conference live, the event poured gasoline on the already fiery vaccine safety debate. Federal public health officials were forced to comment on how vaccines cannot cause autism, even though they seemed to have done just that in little Hannah Poling. The government’s position on the Polings’ case and on vaccine-induced autism were completely at odds with one another, and the government’s clumsy and conflicting answers raised even more questions about vaccine safety:

• Did vaccines cause Hannah’s autism?

• Is mitochondrial dysfunction rare?

• Did government deliberately mislead the public about Hannah’s injury?

• Did the media pursue this news story appropriately?

Our government would not say that Hannah had autism, which she indeed does have.^xv The VICP concession document^xvi said that Hannah has “a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.”^xvii By definition, a person diagnosed with a disorder will have features of that disorder. Government attorneys had full access to Hannah Poling’s extensive medical files disclosing that she has DSM-diagnosed, full-syndrome autism. Yet, they referred to her neurological disorder in terms that sounded ambiguous, as if she has something like autism, but not autism. Hannah’s parents repeatedly clarified to the media that their daughter has full-syndrome autism. A scientific journal article^xviii further confirmed her diagnosis.

Where was the mainstream media? It failed in two respects. First, it continued to repeat the government’s euphemistic words, “autism-like symptoms,” thereby attempting to dodge the burning question—is the dramatic increase in the number of childhood vaccines causing the dramatic increase in autism incidence? Second, the media gave extensive airtime to vaccine-program defenders who seemed to turn the case on its head, blaming the victim for her own injury. In a twist of logic, they inferred that it wasn’t really the vaccines’ fault that Hannah was permanently injured; on the contrary, Hannah was merely a poor receptacle for lifesaving vaccines.

An article in the New Scientist declared, “Significantly, the government’s decision says nothing about whether vaccines cause autism. Instead, government lawyers concluded only that vaccines aggravated a preexisting cellular disorder in the child, causing brain damage that included features of autism.”^xix This vague government pronouncement prompted the tongue-in-cheek response from a commenter, “Do cigarettes only aggravate preexisting genetic factors, causing lung damage including features of cancer?”^xx In late 2010, reporter Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News summed up HHS's position, “In acknowledging Hannah’s injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn’t 'cause' her autism, but 'resulted' in it.”^xxi

CDC DIRECTOR DR. GERBERDING APPEARS ON CNN

A few days after the announcement, CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding appeared on CNN with Dr. Sanjay Gupta to explain the government’s position on the Poling case and vaccine-autism causation.

Gupta began the interview by noting that a child with regressive autism had been compensated and that government had conceded that vaccines had caused her “autism-like symptoms.” He zeroed in on a key question. Gupta asked whether Hannah had “autism” or “autism-like symptoms.”

Gerberding never answered.

She instead claimed that she had not read the Poling case file. Gupta failed to challenge this extraordinary and implausible statement. Gerberding was at the helm of the government agency responsible for the U.S. vaccine program and reported directly to Congress. A government agency conceded that vaccines caused Hannah Poling’s autism-like symptoms and Gerberding had not read her case file before appearing on national television?

In another extraordinary statement, Gerberding proceeded to explain a way in which vaccines can cause autism:

My understanding is that the child has what we think is a rare mitochondrial disorder and when children have this disease, anything that stresses them creates a situation where their cells just can’t make enough energy to keep their brains functioning normally. Now we all know that vaccines can occasionally cause fevers in kids, so if the child is immunized, got a fever or other complications from the vaccine then, if you are predisposed with a mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage, some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism.^xxii

Gerberding had just said that vaccines can cause autism in children with mitochondrial disorders. Gupta passed right by this statement as well. Seeming not to have heard her, he instead asked, “As it stands, are we ready to say that vaccines do not cause autism?” Off the hook of the vaccine-autism causation question, Gerberding quickly responded:

What we can say absolutely, for sure, is that we don’t really understand the causes of autism. We’ve got a long way to go before we get to the bottom of this, but there have been at least 15 very good scientific studies, and the Institute of Medicine which has searched this out and they have concluded that there really is no association between vaccines and autism.^xxiii

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, had just explained an association between vaccines and autism on national news. She then said there is no association between vaccines and autism.

Gupta did not challenge her on her conflicting statements. Instead, he allowed Gerberding to reinforce the government’s position that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

Two weeks earlier, the CDC had held a conference call with concerned physicians and insurance companies to discuss the Poling case.^xxiv During the call, experts presented information that Hannah’s preexisting, mitochondrial dysfunction may not be so rare. An unpublished study of thirty children with regressive autism revealed that they all shared Hannah’s same biomarkers.^xxv On the call it was estimated that up to one in fifty children, or 2 percent of the general population, may have a genetic mutation that places them at risk for mitochondrial dysfunction.^xxvi This information had been in the press for three days when Gerberding gave the CNN interview and made the claim that Hannah’s condition was “rare.” But Gupta didn’t challenge her claim.

In the Washington Post, Gerberding offered additional, unsubstantiated words of reassurance to a concerned public:

While we recognize, and have recognized, mitochondrial disorders are associated with . . . autism-like syndrome, there is nothing about this situation that should be generalized to the risks of vaccines for normal children.^xxvii

Gerberding failed to explain the seemingly simple phrase “normal children.” Hannah seemed “normal” before her shots, as did tens of thousands of children who regressed into autism after their shots. In fact, Hannah was above average socially and so highly verbal that, at the age of sixteen months, she had been chosen to be a “typical peer” to model appropriate social skills to developmentally disabled children in an early intervention program. Millions of concerned parents wonder about vaccine safety and which of their “normal” children might be at risk to develop autism after vaccination. How could they know?

Gerberding’s Washington Post statement raised several troubling questions:

• By definition, regressive autism means that the children were, by all appearances, neurologically “normal” before their diagnosis. In the absence of criteria to identify susceptibility, aren’t all children “normal” before they regress into autism after vaccination?

• How many other children with regressive autism following vaccination have asymptomatic, undiagnosed, mitochondrial dysfunction like Hannah Poling? Was Hannah diagnosed only because her father is a neurologist?

• In the Hannah Poling scenario, a seemingly healthy child suffered a vaccine regression that gave her autism. Autism affects one percent of all U.S. children. Why aren’t we screening children before vaccination to make sure they are not susceptible, just like Hannah was?

Dr. Anne Schuchat, then assistant surgeon general and director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, answered the last question in an interview in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Some have suggested that infants and children be screened for mitochondrial disorders before getting recommended vaccinations. Unfortunately, mitochondrial diseases are very difficult to diagnose and it is usually not possible to identify children with such disorders until there are signs of developmental decline. A definitive diagnosis often requires multiple blood tests and may also require a muscle or brain biopsy (removal of a portion for testing, usually under anesthesia). Therefore, providing routine screening tests on children who have no symptoms would bring other medical risks and raise many ethical questions.^xxviii

Schuchat failed to mention that a simple blood test to screen for “soft biomarkers” of mitochondrial dysfunction is available and reasonably predictive.^xxix She further failed to mention the medical risks and ethical questions raised by blindly vaccinating nearly all children when we know that some will have mitochondrial dysfunction that puts them at risk for neurological injury.

The following year, Gerberding resigned from the CDC and joined Merck & Co., Inc., the pharmaceutical giant, as head of its vaccine division. Merck manufactures several childhood vaccines, including the MMR. Notably, the MMR is the vaccine HRSA has admitted causes an encephalopathy that progresses into autism, and was among the vaccines that resulted in Hannah Poling’s regression into autism. While the autism advocacy community vigorously discussed and debated the Poling concession, Gerberding’s public statements on vaccine encephalopathy and autism, and her new employment, mainstream media once again remained mute.

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS PRESIDENT DR. TAYLOE APPEARS ON THE TODAY SHOW

Pediatricians are on the front lines of vaccine administration and sales. Their professional association, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), has gone even further than the government in asserting vaccine safety. AAP President Dr. David Tayloe, Jr. appeared on the Today Show immediately following the Poling concession announcement and claimed that vaccines don’t cause any permanent injuries. When asked if vaccines should be used on every child, he responded,

Yes. I think any of the vaccines we have today have been tested and proven to be safe, and the credible studies don’t show any relationship between vaccines and permanent injury. So we favor this and we know that unless we have vaccination rates that are in the 90 to 95 percent range we are not going to prevent epidemics from coming into this country of measles, of polio, from countries where these diseases are still endemic. So it’s very important that we vaccinate all our children.^xxx

Tayloe was incorrect. Not only are vaccines legally classified as “unavoidably unsafe,” vaccine package inserts list dozens of permanent injuries that occur following vaccination, and HHS itself oversees a table of known, compensable vaccine-induced injuries that include brain damage, paralysis, anaphylactic shock, seizure disorders, and death.^xxxi

Despite the inaccuracy of Tayloe’s statement that there is no relationship between vaccines and permanent injury, the AAP never offered a correction. Neither the CDC nor HRSA nor FDA nor HHS offered clarification to the public. And the media, including Today Show interviewer Hoda Kotb, never challenged Tayloe’s statements, even though the show invited Tayloe on the air to discuss Hannah Poling who had received compensation because the government conceded that vaccines caused her autism.

It is important to note that Tayloe’s father, physician David Tayloe, Sr., was the defendant in a well-known vaccine injury case.^xxxii The child sustained severe, life-long brain damage when the elder Tayloe inappropriately administered a DTP vaccine after a previous adverse reaction to that same vaccine. The judgment was the largest jury verdict in North Carolina for a medical malpractice case at that time, amounting to $3.5 million.^xxxiii The reaction from doctors and pharmaceutical companies to this case and similar ones was swift and unequivocal. Led by the elder Tayloe, who was a local AAP official at the time, they demanded tort liability protection from injuries caused by vaccines. In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which includes provisions to shield doctors and manufacturers from liability and to compensate vaccine injury from taxpayer funds.^xxxiv

[a] HRSA’S PRESS STATEMENT ON VACCINE-AUTISM CAUSATION

During reporter David Kirby’s investigation of the Poling case, he requested clarification of the government’s position on whether or not vaccines could cause autism in light of the VICP decision. HRSA’s Office of Communications responded:

From: Bowman, David (HRSA) [mailto:DBowman@hrsa.gov]

Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 5:22 PM

To: ‘dkirby@nyc.rr.com’

Subject: HRSA Statement

David,

In response to your most recent inquiry, HRSA has the following

statement:

The government has never compensated, nor has it ever been ordered to

compensate, any case based on a determination that autism was actually

caused by vaccines. We have compensated cases in which children

exhibited an encephalopathy, or general brain disease. Encephalopathy

may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms

including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.

Some children who have been compensated for vaccine injuries may have

shown signs of autism before the decision to compensate, or may

ultimately end up with autism or autistic symptoms, but we do not track

cases on this basis.

Regards,

David Bowman

Office of Communications

Health Resources and Services Administration

301-443-3376^xxxv

Bowman asserts that vaccines don’t cause autism, but that they do cause brain damage that can result in autism. However, HRSA doesn't track that. Kirby and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., published this email, but the mainstream media again failed to report it to the public.

Assistant Surgeon General Schuchat’s 2009 Appearance on The Doctors

In the fall of 2009, Dr. Schuchat appeared on the television program, The Doctors - and told the public, “You can’t get seriously ill from a regular flu vaccine.” Schuchat is incorrect. Flu vaccine injury is well documented. The VICP has compensated cases of serious injury from the traditional flu vaccine, as we have described in Lisa Marks Smith's case. Schuchat goes on to say,

Now the other questions people have - and, I get this all the time - is about mercury. It’s about the thimerosal preservative. I want to say there have been a lot of studies about that. There’s no scientific link between the thimerosal preservative and any kind of long-term problem.^xxxvi

Again, Schuchat is incorrect. In scientific and medical literature, there is extensive research linking mercury and the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal to serious health problems. A sampling of this research is available in the appendix to this chapter. Again, the media failed to fulfill its duty to the public. The media made no challenge, inquiry or even follow up investigation after The Doctors.

The response of the autism community to the Poling decision was to ask the logical question, “How many other cases of vaccine induced autism have been paid from the VICP that were never announced to the public?”

In April 2011, a paper in the Pace Environmental Law Review ^xxxvii (See Ch. ___) revealed that 83 children who received compensation in the VICP for vaccine-induced brain damage also have autism or an autism spectrum disorder. These findings

once again raised concern about a causal relationship between vaccines and autism, but the government did nothing to investigate. Then, in April 2012, the CDC announced that the autism rate had increased from 1 in 110 to 1 in 88 in just two years.^xxxviii There was no explanation from the government for this dramatic increase. Following a New York City press conference by several autism groups calling for new hearings on the autism epidemic and the VICP, as well as the firings of several federal public health officials tasked with overseeing the autism research and response efforts,^xxxix Indiana Congressman Dan Burton joined the demand. In an article in The Hill,entitled “It is time to re-engage on the autism epidemic.” Burton, referring to previous oversight hearings under his leadership, wrote, “Our investigations found that over the years the system had broken; and what was supposed to be quick and fair became slow and contentious. There has been no Congressional oversight of VICP in the last decade, and the system has not improved; if anything it has gotten worse. It is time for Congress to revisit this issue and consider substantially reforming this program.”^xl Autism parents are still waiting.

PUBLIC HEALTH STATEMENTS ON VACCINE SAFETY TODAY

Thimerosal

Despite the continuing, alarming rise in autism prevalence and significant concerns, on its website discussing thimerosal, CDC states:

There is no convincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site.^xli

In carefully crafted language, the CDC no longer claims “no evidence of harm” as it did in 1999 but rather that there is “no convincing evidence of harm,” implicitly recognizing that there is some evidence of harm but the CDC has decided not to be “convinced” by it.

Vaccines and Autism

The current CDC web site offers this response to the question, “Do vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders?”

“A: [There are] many studies that have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). To date, the studies continue to show that vaccines are not [sic] associated with ASDs.”^xlii

This statement does not accurately depict the state of vaccine safety science today. While some studies do not find evidence of an association between vaccines, heavy metal components such as thimerosal, and autism, many do. The peer-reviewed meta-analysis released by DeSoto and Hitlan, addressed in Chapter 7 (“An Urgent Call for More Research), found that 74 percent of the relevant studies support an association between autism and heavy metals such as thimerosal and autism.

Contrary to the CDC’s statement, there are now approximately 60 studies that support the autism-vaccine causation theory.^xliii However, parents, attempting to make fully informed decisions about vaccinating their children, who Google “Do vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders?" will see the page containing the CDC's inaccurate claim as the first search result that is returned to them. The trust those parents have that the government is giving them accurate information is misplaced.

In early 2012, in preparation for the paperback version of Vaccine Epidemic, CDC was contacted directly to ascertain their current stance on vaccine autism causation. Thomas W. Skinner of the Centers for Disease Control, Office of the Director, Office of the Associate Director for Communication responded:

“Subject: Re: MI-Normal-Book author-Autism/Vaccine

Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:32:40 +0000

From: Skinner, Thomas W. (CDC/OD/OADC) <tws3@cdc.gov>

To: 'ginger@adventuresinautism.com'

Autism presents difficult challenges for thousands of families across the United States. Scientists do not know what causes autism. However, very thorough studies conducted by some of the world’s brightest scientists simply do not point to an association between vaccines and autism. Hopefully additional research will someday provide answers as to what is the cause or causes of autism.”

Because this statement is inconsistent with current research, I sent Mr. Skinner a follow-up email, in which I brought to his attention a list of sixty studies (listed in Appendix __) that point to an association between vaccines and autism. I had three inquiries: 1) the list of studies that "do not point to an association between vaccines and autism; " 2) the reasons for the CDC’s failure to mention any of the studies that point to an association between vaccines and autism; and 3) the person or panel responsible for approving his statement.

No reply was forthcoming from the CDC as of the publication of this edition.

HHS Secretary Sebelius’s “Don’t Give Equal Weight” Request to the Media

This chapter presents just a few of many examples of incomplete or misleading government statements on vaccine safety. Why does the press allow them to continue? One answer may be because the government has asked the press to do so.

In March 2010, while discussing the H1N1 flu, Readers Digest asked HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, “What can be done about public mistrust of vaccines?” Sebelius replied,

There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We have reached out to media outlets to try to get them to not give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting to what science has shown and continues to show about the safety of vaccines.^xliv

Neither the Administration nor Readers Digest clarified this remarkable disclosure, so it remains unclear which press outlets HHS contacted, what HHS asked the press not to report, or who complied with the request. But again, the mainstream media failed to pursue a story on potential vaccine injury, as well as a compelling story about government’s request for censorship.

The Thorsen DOJ Indictment Further Erodes CDC Credibility

Shortly after the 1999 admission that the children’s vaccine schedule contained high levels of mercury, Dr. Diane Simpson, the deputy director of the National Immunization Program at the CDC, sought to commission research on the relationship between vaccines and autism.^xlv After an international search, Dr. Simpson hired a team of researchers at the Statins Serum Institute in Denmark, led by Dr. Poul Thorsen. The first of several studies commissioned by CDC and carried out by the Thorsen team was entitled, “Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence From Danish Population-Based Data.” This study reported that removing thimerosal from vaccines in Denmark correlated to a rise – not a decrease - in autism rates, and that, “[our] ecological data do not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the incidence of autism.”

This study was criticized by many for significant methodological flaws.^xlvi In particular, because, the researchers used a change in the reporting criteria in Denmark’s autism database as if it represented an actual increase in the autism rate, misleadingly suggesting that Denmark’s autism rate rose when thimerosal-containing vaccines no longer were used. Subsequent studies by the Thorsen team similarly were beset by methodological shortcomings.

However, concern about Thorsen goes beyond flawed research. In early 2010, two Danish newspapers^xlvii reported that a lead researcher – later identified as Thorsen - was suspected of embezzling approximately $1.7 million from Aarhus University in 2009 and fleeing the country. Subsequent stories have raised many questions about Thorsen’s employment at various American universities and elsewhere.

^xlviii.^xlix

In April 2011, media reported that the US Department of Justice had indicted Thorsen “on charges of wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly concocting a scheme to steal more than $1 million in autism research money from the” CDC.^l

In 2012, reports surfaced that Thorsen was back in Denmark, about to stand trial for tax evasion. Those charges were dismissed on technical grounds,^li but recent stories suggest that Danish authorities may appeal the ruling.^lii A call to US authorities confirmed that Thorsen is on the FBI list of those they wish to extradite to face charges in, but there is no time line on his extradition, and no confirmation that an extradition request has been filed with Danish authorities.

CDC has not commented on the strange case of Poul Thorsen, nor has it

issued any statement that removes his work from the list of research that they use to determine whether or not vaccines are associated with autism.

A Modern-Day Semmelweis Reflex

Just as government hails vaccines as a cornerstone of public health, the medical community upholds vaccination as a miracle of modern medicine. If it seems almost impossible that public denial of vaccine injury could exist on such a huge scale, it should be recognized that there is established precedent for such a phenomenon.

In the mid-1800s in Vienna, Austria, mothers were dying shortly after childbirth from a now-extinct illness known as puerperal fever or “child bed fever.” A woman entering the hospital to give birth had a roughly 16 percent chance that she would die before taking her baby home. The mortality rate of mothers giving birth in the midwife centers, however, was lower.

In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, professor of obstetrics at the University of Pest, performed an autopsy on a colleague who had died from the fever, and then fell ill with it himself. He postulated that small particles of the disease may have been left on his hands and surmised that the maternal death rate from childbed fever was so high because doctors and medical students at the teaching hospital were not properly washing their hands after exams and autopsies of fever patients, before delivering newborns.

He instituted new sterilization guidelines and the death rate in the obstetrics and gynecology ward fell to 1.27 percent.^liii

When Semmelweis's colleague published the information, rather than finding it cause for celebration, the medical community lashed out against Semmelweis. He was mocked, attacked, and run out of the profession. He subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. Semmelweis was invited by a colleague to visit an asylum for the mentally ill under the pretense of offering his professional opinion, but was instead locked inside, where he died two weeks later. Conflicting stories report that he died after being physically assaulted by the staff, or alternatively, that he died from puerperal fever. Two decades would pass after Semmelweis's discovery before the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister helped to usher in the modern era of sanitation and hygiene, including medical sterilization.

In serving the public, Semmelweis delivered the unwelcome news to doctors that they were largely responsible for the deaths of new mothers. It was bad news that they were not prepared to hear. This phenomenon has come to be known as the Semmelweis Reflex—the reflex like rejection, often in the medical community, of new scientific information without proper investigation.^liv

Today’s vaccine injury denialism is a modern-day Semmelweis Reflex. Pediatricians who care passionately about the welfare of children understandably find repulsive the idea that autism is largely iatrogenic. Statements offered by government agencies (i.e., HHS and the CDC) and medical professionals (i.e., the AAP) offer plausible deniability to those who do not want to know or admit that the vaccines they are administering are capable of causing serious damage to a population, let alone to the individual children in their own practices.

The Government and Media’s Lack of Accountability

It is the responsibility of government to pursue public health and to base its decisions on sound science. It is the responsibility of the media to challenge governmental assertions and investigate their claims. The media’s unwillingness to follow the story on vaccines and autism and to ask hard-hitting questions has resulted in a larger failure: an absence of accountability.

The public's trust in government and the press continue to erode as stories of corruption, bad faith, and abuse of authority continue to surface. Despite government and media attempts to manage the vaccine safety narrative, parents, the main stakeholders in this debate, are catching on. In its October 2010 survey,^lv the University of Michigan revealed that vaccine safety is the top research priority for 89 percent of parents. As always, the American people are their own last line of defense. Today, the American people must bring reason, responsibility, and prudence to the national childhood vaccine program.

i Statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the United States Public Health Service, July 7, 1999 4:15 PM, accessed October 18^th, 2010, http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/vacc_safe/bthi1.htm.

ii National Research Council, Toxicological Effects of Methylmercury 11 (National Academic Press 2000), available at http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9899&page=R1 (citing the Environmental protection agency’s guideline of 0.1 microgram per kilogram per day).

iii Steven G. Gilbert & Kimberly S. Grant-Webster, Neurobehavioral Effects of Developmental Methylmercury Exposure, 103 Environmental Health Perspectives 135 (supp. 6) (1995).

iv “The Not So-Crackpot Autism Theory,” New York Times, November 10, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10AUTISM.html?ei=1&en=99d1b535fa33bba3&ex=1037894857&pagewanted=print&position=top

v Joint Statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the United States Public Health Service, July 7, 1999 4:15 PM, http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/vacc_safe/bthi1.htm

vi Verstraeten was an employee of vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline at the time his study was published. Verstraeten, Thomas. “Thimerosal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and GlaxoSmithKline”, Pediatrics, 2004;113;932.

vii Verstraeten T, Davis RL, DeStefano F, Lieu TA, Rhodes PH, Black SB, Shinefield H, Chen RT; Vaccine Safety Datalink Team. “Safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines: a two-phased study of computerized health maintenance organization databases.” Pediatrics 112 (2003): 1039–48.

viii Thomas Verstraeten, “Thimerosal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and GlaxoSmithKline”, Pediatrics, 2004;113;932, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/113/4/932.pdf

ix Joint Statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the United States Public Health Service, July 7, 1999 4:15 PM, http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/vacc_safe/bthi1.htm

x Joint Statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the United States Public Health Service, July 7, 1999 4:15 PM, http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/vacc_safe/bthi1.htm

xi David Kirby, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy,(New York: St. Martins Press, 2005)

xii HRSA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Among other responsibilities, it oversees the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. http://www.hrsa.gov/about/index.html.

xiii Vaccine Injury Table, National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, Health Resources and Serivices Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/table.htm

xiv Paola Giovanardi RossiCorresponding Author Contact Information, a, Antonia Parmeggiania, Véronique Bachb, Margherita Santuccia and Paola Viscontia, “EEG features and epilepsy in patients with autism”, Brain and Development, Volume 17, Issue 3, May-June 1995, Pages 169-174

xv Jon S. Poling, MD, PhD, Richard E. Frye, MD, PhD, John Shoffner, MD, Andrew W. Zimmerman, MD , “Developmental Regression and Mitochondrial Dysfunction in a Child With Autism,” Journal of Child Neurology Volume 21, Number 2, February 2006

xvi David Kirby, “The Vaccine-Autism Court Document Every American Should Read”, The Huffington Post, February 26, 2008, accessed October 20, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/the-vaccineautism-court-d_b_88558.html

xvii David Kirby, “Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case in Federal Court - Now What?” The Huffington Post, February 25, 2008, accessed October 20, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/government-concedes-vacci_b_88323.html

xviii Jon S. Poling, MD, PhD, Richard E. Frye, MD, PhD, John Shoffner, MD, Andrew W. Zimmerman, MD , “Developmental Regression and Mitochondrial Dysfunction in a Child With Autism,” Journal of Child Neurology Volume 21, Number 2, February 2006

xix Jim Giles, “Autism payout reignites vaccine controversy,” New Scientist, March 8, 2008, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726464.100-autism-payout-reignites-vaccine-controversy.html

xx Ibid.

xxi Sharyl Attkisson, “Family to Receive $1.5M+ in First-Ever Vaccine-Autism Court Award,” CBS Evening News/CBS News Investigates Blog, September 9, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20015982-10391695.html

xxii Taylor, Ginger, “CDC Chief Admits that Vaccines Trigger Autism,” April 2, 2008. Online video clip. YouTube. Accessed on October 19, 2010,

xxiii Housecall: Unraveling the Mystery of Autism, with Sanjay Gupta, Cable News Network, March 29, 2008

xxiv David Kirby, “The Next Big Autism Bomb: Are 1 in 50 Kids Potentially At Risk?” The Huffington Post, March 26, 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/the-next-big-autism-bomb-_b_93627.html.

xxv These children were part of the same autism treatment program and were not randomly selected.

xxvi Ibid.

xxvii Shankar Vedantam, “Fathering Autism: A Scientist Wrestles With the Realities of His Daughter’s Illness,” The Washington Post, July 1, 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062703023.html?sid=ST2008070101784&pos=

xxviii Anne Schuchat, “Vaccines’ benefits outweigh dangers:Autism claim shouldn’t deter parents,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 26, 2008, http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2008/03/25/vaccinesed_0326.html

xxix David A. Geier, Mark R. Geier, “Autism Spectrum Disorder-associated Biomarkers for Case Evaluation: Mitochondrial Dysfunction Biomarkers,” Medscape Today, http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/584398_6

xxx “The Today Show,” National Broadcasting Corporation. March 11, 2008, http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2008/03/aap-president-tells-giant-easily.html

xxxi Vaccine Injury Table, National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, last accessed November 2, 2010, http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/table.htm

xxxii Forehand v. Tayloe, E. District of North Carolina, verdict delivered May 1, 1985; see

xxxiii http://www.karneylaw.com/Verdicts-Settlements/Top-5-Verdicts-Settlements.shtml#2

xxxiv “National and state AAP leader, Dr. Tayloe Sr., was medical home advocate,” AAP News Vol. 31 No. 8 August 2010, p. 36, http://aapnews.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/31/8/36-a

xxxv Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and David Kirby, “The Vaccine Court: Autism Debate Continues,” The Huffington Post, February 24, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-autism-deba_b_169673.html

xxxvi Everything You Need To Know About The Flu, “The Doctors,” October 26, 2009, Stage 29, LLC

xxxvii Mary Holland, Louis Conte, Robert Krakow, and Lisa Colin, Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury, 28 Pace

Envtl. L. Rev. 480 (2011), http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/pelr/vol28/iss2/6

xxxviii Jon Baio, Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 14 Sites, United States, 2008, March 30, 2012 / 61(SS03);1-19 http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6103a1.htm?s_cid=ss6103a1_w

xxxix The Canary Party, The Canary Party and Grassroots Autism Organizations Call for Firings of Health Officials in the Wake of New Autism Numbers, April 2, 2012, http://canaryparty.org/index.php/the-news/100-the-canary-party-and-grassroots-autism-organizations-call-for-firings-of-health-officials-in-the-wake-of-new-autism-numbers

xl Dan Burton, It Is Time to Re-Engage on the Autism Epidemic, The HIll's Congressional Blog, April 24, 2012, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/223265-it-is-time-to-re-engage-on-the-autism-epidemic

xli http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html, Page last modified: February 11, 2010, Page last reviewed: September 15, 2010

xlii http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/topics.html, Page last reviewed: May 13, 2010, Page last updated: May 13, 2010

xliii Ginger Taylor “No Evidence of Any Link,” AdventuresInAutism.com, June 14^th, 2007, accessed May 1st, 2012, http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-evidence-of-any-link.html

xliv Arthur Allen, “H1N1: The Report Card,” Readers Digest, March 2010, http://www.rd.com/health-slideshows/h1n1-the-report-card/article174741-1.html

xlv Handley, JB, Frantic: CDC’s Dr. Diane Simpson Travels the World to Find Dr. Poul Thorsen, Age of Autism, http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/03/frantic-cdcs-dr-diane-simpson-travels-the-world-to-find-dr-poul-thorsen.html

xlvi Handley, JB, "First Fraud: Dr. Poul Thorsen and the original “Danish Study" Age of Autism, March 8, 2010, http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/03/first-fraud-dr-poul-thorsen-and-the-original-danish-study.html

xlvii Maja Nielsen and Morten Ravn, translated by Ulla Danielson, SWINDLE FOR MILLIONS AT AARHUS UNIVERSITY

Aarhus Stiftstidende, Febuary 10, 2010, http://stiften.dk/aarhus/forsker-svindlede-millioner-paa-universitetet;

Researcher accused of cheating Uni out of millions, The Copenhagen Post, February 11, 2010, http://www.cphpost.dk/news/international/89-international/48229-researcher-accused-of-cheating-uni-out-of-millions.html

xlviii Dan Olmsted, Mark Blaxill, Poul Thorsen's Mutating Resume, Age of Autism, March 10, 2010 http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/03/poul-thorsens-mutating-resume.html

xlix http://www.dsm5.org/MeetUs/Pages/BioPoulThorsen.aspx

l Dane indicted for defrauding CDC, Atlanta Business Chronicle, April 13, 2011, http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2011/04/13/dane-indicted-for-defrauding-cdc.html

li Ulla Danielsen, "BREAKING NEWS: DANISH HIGH COURT DISMISSES CASE OF GROSS TAX EVASION AGAINST FORMER DANISH AUTISM RESEARCHER POUL THORSEN", nbjour, http://nbjour.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/breaking-news-danish-high-court-dismisses-case-of-gross-tax-evasion-against-former-danish-autism-researcher-poul-thorsen/

lii Ulla Danielsen, "BREAKING: PROSECUTOR WANTS DANISH HIGHEST COURT TO RECONSIDER DISMISSED THORSEN TAX CASE", nbjour, http://nbjour.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/breaking-prosecutor-wants-danish-highest-court-to-reconsider-dismissed-thorsen-tax-case/

liii Notable Name Database, Ignaz Semmelweis, http://www.nndb.com/people/601/000091328/

liv Bálint P, Bálint G, “The Semmelweis-reflex,” Orv Hetil. July 26, 2009;150(30):1430.

lv “Parents want research on vaccine safety,” UPI.com, October 12, 2010, http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/10/12/Parents-want-research-on-vaccine-safety/UPI-39721286941024/.

Articles| August 01 1958, https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/22/2/259/29340/ECZEMA-VAC

CINATUM?redirectedFrom=fulltext

ECZEMA VACCINATUM

Audrey H. Reynolds; Howard A. Joos

Pediatrics (1958) 22 (2): 259–267.

https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.22.2.259

Abstract

Nine cases of eczema vaccinatum are presented, including two fatalities. Seven were caused by contact of a child with eczema with a recently vaccinated sibling.

Suddenly appearing umbilicated vesicles superimposed upon atopic eczema are almost diagnostic of eczema vaccinatum or eczema herpeticum. These do not occur with mere secondary bacterial infection.

Hyperimmune vaccinal gamma-globulin is now available for specific therapy.

Eczema vaccinatum is frequently iatrogenic and uniformly preventable.

The following steps are recommended for prophylaxis: 1) No child with atopic eczema or other skin disorder should be vaccinated. 2) No child should be vaccinated if any member of his family has eczema or other skin disorder. 3) Parents of children with eczema should be notified at the onset of the disease of the danger from vaccination contact. 4) If a sibling of a child with atopic eczema is vaccinated, he must be completely separated from that child for at least 21 days. 5) Forms used by state and local health departments for parents' consent to vaccination should include an appropriate warning of the contraindications. 6) Eczema vaccinatum should be a reportable disease. 7) Patients recently vaccinated must be excluded from pediatric wards containing patients with atopic eczema, other diseases of the skin, burns or healing surgical incisions. 8) Vaccination may be recommended at 2 months of age, especially for babies from strongly allergic families.

Ya know… back when they took vaccine safety seriously.

Jeffrey S. Morris, PhD is Paul Offit’s colleague at UPenn’s medical school. He also got his undergrad from Messiah College in 1993, the same year I graduated from Liberty University. So although I have not seen any such claim of his, presumably he is my Christian brother.

My regular readers will know that I consider Paul Offit an inveterate liar, and have personally experienced how unfun it is to be yelled at by him. So anything I write here about Dr. Morris should be tempered with the idea that he has likely been saturated by teachings from the the most vocal con man, and vaccine millionaire, that the vaccine propaganda industry has. And that indoctrination may include the Athiest’s training on how to devalue parents with contempt and even cursing.

The questions themselves are riddled with problems as you might expect of someone has been educated at The Profitt School of Vaccine Safety at Fallacious University. So I'm gonna go through the whole thing carefully explaining things both from my specific point of view, and from our communities scientific understanding of vaccine injury.

First the short answer on vaccine autism causation and Thimerosal:

• Mercury is very good at causing autism, but it is not the only thing that causes autism.

• The mercury based preservative thimerosal is very good at causing autism, but it is not the only thing that causes autism.

• Vaccines are very good at causing autism but they are not the only environmental insult that causes autism.

• Environmental injury is very good at causing autism but it is not the only thing that causes autism.

Our community discussing autism causation has never theorized that thimerosal was the sole cause of autism. It may have been the first thing that the media reported in the US, and it may have been the hope of everyone that this was the only problem so that mercury could be removed from vaccines and we could go on as normal, but the first public debate did not discuss mercury, it was Congress’s demand that the pertussis vaccine be studied to see if it was involved in autism causation. The Thimerosal = Autism theory is the straw man argument that the Offiteers put into the public discussion, and it ignores historical record which started with researching the smallpox vaccine. The smallpox vaccine is a live virus vaccine and cannot contain mercury.

Our community has been saying for decades that autism causation is the result of epigenetics. Gene environment interaction. That genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.

And vaccines are not the only environmental trigger.

Other known triggers include pesticides, dry cleaning chemicals, surgical anesthetics, Tylenol, and drugs given during pregnancy like SSRIs, seizure medications, and even thalidomide.

Now to his questions which include a number of false assumptions based on what he has likely been taught. I will break it up so I'm dealing with one problem at a time.

“Question unrelated to this thread: what do you now think about your clear belief at the time that Thimerosal was a primary driver of autism (or at least the subtype of autism you talked about in that paper)…”

Thimerosal has proven to be a driver of autism both in the dramatic number in the rise of cases in the 90s and in the severity of cases. Thimerosal is a primary driver for many cases of autism, it's not a factor in every case. I don't even believe it was the primary driver in my own son's case.

Remember, there are cases of autism in completely unvaccinated children. For Paul Offit to spout that our community ever promoted the idea that thimerosal was the sole cause of autism is a lie.

One of the benefits of having blogged about this since the very beginning of the blogosphere is that I have a history of my own research into how vaccines can cause autism.

My son regressed into “autism” in September of 2003. His autism was recognized by his physician and subsequent therapists in March of 2004. By July of 2004 I started documenting his treatment. There was no blogosphere yet, but I had my I heard that Michael Moore had this thing called a blog where he was writing about Columbine and gun violence. I have always been an early adapter of technology so I started a blogspot (the precursor to Blogger), and called it Adventures In Autism. I figured if we had to go on this journey to try to recover him and his health then might as well make it public so anybody else looking for treatment can use our experience to evaluate whether or not it might be a good thing for them to try.

When it became clear but he was responding to the recommended medical interventions for “vaccine induced autism,” I began looking add his vaccine records and the mercury content in this specific vaccines he had been given. (At the time there was a website where you could put in the vial number on the vaccines that were listed in your child's vaccine records, and see what the mercury content of that individual shot was. That site was taken down a few years after I got into this research so that parents could no longer look up their child's mercury uptake.)

What I found was that chandler's only mercury containing vaccine was his birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine after which he suffered daily fevers, three months of “colic,” and two years of constipation. His autistic regression did not come until his 18 month vaccines which were mercury free. His other mercury exposures that I could discern, were during my pregnancy. As an RH negative mother I was given two mercury containing Rhogam shots during my first pregnancy, 18 months before Chandler was born, and two mercury containing Rhogam shots during my pregnancy. Additionally I have a mouthful of mercury.

We then did a urine toxic metals profile on him and found that he had several medals including mercury. Chelation was the third thing that we tried in his recovery and he had a wonderful response.

As an aside, we have done biomedical intervention with him for more than 20 years now and we like to say that we got him halfway back. He is one of the happiest people you will ever meet, and he is able to ask for anything he needs. He still needed a one-on-one to keep him on task to get him through high school, but he graduated with honors. We don't know what that actually means for him as he is not able to hold a job. He did not attend college, is now 23, he lives at home, and will likely live with his brother when we pass. We will see what the future holds for him.

I did not even start writing about research until November of 2004, my first discussion of the research was not on thimerosal it was on brain inflammation, and I didn't even starting writing about mercury in earnest until 2005. I wrote A summary of the history of thimerosal a year and a half after my son’s first diagnosis.

So you can see it was never my hypothesis that thimerosal was the “primary driver of autism” even in my own child and therefore it was not my hypothesis ever. My first understanding of vaccine autism causation was gleaned in a undergraduate child psychology class at George Mason University in 1988. Thimerosal was never discussed. My understanding that mercury may have been involved, came from a 1999 mainstream news report about the discovery of high amounts of mercury in the vaccine schedule.

“…given that when thimerosal was removed from virtually all childhood vaccines…”

Thimerosal was not removed from childhood vaccines until THIS WEEK!

In 1999, the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics issue a joint statement saying that although they find no “evidence of harm” from the mercury exposure that children are getting in their vaccines, they are calling on vaccine manufacturers to remove it from vaccines on a voluntary basis as a precautionary measure because “some children may” get more than the EPA limit for mercury at their 6 month visits. Manufactures begin the process in 1999, but do not remove it from all vaccines.

No legal ban on thimerosal is issued.

No recall of the mercury laden vaccines is issued and companies continue to sell lots already manufactured. Some of these vaccines containing full doses of thimerosal have been found in doctors’ offices, by parents who request to read package inserts, with expiration dates as late as 2007.

No independent or government testing of vaccines is done to confirm that thimerosal has been removed. FDA denies parents request that they set up a system to verify manufacturers claims of low dose or thimerosal free vaccines.

No statement is issued to pediatricians to alert them to the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

No recommendation is made to pediatricians to screen children who suffered the onset neurological impairment after vaccination for mercury toxicity.

No recommendation is made to pediatricians to screen children with an autism diagnosis who suffered the symptoms of vaccine induced encephalopathy after vaccination.

“…(as a precaution, not because there was any evidence it was actually causing harm)…”

At this point in the discussion with the doctor, I had already called his attention to the fact that the response to the false claim that there was no evidence of any harm was written by the late great david kirby in his book, conspicuously entitled… EVIDENCE OF HARM.

The 460 page New York Times Bestseller laid out the Evidence of Harm for him in 2005, including 436 citations. When the book was published the CDC added a note to their web page in April of 2005 that they would be reviewing the book and making a response. They left the notice up there for a few months, and then it disappeared. No response ever came.

I noted for him that in 2007 I used the 15 or so research papers listed in this book to start my own research into on the mercury and autism causation, indiscreetly titled "No Evidence of Any Link", and sent him to the link to my current list which now includes 88 papers. https://howdovaccinescauseautism.org/category/mercury/

And yet following this he stated his position that there was no evidence of harm from Thimerosal.

…”the autism diagnosis rate did not decline, did not level out, but continued on the same trajectory?”

First, just the flat out wrongness of his statement: in the birth cohort born after mercury was removed from vaccines, there WAS a flat line in the increases of the autism rate. (Keep in mind that these numbers are for 12 year olds, so subtract 12 from any of the years cited to get the birth year of the children measured.)

Note that the flat line begins with children born in 2002. This was my son. As more aluminum containing vaccines were added to the schedule in the teens autism rates picked up again at the formerly dramatic rate.

Additionally, my answer to this for the last 15 years (long before CDC reported the flatline in 2016 ) was to point out that was that my observation as the mother of one of those children who began getting the lower dose mercury schedule what is that all the children I knew with autism that were older than him were much more severe cases than his, and all the children that I knew that were younger than him all had much milder cases than he. So my guess was that the amount of mercury contained in each child's vaccine schedule correlated with the severity of their individual cases.

I noted that this was just purely my observation of being around other families with children relatively close to my son's age, but with a wide enough range to get enough of a sample to see the patterns. I always finished it up saying I can see no evidence of this in the literature, because they haven't looked into case severity over time.

Suddenly a wild case severity over time paper appeared.

In fact I gave that response three weeks ago in a 2 hour interview with doctor Michael Nichols. Then before the interview even aired, i found out that a paper was published that backed my theory.

“Time Trends in United States Autism Prevalence with Co-Occurring Intellectual Disability: Is There a Signature of Thimerosal?” Found that, "The sharp drop in the ID fraction between birth year 2000 and 2002 coincided with the removal of thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative and neurotoxin linked to autism severity, from most childhood vaccines. Conversely, the renewed increase in the ID fraction after 2006 coincided with the reintroduction of thimerosal via flu shots promoted for infants and pregnant women. Low-income women and children are particularly likely to receive those products in some states, due to health insurance and daycare requirements, which may be contributing to autism severity as well as to the recent strong divergence in ASD prevalence by race/ethnicity.”

So not only did my observation that the severity of autism cases dropped with my son's 2002 birth cohort, rates of intellectual disability dropped dramatically in my son's cohort and began to climb again as mercury was added back into the flu shot.

Just another example of the fact that the parents are at least 10 years ahead of the science and have been ever since autism ever made its first headline.

“Did this cause you to reject your former hypothesis that thimerosal was a primary driver and shift your hypothesis to some different element? Or do you somehow stand by those beliefs?”

As Dr. Morris started with a Straw man fallacy that neither was the claim of our community nor my own theory to begin with, and added several pieces of misinformation into his calculation, my response to doctor Morris is that I stand by my beliefs, and you can follow my logic of my beliefs from my own documentation beginning only months after my son’s doctor say the word autism.

After doctor Morris posed the question I told him that I would be answering it here in long form so I don't have to try to reproduce my answer anymore on Twitter.

Doctor Morris followed up his question by gaslighting me. Asking me if it could be possible that I was wrong in my vaccine autism causation conclusions from the beginning and wrong ever since. It was said very politely as all good gaslighting is, and seems to be designed for me to go back and defend to him everything that I have written in the last 20 years.

I responded there as I am going respond to him here. Actually read my arguments and critique them there, rather rather than treating me as if you are one of my betters. That it is important to differentiate scientific discussions from gaslighting mothers.

The process of scientific inquiry, which is what this man claims to be interested in, is one of discussing scientific theories using evidendce and reasoning. (And annoyingly often, math.) It goes like this:

Me: “I have a theory, and it is mine and mine alone. My theory is that a brontosaurus is thin at one end, gets large in the middle, and is thin at the other end. Here I present my maths. (In this scenario I am British.)

My Critic: “ I ran your math again (My critic is American), and you forgot to carry the 2. I think you might not be measuring prehistoric, brontosaurus bones, I think those bones were of a giant Anaconda taken from the Amazon in 1972, who was thin at one end, thin in the middle, and then at the other end.”

Me: “ Oh. I retract.”

This is a different approach to gaslighting, which goes like this:

Me: “Awwww… Sweetheart, vaccines are safe and effective and you are just a genuinely distressed mother looking for someone to blame for your child's terrible condition that your genes caused.”

It has been 20 years of gaslighting and we're done with it. Just enough already. I don't even think that Dr. Morris knows that he's doing it. They have just been trained from the beginning to pat mothers on the head, and call them emotional. It was very upset at the beginning but once I saw that they do it to women who are MD, PhD, and MPH holders, I understood it with their coping mechanism to not have to deal with the fact that, there was a chance that they had been tricked into be disabling and killing babies. None of them went in to medicine to do that.

So I have just started sending him polite demure answers. If he chooses to actually start critiquing the science on some of my writing, I will start actually investing in that conversation again.

He did ask this one earnest question though, so I took two days to answer it, but I've probably had enough Twitter for the week. And now I am angry for having to re write what has been written a thousand times before. No wonder us moms are dropping like flies. This work IS stroke/heart attack/cancer inducing.

I now need to go take a Sabbath, do some breathing exercises, and focus on forgiveness.

Forgive us Lord, we know not what we do.

Postscript - he was trolling me. After four days there is no evidence that he even read this post and he never responded at all to it. Once again the doctor places a burden on an injured party and then walks away and takes no responsibility for his request.

This is the one piece of legislation that everybody in the vaccine safety movement has been working toward 25 years.

This is the one piece of legislation that all of MAHA wants passed.

Since the 1986 act ended American’s 7th amendment right to sue vaccine makers for death and injury, the vaccine bubble has been pumped higher and higher, as first children and now adults, become injured and die from vaccine adverse events in greater and greater numbers.

The fact that vaccine makers cannot be held accountable, even when their products kill newborn infants, has led to the biggest, and longest sustained, health crisis in American history.

Liability protection for vaccine makers is a massive, uncontroled, unethical, unconstitutional, experiment in health policy that has become the biggest failure in health policy in our history.

And now new toxic industries want the same protection that was given to vaccine makers. We are watching Big Ag ask for the same protection for their pesticides, even after Mr. Johnson was awarded $298 million when Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicide Round-up caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Reiterating… Poison companies, that sell poisons, do not want to be legally accountable when their poisons, poison people.

It is time to kill the unaccountable toxic beast where it began.

Dr. Gosar’s H.R. 4668, the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, will:

• REPEAL vaccine manufacturers’ liability shield, empowering plaintiffs to pursue civil action against vaccine manufacturers for vaccine-related injuries and deaths.

• REMOVE the statute of limitations for those seeking compensation under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

• ELIMINATE the COVID-19 vaccines’ classification as “countermeasures” under the PREP Act, enabling plaintiffs to pursue civil action for COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries.

• PRESERVE the VICP, allowing plaintiffs to choose whether to pursue civil action or seek compensation through the VICP. Plaintiffs are still prevented from “double dipping.”

Next steps to help:

Amplify Americans’ voices against this liability shield on social media.

Encourage Members of Congress to join the fight as cosponsors of H.R. 4668!
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Link to Press Release: Representative Paul Gosar

From: Representative Paul Gosar’s Office

Gosar Reintroduces Legislation to Sue Big Pharma for Vaccine Injuries

Washington, D.C. -- Congressman Paul A. Gosar, D.D.S. (AZ-09), issued the following statement after reintroducing H.R. 4668, the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, a bill that would strip vaccine manufacturers of their unjust liability shields: “Current immunity provisions unfairly shielding Big Pharma from the harms caused by their products prevents those injured by vaccines to pursue a civil lawsuit in state or federal court. This carveout has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma while leaving tens of thousands of people without the ability to seek legal justice and compensation for injuries caused by vaccines. Although federal bureaucrats and Big Pharma insist that vaccines are safe, there is an unfortunate lack of science regarding the dangerous side effects of vaccines. Worse, greedy Big Pharma profit enormously from government-recommended vaccines, many of which are mandated or linked to public funding. Yet, they bear none of the risk if something goes wrong. Accountability does not weaken science, it strengthens it. The fact is, government bureaucrats and scientists responsible for approving vaccines are in bed with Big Pharma, often owning pharmaceutical stocks, serving as consultants and receiving lucrative contracts from pharmaceutical companies that pressure them to produce favorable results which is in direct violation of federal law. Worse, many scientists and researchers in government agencies develop patents for vaccines that are approved by the very agencies they work for, creating a conflict of interest and raising serious questions about the impartiality of their decisions.Under current law, it is nearly impossible to hold vaccine manufacturers liable for injuries caused by vaccines due to a 1986 law that wrongly granted sweeping legal immunities to Big Pharma, making it very difficult for vaccine-injured victims to win in a court of law. Let’s be clear, no industry, especially one that profits from government-recommended and government-mandated products, should be immune from the liability its products cause. My legislation puts patients over profits by stripping away current liability protections and removes the statute of limitations unfairly shielding Big Pharma from the harms caused by their products and allows those injured by vaccines to pursue a civil lawsuit in state or federal court,” concluded Congressman Gosar.It is long overdue for Congress to address the nightmare that it created: almost total liability protection for vaccine makers. Rep. Gosar's "End the Vaccine Carveout Act" is exactly what we need to ensure vaccines are held to the highest standards of safety and effectiveness, just like almost all other products. If vaccines are truly safe as advertised, then there is no reason for them to be exempted from liability if and when they cause harm; Rep. Gosar gets this common sense. Children's Health Defense has been fighting for a bill like this for years; we thank the Congressman for his leadership and courage to make this happen,” added Mary Holland, President, Children’s Health Defense. "The American people are weary of the lack of accountability in our nation. Over the past few years, we have witnessed an unprecedented, un-American act: the unlawful coercion of an entire population into taking pharmaceutical products under threat of unemployment, censorship, and societal exclusion. To ensure accountability and rectify these wrongs, Feds For Freedom strongly supports Rep. Gosar’s End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which will eliminate the PREP Act’s liability protections for vaccine manufacturers and the “covered countermeasure” classification for the COVID-19 “vaccine. The PREP Act has never aligned with our constitutional rights and has caused immense suffering and death by removing incentives for vaccine manufacturers to ensure product safety,” said Stephanie Weidle, Executive Director of Feds For Freedom. “This must end. The End the Vaccine Carveout Act is a significant step toward restoring our nation’s values of justice and life. The government overstepped its authority by deciding which companies Americans can sue for harm. No more. Accountability is coming.” “The health and safety of our children is enormously impacted by the barrage of vaccines they receive, especially in infancy. Ingredients such as polyethylene glycol, aluminum, and contaminants such as glyphosate in vaccines are likely causing tremendous harm to generations of our family members. It is no longer controversial, it is clear that vaccine manufacturers must be responsible for the safety of their products,” stated Zen Honeycutt, Founding Executive Director, Moms Across America.Background:In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NVCIA), which shields vaccine manufacturers from the harm caused by their products, making it almost impossible for a person injured by a vaccine to win in court. The plaintiff must prove that the vaccine manufacturer deliberately “[withheld] information relating to the safety or efficacy of the vaccine,” engaged in “criminal or illegal activity relating to the safety and effectiveness of vaccines,” or “by clear and convincing evidence… failed to exercise due care.” Satisfying these requirements is practically an impossibility. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are tasked with approving vaccines. Sadly, there exists a massive conflict of interest, since the scientists who work at these agencies license the patents to vaccine manufacturers and, in so doing, earn up to $150,000 in royalties. Furthermore, voting members on the boards that advise the CDC and the NIH owned stocks in vaccine manufacturers, engaged in contract work for vaccine manufacturers, and received grants from vaccine manufacturers.Current Cosponsors:Representatives Biggs (AZ), Boebert, Brecheen, Burchett, Burlison, Collins, Crane, Davidson, Donalds, Greene, Hageman, Harris (MD), Higgins, Jackson (TX), Luna, Mace, Massie, Miller (IL), Mills, Moore (AL), Nehls, Norman, Ogles, Roy, Self, Spartz, Steube, Weber Outside Group Support:Autism Action Network, A Voice for Choice, Inc., Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, Children’s Health Defense, Citizens for Renewing America, Feds for Freedom, Global Health Project, Global Wellness Forum, Health Freedom Defense Fund, Independent Medical Alliance, Moms Across America, No College Mandates, Stand for Health Freedom, Teachers for Choice, Transformational Healthcare, Weston A. Price Foundation

Contact Me | Media Center | Our District

For Immediate Release

Contact: Anthony Foti

Date: July 24, 2025

anthony.foti@mail.house.gov

Gosar Reintroduces Legislation to Sue Big Pharma for Vaccine Injuries

Washington, D.C. -- Congressman Paul A. Gosar, D.D.S. (AZ-09), issued the following statement after reintroducing H.R. 4668, the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, a bill that would strip vaccine manufacturers of their unjust liability shields:

“Current immunity provisions unfairly shielding Big Pharma from the harms caused by their products prevents those injured by vaccines to pursue a civil lawsuit in state or federal court. This carveout has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma while leaving tens of thousands of people without the ability to seek legal justice and compensation for injuries caused by vaccines.

Although federal bureaucrats and Big Pharma insist that vaccines are safe, there is an unfortunate lack of science regarding the dangerous side effects of vaccines. Worse, greedy Big Pharma profit enormously from government-recommended vaccines, many of which are mandated or linked to public funding. Yet, they bear none of the risk if something goes wrong. Accountability does not weaken science, it strengthens it.

The fact is, government bureaucrats and scientists responsible for approving vaccines are in bed with Big Pharma, often owning pharmaceutical stocks, serving as consultants and receiving lucrative contracts from pharmaceutical companies that pressure them to produce favorable results which is in direct violation of federal law. Worse, many scientists and researchers in government agencies develop patents for vaccines that are approved by the very agencies they work for, creating a conflict of interest and raising serious questions about the impartiality of their decisions.

Under current law, it is nearly impossible to hold vaccine manufacturers liable for injuries caused by vaccines due to a 1986 law that wrongly granted sweeping legal immunities to Big Pharma, making it very difficult for vaccine-injured victims to win in a court of law. Let’s be clear, no industry, especially one that profits from government-recommended and government-mandated products, should be immune from the liability its products cause.

My legislation puts patients over profits by stripping away current liability protections and removes the statute of limitations unfairly shielding Big Pharma from the harms caused by their products and allows those injured by vaccines to pursue a civil lawsuit in state or federal court,” concluded Congressman Gosar.

It is long overdue for Congress to address the nightmare that it created: almost total liability protection for vaccine makers. Rep. Gosar's "End the Vaccine Carveout Act" is exactly what we need to ensure vaccines are held to the highest standards of safety and effectiveness, just like almost all other products. If vaccines are truly safe as advertised, then there is no reason for them to be exempted from liability if and when they cause harm; Rep. Gosar gets this common sense. Children's Health Defense has been fighting for a bill like this for years; we thank the Congressman for his leadership and courage to make this happen,” added Mary Holland, President, Children’s Health Defense.

"The American people are weary of the lack of accountability in our nation. Over the past few years, we have witnessed an unprecedented, un-American act: the unlawful coercion of an entire population into taking pharmaceutical products under threat of unemployment, censorship, and societal exclusion. To ensure accountability and rectify these wrongs, Feds For Freedom strongly supports Rep. Gosar’s End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which will eliminate the PREP Act’s liability protections for vaccine manufacturers and the “covered countermeasure” classification for the COVID-19 “vaccine.

The PREP Act has never aligned with our constitutional rights and has caused immense suffering and death by removing incentives for vaccine manufacturers to ensure product safety,” said Stephanie Weidle, Executive Director of Feds For Freedom. “This must end. The End the Vaccine Carveout Act is a significant step toward restoring our nation’s values of justice and life. The government overstepped its authority by deciding which companies Americans can sue for harm. No more. Accountability is coming.”

“The health and safety of our children is enormously impacted by the barrage of vaccines they receive, especially in infancy. Ingredients such as polyethylene glycol, aluminum, and contaminants such as glyphosate in vaccines are likely causing tremendous harm to generations of our family members. It is no longer controversial, it is clear that vaccine manufacturers must be responsible for the safety of their products,” stated Zen Honeycutt, Founding Executive Director, Moms Across America.

Background:

In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NVCIA), which shields vaccine manufacturers from the harm caused by their products, making it almost impossible for a person injured by a vaccine to win in court. The plaintiff must prove that the vaccine manufacturer deliberately “[withheld] information relating to the safety or efficacy of the vaccine,” engaged in “criminal or illegal activity relating to the safety and effectiveness of vaccines,” or “by clear and convincing evidence… failed to exercise due care.” Satisfying these requirements is practically an impossibility.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are tasked with approving vaccines. Sadly, there exists a massive conflict of interest, since the scientists who work at these agencies license the patents to vaccine manufacturers and, in so doing, earn up to $150,000 in royalties. Furthermore, voting members on the boards that advise the CDC and the NIH owned stocks in vaccine manufacturers, engaged in contract work for vaccine manufacturers, and received grants from vaccine manufacturers.

Current Cosponsors:

Representatives Biggs (AZ), Boebert, Brecheen, Burchett, Burlison, Collins, Crane, Davidson, Donalds, Greene, Hageman, Harris (MD), Higgins, Jackson (TX), Luna, Mace, Massie, Miller (IL), Mills, Moore (AL), Nehls, Norman, Ogles, Roy, Self, Spartz, Steube, Weber

Outside Group Support:

Autism Action Network, A Voice for Choice, Inc., Children’s Health Defense, Citizens for Renewing America, Feds for Freedom, Global Health Project, Global Wellness Forum, Health Freedom Defense Fund, Independent Medical Alliance, Moms Across America, No College Mandates, Stand for Health Freedom, Teachers for Choice, Transformational Healthcare, Weston A. Price Foundation, NoDeception.org

This week on Instagram a reenactment of the early oughts drama between parents and the CDC was re enacted in micro form between a father with questions and a PhD pharmacist (who looks like he was a tweener at the time this was playing out in 2000) with very slick and very fraudulent answers. Tyler, the dad of a very sweet young adult with severe autism (tylerhudsonmusic), commented on Kennedy's revelation Tucker Carlson show of the Verstraeten fraud. His conclusion was that it was difficult to trust the establishment on vaccine safety claims, especially after their lies during the COVID era, and that, “Correlation is not causation = two weeks to flatten the curve = bullshit.”

He was then sent a video from a PhD pharmacist and “science journalist.” Those of you who have been following me for decades know that I have spent decades doing battle with these young naive irresponsible “science journalists.” and those of you who are my recent followers will have seen my jousting with a producer from “Nightline” in March over Kennedy's comments, which includes a 45 minute recording of our conversation. “Science journalists” have now been reborn as “science influencers,” but it's the same same schtick just repackaged for the social media era. They're almost always young people with some relevant mainstream training, boosting their profile and/or their bank account defending the fraud in mainstream medicine and normalizing attacks on parents. They speak with authority that they have not earned, and when they are outed they often disappear back into their original career only to be replaced by a new young naive face that will say whatever the mainstream establishment tells them to say. There are no critical thinkers in this category. They practice the religion of Scientism, and they usually don't even know the history of what they're talking about.

Dr Noc, basically explaing that Kennedy didn't know what he was talking about and that he was using the “raw data” from the first study , which he was, but that CDC had improved the study and it ultimately found no link between vaccines and autism, which CDC had not.

Anyone who lived through this era of bullshit knows that this is a blatant fraud that they have been trying to cover up for 25 years. Tyler then asked the question how do you get rid of an 1135% increase in autism in this study by finding a new cohort to study, and how did they find this new group of children?

What this construction worker/musician didn't realize he was doing was asking THE question. This is the question that brought Bobby Kennedy into the public arena to discuss vaccines in the 1st place. This fraud that Dr. Noc is promoting again is the reason I became a serious writer on these issues in 2005.

So I took the section of the paper on verstrand that I republished last week and made a video explaining to parents that what has been presented to them as improvements are blatant fraud. And that Dr. Noc does has not even read Verstraetrn's conclusion on his own paper.

Keep in mind, once a science endeavor finds something, it is unethical to unfind it. Ethics dictate that it be reported to the public. Verstraeten along with a string of other mainstream and CDC studies, work very hard to unfind the things that they have found about how their own vaccine program endangers children. This habit of theirs has earned them the distrust and sometimes hatred of the public certainly of those with injured children.

And if you don't have a copy of evidence of harm yet, please go buy one. Even 20 years later it is well worth the read.

And someone send a copy to Dr. Noc. God save us from niave science fraud influencers.

And it's great to see autism parents continuing to ask the right questions year after year.

Bobby has been in charge of HHS for four months now, and he has visited the CDC in Atlanta. Certainly by this time he's come across William Thompson and some sort of discussion about the MMR study fraud must have happened. I've just been sitting quietly and wondering what and what what is going to come of this scandal, and when Secretary Kennedy is going to discuss the scandal publicly. He may be waiting for his permanent CDC director to be confirmed, or for some other development to take place.

In the meantime I thought I would post the developments in the timeline of the scandal to refresh our memories for the day that this becomes national news again. It has now been 11 years since this scandal broke. It is one of a number of open developments that have never been handled properly.

8/8/14 – Dr. Brian Hooker publishes an article in the journal Translational Neurodegeneration entitled Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young African American boys: a reanalysis of CDC data. The paper took a second look at the data used in the 2002 CDC MMR/autism study Age at first measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in children with autism and school-matched control subjects: a population-based study in metropolitan Atlanta and concludes that there is a significant association between giving the MMR vaccine to black males under the age of 3 and the development of autism. This association was not reported in the published CDC study.

8/18/14 – A video is released on the Internet with audio purported, and later confirmed to be, discussions between Dr. Brian Hooker and CDC senior research scientist Dr. William Thompson, one of the original MMR paper’s authors. The video claims that Thompson told Hooker in phone conversations that the research team found the association between vaccines and autism, and then changed the parameters of the study to get rid of the association, so they would not have to report it to the public. In the audio Thompson expresses great shame and remorse for “lying” and for going along with what the “higher-ups wanted.”

The autism and vaccine injury communities were outraged at the disclosure, and discussions on the matter began to flood the blogosphere and appear on social media under #CDCwhistleblower. More quotes by Thompson are released on the Internet.

A sample of the Thompson quotes:

“Oh my God, I did not believe that we did what we did, but we did. It’s all there… This is the lowest point in my career, that I went along with that paper. I have great shame now when I meet families of kids with autism, because I have been part of the problem.”

“We’ve missed ten years of research because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism. They’re not doing what they should be doing because they’re afraid to look for things that might be associated.”

CDC releases a statement on their web site confirming that the study parameters were changed and that there were two sets of children studied. One was all the children initially recruited for the study; the other was a subset of children who had Georgia birth certificates. The statement also confirmed that a higher association was found between MMR and autism in children given the vaccine before the age of 36 months.

8/27/14 – Dr. William Thompson releases a statement through his whistleblower attorneys confirming the claims made about him and about the paper. He expresses regret that he and his colleagues omitted statistically significant data on the vaccine autism link, he confirms that it was he on the audio speaking to Dr. Hooker on the phone, and he states that he is providing information to Congressman Bill Posey and will continue to cooperate with Congress on the matter.

8/27/14 – The journal Translational Neurodegeneration removes the Hooker article from its website with the following statement: “This article has been removed from the public domain pending further investigation because the journal and publisher believe that its continued availability could cause public harm. Definitive editorial action will be taken once our investigation is complete.” The journal then fell under criticism from members of the public who claimed that Translational Neurodegeneration did not follow its own research review policies in removing the article.

8/29/14 – More audio of Thompson is released in a video in which he discusses the firm belief inside the CDC that mercury in vaccines can cause tics, and he emphatically states that thimerosal should never be given to pregnant women, as is currently done. Since tics are four times more common in children with autism, Thompson proceeds to state, “There is biologic plausibility right now to say that thimerosal causes autism-like features.”

8/28/14 – Reporter Sharyl Attkisson investigates the story and reports, “A spokesman for the journal Pediatrics today said the publication stands by the study despite the news.“ “There’s a standard process that journals follow when an article is questioned,” said the spokesman. “Those discussions took place between the editors of Pediatrics and the authors of this study, and the editors concluded the research was appropriately conducted.” However, Thompson, one of the study authors, confirmed that he was never contacted by the editors of Pediatrics. Pediatricsis published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which accepts vaccine industry funding.

Further, Attkisson reports, “The Director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office, Dr. Frank DeStefano, is a co-author of the now-questioned study which has been widely-cited to dispel an MMR-autism link. DeStefano is frequently quoted as an expert who debunks vaccine-autism ties.

“‘I stand by the research and the conclusions in our 2004 paper, and I’ll reiterate that the evidence, thus far, the weight of the evidence, is against a causal association between vaccines and autism,‘ DeStefano told me in a telephone interview this week.“

8/29/14 – Sharyl Attkisson issues a second report on the story, this time reporting, “In a statement, Thompson implies his CDC employer and colleagues have not always been forthright with the public about vaccine safety issues. But DeStefano argues their final analysis produced more valid results.”

Attkisson also includes the complete audio with her interview with DeStefano, in which he states “at 36 months, an exposure around that time period is just not biologically plausible to have a causal association with autism.” DeStefano provides no basis for this assertion.

09/2/14 – Attkisson issues a third report, highlighting a seeming reversal from DeStefano “biologically implausible” stance and an admission that they are not looking for cases where vaccines can or have caused autism: A coauthor of the questioned study is Dr. Frank DeStefano, Director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office. In a telephone interview last week, DeStefano defended the study and reiterated the commonly accepted position that, “there is no link between vaccines and autism.”

But he acknowledged the prospect that vaccines might rarely trigger autism.

“I guess, that, that is a possibility,” said DeStefano. “It’s hard to predict who those children might be, but certainly, individual cases can be studied to look at those possibilities.”

DeStefano is the head of the CDC Immunization Safety Office. It was his job to look for cases of vaccine-induced autism, most especially in light of both the rising numbers of children with autism and the vast number of parental reports nationwide of regression into autism following vaccination. Either he didn’t look for those cases, or he did, and he chose not to report his findings. Neither is acceptable.

9/8/14 – Ben Swann reports that Congressman Posey’s office confirmed that Thompson has turned over a “very large number” of documents.

9/9/14 – The Orlando Sentinel confirms that Congressman Posey has begun an investigation into the #CDCwhistleblower claims.

9/10/14 – Attkisson’s fourth installment reports that Pediatrics issued a statement standing by the DeStefano study, apparently not following its own ethical guidelines, as it didn’t contact Thompson, only the authors accused of malfeasance.

9/17/14 – Autism Media Channel releases more audio from the Thompson phone calls in which Thompson says that the CDC is 10 years behind on autism, because it is paralyzed by what it might find if proper investigation was undertaken. He calls for Congressional hearings and an independent investigation of the CDC’s actions. The video closes with Thompson saying, “I have a boss who is asking me to lie… I have basically stopped lying.”

10/9/14 – Autism Media Channel releases another video alleging further hiding of MMR/autism data, reporting that Thompson and his team found a link between MMR and what they described as, “Isolated” autism. It defined the phenomenon as children with autism who did not have any co-morbid developmental disorders including Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation (IQ less than 70), Visual Impairment, Hearing Impairment, Epilepsy or Birth Defects. The video states that, “According to Thompson, these were autistic children with no other obvious explanation for their developmental disorder. A subset that may have been injured in their second year of life.” The video reports that CDC found that for this subset of children, it was more likely that that they had received the MMR between 12 to 18 months of life, regardless of race, compared to those who received MMR after 36 months.

Thompson is quoted as telling Dr. Hooker that, “The effect is where you think it would happen. It’s with the kids with out other conditions.”

AMC reports that Thompson has provided documentation showing that CDC then abandoned the research protocol, revising the age groups examined so that children over the age of 36 months were no longer included in the study, and limiting the co-morbid conditions to ONLY Mental Retardation.

The video then further proposes that it may be that those changes were not enough to get rid of the association that they were finding between the MMR and autism, “… since in the end they simply omitted the relevant findings from the paper all together. Those findings were concealed from the editors of Pediatrics, its reviewers and the public.”

7/29/15 – Rep. Bill Posey brings to the floor of the House of Representatives former CDC researcher and now Whistleblower, Dr. Bill Thompson’s letter regarding significant files they omitted and destroyed to avoid reporting any significant race effects in their study. The statement by Thompson reports that he participated in a meeting where his research team put a garbage can in the middle of the room and threw away data relavant to the links between MMR and Autism. Posey calls for formal hearings into the scandal, and offers the documents that Posey has turned over to his office to all members of Congress. http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4546421/rep-bill-posey-calling-investigation-cdcs-mmr-reasearch-fraud

Activists highlight the new revelation in a campaign under #GarbageCan.

8/6/15 – CDC spokesperson Tom Skinner, in response to the information presented by Congressman Posey, offers the following statement to Forbes Magazine, announcing that the agency will investigate themselves for the fraud charges that have been levied against them:

“CDC is aware that employee Dr. William Thompson has raised concerns regarding an article he co-authored that was published in 2004 in Pediatrics. Consistent with CDC’s existing policies and procedures, the agency, through its Office of the Associate Director for Science (ADS), and in coordination with the HHS Office of Research Integrity, is reviewing these concerns. The agency will provide further information once the review is completed.”

8/20/15 – Kevin Barry, Esq. releases his book, Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Autism Research Fraud at the CDC. “A Firsthand Account from a CDC Insider on the Link between Vaccines and Autism

Vaccine Whistleblower is a gripping account of four legally recorded phone conversations between Dr. Brian Hooker, a scientist investigating autism and vaccine research, and Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist in the vaccine safety division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thompson, who is still employed at the CDC under protection of the federal Whistleblower Protection Act, discloses a pattern of data manipulation, fraud, and corruption at the highest levels of the CDC, the federal agency in charge of protecting the health of Americans. Thompson states, “Senior people just do completely unethical, vile things and no one holds them accountable.”

This book nullifies the government’s claims that “vaccines are safe and effective,” and reveals that the government rigged research to cover up the link between vaccines and autism. Scientific truth and the health of American children have been compromised to protect the vaccine program and the pharmaceutical industry.

The financial cost of the CDC’s corruption is staggering. The human cost is incalculable. Vaccine Whistleblower provides context to the implications of Thompson’s revelations and directs the reader to political action.”

11/3/15 – Congressman Bill Posey posts to facebook: “ARROGANT, PETULANT & DEFIANT – I was informed by an insider they did an investigation, prepared a response and produced a video as a result of the July 29th video I posted below. I simply asked to see…”

The comment is accompanied by a letter from CDC refusing his request to view the materials.

11/30/15 – Ben Swann announces that Rep. Posey has given him the Thompson documents, and that Swann will release them to the public following a complete review of the material.

1/26/16 – Ben Swann releases a 24 minute mini-documentary on the CDC Whistleblower scandal, and all of the Thompson documents that Rep. Posey had turned over to him. ThompsonDocuments.zip

Included is William Thompson’s six page statment to Congress on the actions he and his team took to with hold vaccine-autism links from the public.

3/16 – The Tribeca Film Festival adds the new Thompson scandal full length, feature documentary “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe,” by Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, and Polly Tommy, to its line up. Outrage over the choice causes the festival to remove the film from the line up. Media over the controversy propels exposure of the film and the CDC whistleblower scandal into the US and international media.

4/1/16 – Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe premiers at an alternate venue in New York. The screening would be the beginning of theater screenings nationally, and a tour by the film makers that is still underway.

http://www.vaxxed.com/

4/13/16 – Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal appear on the Today Show to discuss the documentary and the decision to pull it from the event.

4/18/16 – The duo appears again on the Today Show to discuss the film, with De Ninero expressing regret over the choice to pull the film, and his believe that there is something wrong at the CDC.

9/23/16 – Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee tells a group at a fundraising event that his offices is investigating the Thompson disclosures and intends to pursue the matter.

10/18/16 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr., via his organization, the World Mercury Project, announce that a judge has allowed a civil case for a vaccine induced autism claim against a physician to move forward to trial in Tennessee. Because the case involves the MMR vaccine, the judge has allowed Dr. William Thompson to be subpoenaed, and CDC Director Tom Frieden is attempting to block Thompson from testifying in the first civil hearing before a jury of a vaccine injury case in more than 30 years.

As of July 2025 Congress has not released the video testimony that Thompson gave to the House Government Oversight Committee.

Watch VAXXED, the film that documents it all.

Let’s see what happens this summer.

View draft history

They taught the principle to us in Graduate School in a more sophisticated language. “The client will tell you what is, and is not, important to them. All you have to do is really listen.”

This week Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and the Brownstone Institute told us about the document leaked an employee of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group of vaccine companies. The notes from their April 3rd meeting on how to end the tenure and impact of Secretary Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services. If you have not yet read the article, please be sure to go over there and read it I won't be detailing it here.

In the document the vaccine companies have told us who they are, What they want, and what they do not care about.

They recognize that the bottom is starting to fall out of their industry, and what they do want is easier to see. They want to end Kennedy's influence, they want to get investors money flowing in their direction again, they want to lower their regulatory hurdles, and finally, they want the public to be afraid.

This is not new information from for us, as we have known this for 20 years, simply because we've watched them for 20 years.

It's rare to be able to see it in their own language from their own sources, but it has happened before.

In fact all of this has happened before. Every time our movement make some gains we see the same things: mainstream media attacking the “anti-vaxxers” or Bobby specifically, Pharma throwing money at the problem, Pharma lobbying Congress, Pharma sending out their talking heads, and finally, there’s a website that nobody ever goes to.

The vaccine pushers only have one playbook. And they've been using it for two decades now. They have a strained habit of seeming to win every battle, which adds it to a loss in the war. This is like the eighth time they've doubled down on this failed strategy, but it's all they have.

There is a saying, “some people are so poor that all they have is money.” That is the vaccine lobby. They have no truth. All of their friends are paid. And they have a lot of cash to throw at the problem. But since you can't buy trust, it fails bigger and bigger every time.

And of course it fails. It does nothing to address the base problem, which is lack of trust of the American people because the vaccine industry has destroyed the health and functioning of a significant percentage of American children. And now adults. And like all of the other campaigns this one does nothing to acknowledge their fault in this.

There is nothing in this document that refers to child health, the health outcomes, to taking responsibility for the injuries they have caused, in fact there is no reference to health at all. With this memo they have shown us what is important to them, money. And they have also shown us what is not important to them, health outcomes for their customers.

And after the last five years spent reaching new heights of vaccine injury, it is clear there is no bottom to how low they will sink morally. There is no number or severity of vaccine injured people that they will not ignore. They have more than decimated the health of Americans, and they still feel no shame.

There is not even a pretense of caring about human health when they're behind closed doors.

There is no doubt that they have many among their own friends and family who have been disabled and killed in the last five years but they feel nothing.

I don't even know what to call this, it's more than a cult, they're like money zombies. There is seemingly not even a basic reason at play here. Sales, sales, sales right up until the last customer is dead and the last potential customer hates their guts.

They spent so many decades killing and disabling babies, that the fact that adults are now dying, and their entire scheme is that in public, that they are desensitized to even seeing what the rest of us see, much less course correcting and repenting of what they’ve done.

So what is the correct response to this? When you have an industry that works hand in glove with government, but shows it to be this morally bankrupt and happy to kill and maim their customers, shouldn't that bad faith organization lose the right to access inside the federal government?

I believe this should be the end to government sponsored vaccine programs, and the vaccine public private partnership. I think that the federal government needs to sell all of its vaccine patents, to divest itself of any vaccine development or promotion, and let the vaccine industry become completely privatized. Individuals can buy vaccines if that is what they want. That these companies have shown that they prioritize a dollar over a human life should end their relationship with federal and state governments. They should get no government anything.

Let the vaccine bubble finally pop.

Today on X you heard this from Secretary Kennedy: “The Institute of Medicine … said in 2001 that the link between autism vaccine is biologically plausible.” “They were highly critical of the way that CDC was making decisions about the vaccine schedule.” “The Institute of Medicine recommended a retinue of studies including animal models, observational studies, bench studies, and epidemiological studies.” “Instead, [CDC] commissioned the creation of these six epidemiological studies, and … all of them use fraudulent techniques.” “None of those studies did what you would want … which is to compare outcomes in a fully vaccinated group to health outcomes in an unvaccinated group.” However, CDC did that study in 1999—and then covered up the results. “They brought in a team of scientists under a Belgian researcher named Thomas Verstraeten.” “They looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within their first 30 days of life and compared those children to children who had received the vaccine later, or not at all.” “They found an 1,135% elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children.” “They kept the study secret and they manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link.” “They got rid of all the older children, essentially, and just had younger children who were too young to be diagnosed.” “They stratified the data and they did a lot of other tricks, and all of those studies were the subject of that kind of trickery.”

If you were reading my obscure mommy blog 20 years ago, you would have read this:

August 13, 2005

Here's Why the Disdain...

This post is a response to a post by JP on his new blog, SupportVaccination.org.

In his post, he ask questions of parents like me, that I am eager to answer. Parents have been accused of being "scientifically illiterate" and dismissing "well designed" population studies that show that there is no link between autism and thimerosal. I thought this was a good opportunity to tell the blogesphere, at least in part, why we are not so hot on the IOM’s epidemiological studies.

Dear JP,

As one of those parents with… well ‘distain’ is a harsh word, lets call it an ‘unwillingness to rely on’ the epidemiological studies cited by the IOM, it probably falls upon the likes of me to answer

the question you pose in the title of your piece.

Why the disdain for epidemiology...

Since I am the likes of me, I will take this on and answer your questions and challenges from my point of view.

I am going to break up my response to your post into a few separate posts, as there are several things to address.

I am the mother of an autistic 3 year old boy and a marriage and family therapist, with a masters degree from Johns Hopkins. The statistics courses that I took in grad school were designed to educate me on how to evaluate the research of others to see if it was something we should incorporate into the treatment of a client. This education has turned out to be useful in evaluating the epidemiological studies that have been offered up to prove that thimerosal is safe.

I have been looking at these studies with two basic questions in mind:

Can this study be applied to entire population of children in the U.S. and thereby be useful for guidance in setting vaccine policy? If so, how?

Can I use this study to make a determination as to the safety of vaccinating my sons, one who is autistic and one who is (mostly) neurotypical. If so, how?

I want to start first with what an epidemiological study is and what it can do.

Any question like this starts with case studies. Some one notices two things occurring together (smoking and lung cancer, vaccine reaction and autism) and they look at the plausibility of a relationship (smoke filling the lungs could cause damage, neurotoxic mercury in vaccines could cause brain damage).

Next they want to see if what they are observing in their setting could be happening else where and after conferring with associates and finding that others see the possibility of a link as well, they commission a large population study.

Epidemiological studies are limited in their use. They can be used to spot patterns and trends, but they can almost never be used to prove or disprove anything. They are one of the first stages of a medical inquiry and act as a divining rod to tell researchers where to start digging.

They are very vulnerable to confounders, because they are asking broad questions over huge numbers of people; so they should not be used to make definitive statements as much as to help researchers shape the next question that should be asked.

Those next questions are taken to smaller population studies (where confounders can be more easily controlled), lab studies (in vitro), and actual case studies (in vivo). The results of those studies, helps to further refine the questions being asked, which can be sent back up to large population studies, and so on, and so on until, (hopefully) the results of your epidemiological, in vitro and in vivo studies all line up like tumblers in a lock and the lock opens with one key.

This is not what we are seeing yet when we look at totality of autism/thimerosal research, as the IOM report shows. In fact the large epidemiological studies relied on for the conclusions in the report are at odds with other in vitro and in vivo research also in the report. The tumblers do not line up and therefore all of the research should be scrutinized to see what is throwing things off.

The scrutiny of the epidemiological studies has shown that they do not measure what they purport to measure, and even if they did, they cannot be applied in the way that they are being applied.

Your example of how epidemiological studies were used in the 50’s a nice example of how they can be used well and lead researchers to determine the source of a terrible illness like lung cancer, unfortunately it seems that what is going on today in this inquiry is a very different scenario.

What we know so far about autism tells us that it is not as straight forward as, smoke cigarettes get lung cancer. The thimerosal studies seem to have multiple confounders (genetic, environmental, etc) that cut into the reliability of epidemiological studies.

The two studies that are relied upon the most heavily are the Danish Study and the Verstraten Study. Both of these studies were designed and carried out very poorly and are being used very badly.

Here is why I treat them with such skepticism. (Quoting myself in part from an earlier post that responded to a piece by Dr. Laidler)

One of the problems that complicates the search for the causes and cures of autism is the assumption that it is a single disorder and that all cases are caused by the same thing. This is in contrast to a disease like AIDS in which all cases are brought on by the HIV virus.

What is diagnosed as ‘Autism’ is actually likely to be more than one physical syndrome. Because Autism is a DSM diagnosis and based solely on behavioral criteria, the diagnosis does not address the different sets of physical anomaly clusters that researchers are finding when they look at the biology of ‘autistic’ patients.

One research group has recently made a distinction between two types of autistic profiles. One, labeled complex autism and occurring in about 30% of autism cases, presents with smaller head size, greater chance of low IQ, lower rate of siblings with the disorder and seems to have close to a 1:1 ratio of occurrence between boys and girls.

The other, essential autism, presents with larger head size, few structural brain abnormalities and has a ratio of 7:1 boys to girls.

This is a huge confounder to any epidemiological study, even a well designed one, that looks at all cases of diagnosed autism with out differentiating between groups with different phenotypes.

In discussing research into the causes of autism (in this case the genetic cause), one of the researchers commented, “…Studies haven’t found anything because they’re looking at a big heterogeneous group — a mishmash of people with different etiologies,” Takahashi said.”

One could postulate that only the larger head size group displays autistic symptoms because of mercury poisoning, as mercury toxicity does not always present with impaired IQ; and because in vitro thimerosal toxicity studies preformed at the University of Kentucky showed that estrogen has a protective effect against, and testosterone exacerbates the damage of, ethlymercury as a neurotoxin.

In light of this new information it seems that a better question than, “is autism is caused by mercury toxicity” which is the question largely being asked in these epidemiological studies, would be, “are cases of mercury toxicity being misdiagnosed as autism”.

The answer to that question cannot be found in a large epidemiological study.

The authors of the the final IOM report on the thimerosal/autism relationship in 2004 stated themselves that the epidemiological research it was relying on to clear thimerosal as a cause of autism would not pick up on a sub-set of the population that was genetically vulnerable to mercury poisoning.

If that is the case, then how much more so to these studies fail to give us meaningful data if the children who may be mercury poisoned are members of two different subsets being confused with one another?

Since the working theory in biomedical treatment of autism is that many of the children diagnosed with autism are genetically vulnerable sub set who cannot excrete heavy metals, and since this treatment is bringing about successes in the abatement of many children's autistic symptoms, does that not throw into question the use of these large scale studies to find the correlation between thimerosal and autism as easily as they would between smoking and cancer?

What causes further problems for people who want to use these studies to show that the case is closed on thimerosal and NDDs (as the conclusion in the IOM study does) is that these studies are not well designed and are very poorly applied.

The findings in the Denmark study have come under serious criticism. When the data of study was reviewed, it was found that the sampling presented fatal flaws.

The low incidence of autism during the use of thimerosal can be attributed to the fact that the database that was used only tracked inpatient cases of autism at the time. At the point in time where thimerosal was removed, the database was expanded to include cases that were diagnosed at a large clinic outside of Copenhagen where 20% of the countries autistic patents were diagnosed. At the point in time where thimerosal was no longer used, but the cases of autism seem to have skyrocketed, the database had expanded further to include all cases of autism, inpatient and outpatient, in the country.

The sample size of the study was only 956 children. That is the number of people that their disability database had on record as being diagnosed with autism in Denmark between 1971 and 2000. 956 people in 29 years. That is 33 people a year in the entire country. [Hyperbole warning] I have that many autistic kids in my kitchen right now!

The study is further compromised by the fact that several of the coauthors were employed by the Statens Serums Institut, the countries sole vaccine manufacturer who would presumably be held liable if it was indeed found that the use of thimerosal in vaccines contributed to autism.

[Update: Kristjan has pointed out here that the Danish health care system and liability laws are different from ours and no such legal liability exists for the Statens Serums Institut. I still wonder what might motivate these researchers to stand buy this study and not protest its poor use. More on that in the comments here, here and here.]

Further, even if the study were reliable, applying it to the U.S. population as the IOM has done presents problems. Children in Denmark were administered less than half the amount of thimerosal of US children, and it was administered later and over a longer period of time.

Finally, American children, like my sons, are subject to an autism rate at least 10 times that of Denmark, so this study should not be applied to determine their risk of autism from thimerosal exposure.

It seems to me to be like doing a population study of Sickle Cell Anemia in Denmark and applying it to the population of Baltimore. Clearly U.S. children have some other intervening factors that increases the threat of NDDs, be they genetic, environmental or the thimerosal dosage and age of administration.

The problems with the Verstraten study, the only epidemiological study that the CDC has done in the U.S. to examine the possible link between thimerosal containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders, are severe. It is such a badly designed and executed study that I can hardly do it justice in a blog post. I started working on a review of it about 6 weeks ago for my blog and I still have not finished.

In fact, it is currently the subject of a Senate investigation that may result in hearings on Capitol Hill.

I will try to do a quick review of my ‘distain’ for it, as I actually think the harshness of your term might apply to my attitude in this case.

Note: CDC did not publish the finding that their vaccine program was strongly associated with autism. The document was made public after FOIA requests and a demand that it be turned over by a member of the US Congress. Here is what they actually found, and hid. Here is what they published after distorting the findings.

Verstraten started with a nice, simple study. He had medical records of about 180,000 kids in California, a good sized sample. He broke them up into four main groups, kids who received no thimerosal, a little thimerosal, a moderate amount, and a high amount. He checked to see if the amount of thimerosal that they got, and when they got it (two months of age, six months of age, etc) corresponded to an increased risk for different types of neurodevelopmental disorders, and NDDs in general.

The study began in November of 1999 and was supposed to be finished in 4 months.

What he found was that the more thimerosal a child got, the higher their chance of an NDD, with children who got the highest doses had a huge risk of having a disorder, more than 600% in one case. He also found that the age at which it was administered determined the type of disorder that a child would develop.

Verstraten sent an email to another CDC employee, Dr. Davis, and said that no matter what he tried, could not make the relationship go away.

In December the two men, and additional researchers at the CDC, began to change the parameters of the study. When you do this, you are supposed to document all the changes and justify why they are needed to properly answer the question you are asking. They did not.

The changes they began to make to the statistical analysis of the study are now described by the CDC as “improvements”. How they could see some of these changes as improvements is unbelievable to me. Here are some of the changes:

They took the zero thimerosal group, and tucked them into the low thimerosal group. Now they only have three groups and in effect they have brought up the bottom, so the top does not seem as high.

That did not bring down the risk enough, so they decided to get rid of the no thimerosal group all together, so now you are only comparing the low, middle and high groups, bring up the bottom further.

They got rid of a catch all group of NDDs so the study no longer addressed the question, ‘does an increase thimerosal increase the risk of a neurodevelopmental disorder’. Now it only looked at each disorder separately.

Still not dampening the signal enough, the decided to go into and change some of the actual medical records of the patients they were studying. The CDC reports that these were correcting errors in patient records, but will not offer any proof of this claim, saying instead that the data that would confirm their claim was ‘lost’.

This brought the risk down, but still showed a link between thimerosal and NDDs, so they then started dropping children from the study. They used about 20 different ICD9 codes to exclude any child from the study that had almost any birth complication or whose mother had almost any pregnancy complication. This included serious problems like premature birth and birth defects, but went all the way down to moms who took an antibiotic while pregnant. In effect this removes from the study many children who are likely to go on to develop NDDs.

This is fine to do in your study if you want, but it renders it almost completely useless for application to vaccine policy. This policy covers all U.S. children, and lots and lots of those children were subject to pregnancy and birth complications.

This study now no longer applies to my children as both of my pregnancies had complications.

At this point it is safe to say that this study no longer addressed the question of whether or not an increase in the dose of thimerosal increases the chance of an NDD in American children. But the ‘improvements’ don’t stop there.

Many more people are given a chance to make suggestions, the Simpsonwood meeting was held, comments are made that the study never should have been done in the first place, and the research is further bastardized.

A stop date was put in place so that children who were initially diagnosed with something like a speech delay, were then always considered to be speech delayed, even if they went on to be diagnosed with a more serious disorder like full blown autism. This is important as a large number of kids diagnosed with autism at ages 3 and 4 are diagnosed with some milder developmental delay at 18 months or two years of age. Doctors don’t like giving the autism diagnosis early, and the state of California (where the study was done) won’t even formally evaluate children for autism, or diagnose it before the age of 3.

I live in California. My son was evaluated at 2 and found to have ‘speech delays’ and offered early start services. To all involved in his treatment, he was autistic, but he did not become officially “Autistic” according to the state and his own records until age 3. Chandler would not have been considered Autistic for the purposes of the Verstraeten study.

My favorite ‘improvement’ was to add into the study children who were only a year or so old at the cut off date of the study. No child is diagnosed with autism, or indeed much of anything, this early. They all could have gone on to be diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder but in the Verstraeten study, they are all considered healthy and unaffected by thimerosal.

Even with all these shenanigans, they STILL could not completely get rid of the relationship between thimerosal and NDDs. They then employed a tactic that served to make their own findings in the study irrelevant.

They split the whole group up into two, one large one from one HMO and one smaller group from another HMO (I think it was around 16,000). The small group was now too small to be of any statistical power. They used that group to say that the results in the first group could not be replicated in the second.

Then they bought another database from an HMO in New England, which was odd because they already owned dozens of them at the cost of millions of dollars in tax payer money. The HMO had failed and was in receivership due in part to poor record keeping on out of date computers. The HMO also used their own diagnostic system that didn’t even implement ICD9 codes and the researchers used completely different parameters to study this database than they did in the first. They used this third group of only 12,000 or so patients, as yet another example of how they could not replicate the results of the first, large group, which they were now referring to as ‘the screening study’.

The 4 month study took 4 years and, in my opinion, came out looking like something akin to Frankenstein’s Monster.

This study does not offer a meaningful measure of anything and cannot be applied to any group that I can think of.

Add to this the fact Verstraten himself became an employee of Glaxo (currently being sued by parents of autistic children) half way through the study, which was not disclosed when the study was published, and it becomes easy to see why where the distain comes from.

When asked to justify all the changes and publish the data so that the study could be confirmed and replicated, the CDC repeated the claim that the original data was ‘lost’. A private contractor testified before congress that he had been ordered to destroy the data sets, “to insure patient confidentiality”. This is a violation of federal law and is what sparked the congressional investigation currently underway.

It is practice in the scientific community that if a study can not be confirmed or replicated, that it should be withdrawn. Despite parent requests for such action, the CDC stands by this study and refuses to pull it.

As a parent who is looking at this issue as hard as I can, I am upset that the IOM, who should know better, keeps calling these studies ‘well designed’ and has used them to show that the case is closed on thimerosal and autism.

Verstraeten himself says that the study is a ‘neutral study’ and does not find for or against thimerosal in the implication that it is involved with NDDs.

In grad school, in order to pass statistics we had to take studies and break them down, justifying if and how they could be used for us to make treatment decisions. The Institute of Medicine would have failed my 600 level stats courses.

ADDENDUM:
People have asked for citations. What hasn't been referenced above can be found in David Kirby's book, Evidence Of Harm, as this post just attempts to squish his big fat book into a blog post.

Additional addendum:
Julie Gerberding (CDC Director under the George Bush administration) was asked by Congress to defend Verstraeten and had to reply that it was a “useless study.” She did so in secret, but the document was leaked by a congressional staffer. Even though everyone knows it is garbage, Pediatrics has not retracted it, and some still claim it clears the vaccine/autism theory. However CDC removed it from their list of research that refutes the theory in by the end of 2008 when news of the Congressional/CDC exchange went public.

June 30 - CDC is back to relying on it again. They have it listed on :

https://www.cdc.gov/autism/media/pdfs/cdcstudiesonvaccinesandautism-508.pdf

Last date updated January 2025: