If vaccines don’t cause autism, then how do you explain all this evidence?

[Nat Quinn]

The Forgotten Side of Medicine cross-posted a post from Steve Kirsch’s newsletter A Midwestern DoctorAug 11 · The Forgotten Side of Medicine If everyone reflexively believes something, that suggests a lot of money was spent to create that societal belief. “There is no evidence vaccines cause autism” is one such example and has made it so difficult to say anything each time you see a child who has a brain injury immediately following vaccination. Steve did a great job compiling the evidence to show something is going on here that needs to be seriously looked at. In the near future, I will be sending out an article to explain how vaccines cause autism, as while largely forgotten, the mechanisms to explain it have already been worked out. If vaccines don’t cause autism, then how do you explain all this evidence? We see an odds ratio of 5 when comparing autism in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed in MULTIPLE studies. The before:after odds are even more extraordinary. How can we ignore all this evidence? STEVE KIRSCH AUG 11 SHARE Executive summary Here’s my favorite short list of evidence that can’t be explained if vaccines don’t cause autism. Does anyone think I’m wrong and can explain the list? Note that I only claim that vaccines are THE major cause, not the sole cause. There are other things that contribute. But if we could change only one thing, eliminating use of all vaccines is the single best way to reduce the rate of autism in the US. The bottom line is that for questions like whether vaccines can trigger autism, there is only one answer: it does or it doesn’t. It doesn’t change. We have 25 years of evidence. It’s all either supportive of Hypothesis A or B. It is a colossal failure of evidence-based medicine and the medical community that they cannot figure out which bucket all the evidence is consistent with. The answer is so simple because all the studies cited as the strongest evidence on their side are all deeply flawed and can be easily disproven. It is astonishing to me that so many smart people cannot figure this out. But they are paid not to look. They always completely ignore the studies that go against the narrative and only focus on studies where the studies are designed to minimize the chance of finding an association. Making statements such as “you review all evidence, giving more weight to the quality and quantity of evidence” is science via “expert opinion.” It is hit or miss. If you want scientific certainty, you need to be able to show that every known piece of evidence is either consistent or not inconsistent with your hypothesis. We believe we can do this in this case and that they cannot. It’s that simple. This is the key. Let’s go though all the top evidence, both sides in the same room, and let’s let unbiased experts (with no conflicts of interest) listen to the arguments. If you want a shortcut to the truth, compelling anecdotes or a well done case study are generally powerful tools to reveal the truth. We certainly have this in this case as there are many many anecdotes that they simply cannot explain and they have no anecdotes that we cannot explain. We can come up with amazing anecdotes, e.g., 40 cases of instant autism within 2 weeks after the vaccine in a medical practice and 0 cases before. Can the other side come up with anything even close to that for 2 weeks before the vaccine? Is it “settled science” that vaccines don’t cause autism? No! Here’s the proof Michael Simpson claims it is “settled science” that vaccines don’t cause autism. He said it right here: Paul Offit says that the medical consensus is that vaccines do not cause autism. Watch this video. It’s right there. The experts in the video say if there was a link they would have found it. You can absolutely rely on this because they are the experts! <sarcasm off> But it can NEVER be “settled science” that vaccines don’t cause autism as Paul Offit admitted in that video. And it can NEVER be settled science when there are cases where the US vaccine court have admitted that the vaccines caused autism such as for Hannah Poling and Porter Bridges. Those cases have NEVER been overturned with evidence to the contrary. In a shocking admission under oath in 2018, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, one of the world’s top experts on vaccines, agrees with attorney Aaron Siri that the data is insufficient to make the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism.’ In 2018, the data was simply insufficient to make the claim for the Tdap and DTaP vaccines. Anyone who claims this is “settled science” must show a study after Jan 11, 2018 showing that the ambiguity has been resolved for these two vaccines as well as all the other vaccines on the childhood schedule. This has never been done. What was also stunning to me was Plotkin’s outright dismissal of the Geier paper. Plotkin cites no evidence whatsoever that the study was wrong. If the study was wrong, why isn’t there a VSD study showing the error? Despite his admission, Dr. Plotkin asserts he would lie to his patients about this, in order to convince them to vaccinate. Is this a fringe view that vaccines cause autism? Apparently not. I have on order of 1M followers world wide, so even if this poll is only accurate for my followers, that is a huge number of people who agree with me that mainstream science got it wrong in declaring the lack of a link as “settled science.” But it’s not just me and my followers. It’s so obvious that even this well known personality noticed the same thing everyone else is noticing. So it is stunning that there are no debates. The people who believe there is a link want the debate. RFK Jr. has been trying to get a debate on this for 20 years. No takers. I threw down the gauntlet on July 7, 2023 with this tweet Here’s the tweet where I challenged any qualified scientist in America to challenge us. Here the database of who has accepted. Should the issue be decided in the peer-reviewed literature? People who claim that the issue must be settled in the scientific literature are living in a fantasy world. There are over 214 papers in the peer-review medical literature showing the link and 164 papers showing no link. How does that settle which papers are right? By the number of articles on each side? Of course not! As John Ioannidis has shown, a large number of published papers are false. The purpose of the challenge in the previous section is it to determine whether it is all of the 214 confirming papers that are false or all of the 164 papers claiming no link that are false. It has to be one or the other because it’s a binary question. The DeStefano paper (2004) is a perfect example. To decide whether this paper is true or false requires looking into the claims of one of the co-authors (William Thompson) and examining the evidence he produced. The evidence clearly shows scientific fraud took place: it is required for the authors to publish the race subgroup analysis, but they didn’t even mention it in the paper. Co-author Thompson admitted this breach of ethics in a press release. Even worse, CDC management ordered Thompson to destroy any evidence of that subgroup analysis instead. Yet the journal refused to retract the paper. This paper is a perfect example of why it is important to have a dialog on issues such as this. In fact, we are willing to concede the whole debate if we lose on this one paper. Are they willing to do the same? This has never been done AFAIK. If I’m wrong, please provide the reference in the comments. A single verifiable anecdote is all it takes to disprove the null hypothesis (and prove that vaccines can cause autism) We don’t need peer-reviewed papers in the medical journals to make our proof. If the medical community consensus claims there are no black swans, but I have evidence of a black swan that anyone can easily verify, then I have shown the medical community is wrong, even with a single anecdote. We can do this quite easily for vaccines and autism as shown in this article. It is statistically impossible for this event to have occurred by random chance, i.e., if something other than vaccines are causing autism cases. This doesn’t prove that all autism cases are caused by vaccines, but it does prove that vaccines can trigger autism. The list (in no particular order) Here is a list of some of the most compelling evidence I’ve run across. If there is a hypothesis that is a better fit to this evidence than vaccines cause autism, I’d love to hear it. Lack of a single case where a child became “overnight autistic” before a vaccination appointment: There are thousands of parents who report that their child became “overnight autistic” within 24 hours after a vaccine shot. I personally know dozens of these parent (and here are some parents who agreed to have their name used publicly if you want to verify this). So if vaccines don’t cause autism, there must be a roughly comparable number of parents who noticed this within 24 hours before a vaccine appointment (because the number of cases will be comparable on any day you pick). Yet, nobody has ever heard of a single kid who became “overnight autistic” even within 2 weeks before a vaccination appointment! All the “overnight autism” stories are all after a vaccination appointment, generally within a 2 week window but sometimes as short as just 2 hours after the shot is given. Here’s an example of overnight autism. And here’s another where 3 twins all developed autism within hours after the shot. Note that in general that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if there was such a story, someone would have heard it. None of the experts I contact had heard of a single “before” case. Note that I also asked on Twitter for a counter-example, and nobody had one there either. Here’s yet another ask for exceptions. If vaccines weren’t causing overnight autism, the anecdotes of this happening pre-vaccine appointment would be as easy to find as the anecdotes of it happening post-vaccine appointment. Finally, the argument that nobody would remember if their child got overnight autism before their vaccination appointment is silly as this simple Twitter poll demonstrated (relating a sudden death of a friend and when the friend was scheduled to be vaccinated). As a second demonstration of recall, I did a second poll on getting COVID right before the COVID shot appointment. People remember this stuff. In both cases, people easily recalled a big event happening right before a vaccine appointment. Bottom line: If you are a critical thinker, you really don’t need anything more than this one point to prove causality. We’re done. Their studies don’t prove what they claim they prove. See this 92 page article created by SafeMinds, Vaccines and Autism What do Epidemiological Studies Really Tell Us? which describes what you need to know about many of the most important studies they cite as strong evidence including both widely cited studies such as the Verstraeten study (where it describes in detail the five generations of the study) and some of the more esoteric studies like the Honda study (where the just replaced a single vaccine MMR with separate vaccines M. M. and R. and found no difference). See also this analysis by Jerry Hammond entitled: “Why the Claim ‘Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism’ Is Disinformation” as well as this article which debunks the 16 most cited papers on their side: Part 2: Vaccines and Autism – What Do Epidemiological Studies Really Tell Us?. The reality is that their evidence isn’t compelling at all. There is also the Hviid 2019 study which was debunked by Brian Hooker here. 214 papers in the peer-reviewed literature linking vaccines and autism: Autism mom Ginger Taylor compiled a list of 214 studies showing the link between vaccines and autism. Here’s the list as a single download. Here’s a short list (30 key papers). There are also 400 papers showing how dangerous the vaccines are in general. See Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers. We can show how every one of the papers brought forward by vaccine proponents are flawed. For example, there are 164 papers listed in this Michael Simpson article which he claims is proof that there is no association between vaccines and autism. He asserts that the single best paper is a 2014 meta-analysis by Taylor et al., “Vaccines are not associated with autism: an evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies” (you can see a proof of the article here without a fee) which analyzes 10 studies (5 of each type), including Madsen (2002), Hviid (2003), DeStefano (2004), Andrews (2004), Smeeth (2004), and Verstraeten (2003). The problem of course is that all of these papers were debunked in the SafeMinds analysis. The best studies were the cohort studies and one of the cohort studies was judged to be “high risk.” The other four cohort studies were described in the SafeMinds analysis. For the case-control studies, the two largest ones in the study were also described in the SafeMinds analysis. So the best of the best of their best studies were debunked. These meta-analyses are only as good as the underlying papers. Can we talk in detail about the top 3 papers in each group? I’d love to meet with Simpson and we can debate his strongest evidence vs. my strongest evidence and let’s see what happens. But Simpson ignored my request. We cannot get a debate on this with anyone. The other side declares victory (that it is “settled science”), yet runs when challenged to a simple debate on the top 5 papers on both sides. It is odd that they write pages and pages of text attempting to explain why they are right, but when challenged to discuss the top evidence, they don’t even reply. There are two “tells” here: anytime someone uses the term “settled science” when there is such a massive reality disconnect as demonstrated here, that’s disingenuous. Secondly, the side declaring “settled science” subsequently refusing to even respond yes or no (with a legitimate reason or counter offer) to a legit debate challenge with experts is a huge red flag that something is seriously wrong. They won’t meet with scientists on our side to discuss all the data on the table to see if we can get a consensus. This is tragic. Kids suffer because their side won’t meet with our side. We are willing, they are not. What does that tell you? Someone is afraid of debate. RFK Jr. has been trying to get a debate on autism for 20 years. Their argument for why vaccines don’t cause autism is to cherry pick all the studies showing no signal, and completely ignore every study with any signal. That’s dishonest science. An honest scientist would present credible studies and then explain with evidence the other studies that show the opposite to show why those studies not credible. They don’t do that. They avoid the studies that show the linkage like the plague. Watch this Susan Oliver video to see how they argue by cherry picking flawed studies and ignoring studies that conflict. Note in this article I include supportive studies and I debunk every study that they use. So I’m walking the talk here. The McDowell triplets all became autistic within hours of each other on the same day (full video here). How is that possible? Easy. They were all vaccinated at the exact same time in the same pediatrician appointment with just one vaccine shot: the pneumococcal vaccine! Date of vaccination 6/25/07. They never held hands again after that day. The girl (Clair) shut completely off just 2 hours after the shot. The first boy, Richie, shut down 4 hours after the shot. See also this article. They were all 9 months and 4 days old at the time with no problems. The geneticist that was consulted told the McDowell’s that it is an IMPOSSIBILITY for this to happen due to GENETICS. It is impossible for three different siblings to genetically get autism on the same day. What they mean by that statement is that the odds of this happening are so rare that you are highly unlikely to see a single case like this in your lifetime if it happened by chance. The article goes on to say, “We hear about children getting autism ALL THE TIME after their vaccinations.” Hannah Poling developed autism within 2 days after her shot. She went from perfectly healthy to autistic. It was even determined scientifically that her autism was caused by the vaccine. So that should have ended the debate. There are way too many of these “coincidences” (like Hannah and the triplets) to be random chance. You cannot orchestrate anecdotes like you can game a large research study. There are apparently no cases of a unvaccinated child who was meeting all their milestones, then suddenly regressed into profound autism at 12 months or older. Note that profound autism affects 1 in 4 kids with ASD. See this tweet for details and the references. Madsen study: A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism (Madsen, 2002). This is cited by Martin Kulldorff as proof vaccines don’t cause autism. Even in this heavily flawed study, the raw data showed a strongly elevated risk of autism. So they never showed the raw data odds ratio (did you know that the rate of autism was 45% higher in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group?) and the paper only showed the adjusted numbers! That’s unethical. You can read the flaws in this study that was widely cited to prove that there was no association here. Over 1,000 scientists didn’t see anything wrong with the study! It’s really stunning how easily bad science propagates into the mainstream. Note that this is the single best study that is cited to prove that vaccines don’t cause autism and it is deeply flawed. The authors wouldn’t provide the underlying data and refused to answer any questions. Is that the way science works? There is also the Hviid 2019 study which was debunked by Brian Hooker here. Wakefield 1998 paper: Wakefield’s retracted paper reported that “We investigated a consecutive series of children… Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children, with measles infection in one child, and otitis media in another.” So 66% of the cases were associated with the MMR vaccine. The 2022 Morocco study: 70% of the 90 parents surveyed affirmed that the first autistic features appeared after vaccination with the MMR vaccine. The rates are nearly identical to the 66% rate in the Wakefield study. DeStefano paper evidence destruction: CDC scientist William Thompson was ordered by his bosses at the CDC to destroy ONLY the evidence linking vaccines and autism. Furthermore, the race subgroup analysis showing the link was omitted from the paper which is also unethical. When Congressman Bill Posey tried to get Thompson to testify in Congress, they shut him down so there was no testimony. This coverup was what convinced Wakefield that he was right: vaccines cause autism. DeStefano refused to release the data when James Lyons-Weiler requested it. Also, all data has to be retained for 7 years. You can’t destroy data before that. The FOIA request took 10 years before the CDC responded to it. More about the DeStefano paper in this article. Simpsonwood meeting: CDC scientist Thomas Verstraeten did a study in 1999 linking thimerosal with autism. They tried to make the autism signal go away. They couldn’t. The original signal was a RR=7.6 (see also this abstract) which is a huge signal. See my article for details and a link to the original Verstraeten study. See also this article and this historical overview and Simpsonwood 23 years later and the transcript. More history here. Paul Offit lied to RFK Jr. about thimerosal: RFK Jr told me the story personally, but now, it’s on the Joe Rogan podcast Episode #1999. Start listening at 23:00. The punchline is at 28:33. Basically, the ethylmercury in the thimerosal makes a beeline out of your blood and deposits into your brain (unlike the methylmercury in fish which has a harder time entering your brain so it stays in your blood longer). Offit tried to convince RFK that the mercury gets excreted by referring to a paper. When RFK brought up the Burbacher study, there was dead silence on the line because Offit knew he had been caught in a deception. In short, thimerosal can seriously damage people’s brains. Vaccines are not supposed to cross the BBB. This creates biological plausibility needed for causality. See also my article about Offit attempting to respond to the episode. Japan, France, and Sweden have fewer vaccines with better health outcomes. Why not adopt one of their schedules in the US? A 1998 CDC study admitted that the measles vaccine can cause permanent brain damage and death. It’s right there in the peer-reviewed literature. If the measles vaccine causes permanent brain damage, is it feasible that autism might be within that spectrum of damage? The most remarkable paper showing the MMR vaccine causes permanent brain damage and death is this 1998 paper Acute Encephalopathy Followed by Permanent Brain Injury or Death Associated With Further Attenuated Measles Vaccines: A Review of Claims Submitted to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It is written by CDC authors and has not been questioned or retracted and cited by 90 papers. The really important piece of this paper that most people miss is the part highlighted above: “No cases were identified after the administration of monovalent mumps or rubella vaccine.” This is huge. Only the measles vaccine caused permanent brain damage. Does that mean the other two didn’t? No, it just means that the incident rates for the other two vaccines were much lower (or zero). The fact that the permanent brain damage effect was vaccine-type dependent is a smoking gun that nobody likes to talk about. Of course, if the authors wrote that the vaccines killed these kids, they wouldn’t be able to get their paper published (that’s how “science” works). So you have to read between the lines that severe brain inflammation/damage might cause death. Do you think that might be reasonable? There is no other explanation than the vaccines caused the effect. If there is, let’s hear it. If not, the precautionary principle of medicine demands that we should assume that was the cause until proven otherwise. Here’s is simple example of that principle. Suppose you are a physician and you inject vaccine X which the CDC says is safe and effective into your first 5 patients and they all die the next day. What do you do? Do you say that correlation isn’t causation and continue to vaccinate patients? Or do you stop vaccinating until you can find out what killed all 10 patients? This excellent Substack article shows the statistically significant peaks at days 8 and 9 after the shot. That’s causality.

[Author]

Posts