Reports: CDC will study vaccine-autism link

A week after President Donald Trump committed his administration — and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in particular — to tracking down the cause of what many call an autism epidemic in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that it would do exactly that, though it did not affirm that it would study possible links between childhood vaccination and autism, as news outlets were widely reporting.

But neither RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services (HHS) nor the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), an agency within the orbit of the HHS family, denied them.

Reuters first broke the news, to which HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon responded.

“As President Trump said in his joint address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed,” Nixon said in a statement to various media. “CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening. The American people expect high quality research and transparency and that is what CDC is delivering.”

As Nixon references, in his March 4 presidential address to the nation, Trump mentioned the dramatic increase in the rate of autism, and in doing so underscored his February 13 executive order creating a Make America Healthy Again task force that mentioned autism as a priority of the commission.

“Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong,” Trump said in his speech. “As an example, not long ago — and you can’t even believe these numbers — one in 10,000 children had autism, one in 10,000, and now it’s one in 36. There’s something wrong — one in 36, think of that — so we’re going to find out what it is. And there’s nobody better than Bobby [Kennedy] and all of the people that are working with you, you have the best, to figure out what is going on. Okay, Bobby? Good luck. It’s a very important job.”

While those who advocate for vaccine safety celebrated — they have long advocated for a government-backed study that would transparently compare autism among the vaccinated with a control group of unvaccinated children — opponents were just as vocal in their criticisms.

Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), said vaccines had been thoroughly researched and administered to large numbers of people of all ages and had proven to very safe and effective in preventing the spread of many serious infectious diseases and in dramatically reducing deaths.

“The announcement that CDC will look at potential links between vaccines and autism means that significant federal resources will be diverted from crucial areas of study, including research into the unknown causes of autism, at a time when research funding is already facing deep cuts,” Tan said. “Outbreaks of deadly diseases like measles — which is preventable if a person is vaccinated — should be the top priority of federal health officials, not revisiting established science.”

It should be noted that IDSA leaders and doctors have a close relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. A peer-reviewed study in 2020 in the BMJ found that more than 90 percent of IDSA’s leaders and doctors have financial ties to the industry, one of the top three professional medical associations with such a rate.

But IDSA was not alone. Other medical professionals jumped in to decry the possibility of a study, and so did corporate media. The New York Times ran this headline: “CDC will investigate debunked link between vaccines and autism,” while NBC News offered this headline: “CDC will research widely debunked link between vaccines and autism.” Forbes wrote “CDC Plans Large Study On Long-Debunked Connection Between Vaccines And Autism, Report Says.”

The vaccine-autism issue was brought up in Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, in which he was pressed by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), a gastroenterologist.

“If the data is brought to you and these studies that have been out there for quite some time and have been peer-reviewed, and it shows that … vaccines are not associated with autism, will you ask, ‘No, I need even more,’ or will you say, ‘No, I see this, it stood the test of time, and I unequivocally and without qualification say that this does not cause autism’?” Cassidy asked.

Kennedy said he would do even more than that.

“Not only will I do that, but I will apologize for any statements that misled people otherwise,” Kennedy said.

Sorry, not sorry

Notably in that hearing, Kennedy did not ever say that he believes vaccines do not cause autism, and many of his supporters, including doctors and scientists, say he has nothing to apologize for.

Sayer Ji, the chairman and co-founder of the Global Wellness Forum (along with Donald Trump’s former wife, Marla Maples), told Children’s Health Defense that a study would represent a pivotal moment both for vaccine safety and for public trust in the nation’s institutions, and was “an implicit admission that prior investigations may have been insufficient, biased or incomplete.”

None of those studies — many funded by the pharmaceutical industry — have ever proven no connection between vaccines and autism; they only showed no correlation. The announcement could also be an implicit recognition that, while those studies have been highly touted by the corporate media, an equal or larger number of studies have shown a correlation, though their existence rarely makes the press.

In 2019, for example, the Immunization Action Coalition put it this way: “Claims that vaccines cause autism have led some parents to delay or refuse vaccines for their children. The most common claims are that autism is caused by MMR vaccine, vaccines that contain thimerosal, or too many vaccines. Many scientific studies have been done to test these claims. None has shown any correlation between vaccines and autism.”

As this newspaper has reported, that’s not true. There are at least 30 studies, many of them peer-reviewed, that do show a correlation between vaccines and autism, perhaps more studies that show no link, and new ones keep coming.

For example, in a University of Pittsburgh study in 2008, “Pediatric Vaccines Influence Primate Behavior, and Amygdala Growth and Opioid Ligand Binding,” macaques were administered the recommended infant vaccines, adjusted for age and thimerosal dose (exposed), or saline (unexposed). 

“Compared with unexposed animals, significant neurodevelopmental deficits were evident for exposed animals in survival reflexes, tests of color discrimination and reversal, and learning sets,” the study stated.

A 2011 study by Lucija Tomljenovic, “Do aluminum vaccine adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism?” decided that they just might. The University of British Columbia study showed that children from countries with the highest ASD prevalence appear to have the highest exposure to aluminum from vaccines; that the increase in exposure to aluminum adjuvants significantly correlates with the increase in ASD prevalence in the United States observed over the last two decades; and that a significant correlation exists between the amounts of aluminum administered to preschool children and the current prevalence of ASD in seven Western countries, particularly at 3-4 months of age.

“The application of Hill’s criteria [a scientific set of conditions necessary to provide evidence of a causal relationship between an incidence and a possible consequence] to these data indicates that the correlation between aluminum in vaccines and ASD may be causal,” the study stated. “Because children represent a fraction of the population most at risk for complications following exposure to aluminum, a more rigorous evaluation of aluminum adjuvant safety seems warranted.”

The study said that, when assessing adjuvant toxicity in children, two key points ought to be considered: “[C]hildren should not be viewed as ‘small adults’ as their unique physiology makes them much more vulnerable to toxic insults; and (ii) if exposure to aluminum from only a few vaccines can lead to cognitive impairment and autoimmunity in adults, is it unreasonable to question whether the current pediatric schedules, often containing 18 aluminum adjuvanted vaccines, are safe for children?”

More recently, in 2022, in the Asia Pacific Journal of Medical Toxicology, aluminum came under scrutiny again in “Aluminum Adjuvant in Vaccines: A New Research Avenue is Demanded.” 

“Contemporary research carried out on animals has shown that it has a neurotoxic effect,” the researchers, led by Alberto Rubio-Casillas of the University of Guadalajara wrote. “Furthermore, increased aluminum concentrations in the nervous system tissues of people, who died from an autism condition have been discovered by using advanced imaging techniques. The paradigm shift proposes a reconsideration of the use of the alum-based adjuvants and calls for a careful dissection to avoid incorrect interpretations. This proposal does not constitute an attack on vaccination, as nobody refutes the fact that it has been systematically proven to be effective in saving millions of lives. Unfortunately, scientists who have investigated the toxicity of aluminum-based adjuvants have been unfairly labeled as ‘anti-vader’s.’ Rather, what they have been questioning is the safety of aluminum as an adjuvant. The present work encourages researchers, health regulatory agencies, and even pharmaceutical companies to allow themselves to think about the possibility that aluminum-based adjuvants could be toxic for susceptible children.”

 In 2010, a study out of Stony Brook University Medical Center, by Carolyn Gallagher and Melody Goodman, found that boys vaccinated as neonates (newborns) had threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis compared to boys never vaccinated or vaccinated after the first month of life.

An even broader range of studies focuses not just on potential links between vaccines and autism but between various toxicities and environmental factors that might trigger autism, encompassing an increasingly larger body of evidence of a link between environmental exposures and autism.

Children’s Health Defense author J.B. Handley plumbed even more studies, including seven of unvaccinated children.

In 2017, Handley wrote that two separate studies comparing vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children actually got published. Unlike studies that only explored a single vaccine, Handly wrote that those studies met what he called the ‘gold standard’ — they found children who had never received any vaccines and looked at their health outcomes in a variety of ways/

The conclusions? In “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-Year-Old U.S. Children,” Handley quoted the study, “the vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD [neurodevelopmental disorders]. After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.”

Specifically, vaccinated children were found to have a fourfold higher likelihood of having autism.

The second study, “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children,” found that preterm birth coupled with vaccination was associated with a synergistic increase in the odds of NDD, suggesting the possibility that vaccination could precipitate adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm infants. The results provide clues to the epidemiology and causation of NDD but question the safety of current vaccination programs for preterm infants, Handley concluded.

And from an even newer study in 2020, “Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders,” Handley wrote that, within the study, the number of vaccines received and vaccination status early in life were related to different acute and chronic conditions: The strongest relationships observed for vaccination status were for asthma, developmental delays and ear infections.

Magic Eight Ball

While many in the science community and in the media seemed surprised by a potential and probably likely study, they would not have been surprised had they listened to Kennedy’s remarks at his confirmation, where he all but said the health agencies would be exploring the issue.

Kennedy said he would “support the vaccine program” but would ensure “that we have gold-standard, evidence-based science.”

“Why don’t we know what’s causing this epidemic?” Kennedy asked. “Why hasn’t CDC been looking at other hypotheses to determine the etiology of why we’ve had this dramatic 1,000-percent increase in this disease that is destroying our kids?”

Kennedy also said a truly scientific approach was needed to win the people’s trust back in the government.

“If we want uptake of vaccines, we need a trustworthy government,” Kennedy said. “That’s what I want to restore to the American people and the vaccine program. I want people to know if the government says something, it’s true. It’s not manipulative.”

Many senators at the hearing agreed that the government needed to look into what Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) called an autism pandemic.

“One-in-36,” Mullin said. “If that’s not a pandemic, then what is? It used to be 1-in-10,000 have autism. Can any of you guys with a straight face say that we shouldn’t look at every aspect to what we’re putting in our kids, be it from the food to the vaccines?”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) also criticized the entire body of science when it comes to autism.

“There’s no good science of anything to show what causes autism,” Paul said. “We don’t know. It’s a profound disease. I know many moms and dads who have kids with autism. I know them personally, I have met their kids. The thing is, they saw their kids developing completely normal, and maybe speaking 100 words go to no words at about 15 months of age.” 

To be sure, Paul said, there is no prof that vaccines caused the autism.

“But we don’t know what causes it yet,” he said. “Shouldn’t we be at least open-minded? We take 72 vaccines. Could it be? I don’t know. We shouldn’t just close the door and say we are no longer, because we believe so much in submission, we’re not going to have an open mind to study these things.”

We’re so closed-minded and so consensus-driven that the science says “this,” Paul said.

“Well science doesn’t say anything,” he said. “Science is a dispute, and 10 years from now we could all be wrong. We were told in the beginning — 20 years ago they did this enormous study and they said that everybody over 50 should take an aspirin.”

Paul said he thought it was a pretty good idea that made sense.

“But you know what?” he said. “Twenty years later, they measured it, and they found if you had no heart disease and you were taking aspirin, your chance of dying from a brain bleed or from a stomach bleed were greater than the risk of heart disease.”

If you have heart disease, they still say take an aspirin, Paul said.

“If you don’t, they’ve changed their mind 20 years later,” he said. “But would you have all said I was crazy and I should no longer be in public discourse if I had said 20 years ago that I don’t feel like taking an aspirin, that I ride my bike all the time. But that is what dissent is about. So I just ask you to look at the larger picture and give the guy a break when he says I just want to follow the science where it leads without presupposition.”

Paul said those who were already opposed to further study were the ones who have presupposition.

“You’ve already concluded that it’s absolute that autism is not caused by it,” he said. “Well, we don’t know what causes autism, but we should be more humble in what we say.”

This past week, amid a measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy revealed new insights into his vaccination approach in a op-ed he wrote for Fox News.

“The measles outbreak in Texas is a call to action for all of us to reaffirm our commitment to public health.” Kennedy wrote. “By working together — parents, healthcare providers, community leaders, and government officials — we can prevent future outbreaks and protect the health of our nation. Under my leadership, HHS is and will always be committed to radical transparency to regain the public’s trust in its health agencies.”

But he also stressed his belief in personal medical freedom.

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” Kennedy wrote. “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.