Vaccines, Neurodevelopment, And Autism Spectrum Disorders

In 1976, children received 10 vaccines before attending school. Today they will receive more than 36 injections. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assured parents that it was safe to not only give these vaccines, but that they could be given at one time with complete safety. Is this true? Or are we being lied to on a grand scale?

The medical establishment has created a set of terms, which they use constantly to boost their egos and firm-up their authority as the unique holders of medical wisdom—the mantra is “evidence-based medicine”—as if everything outside their anointing touch is bogus and suspect. A careful examination of many of the accepted treatments reveals that most have little or no scientific “evidence-based” data to support it. One oftenrepeated study found that almost 80% of medical practice had no scientific backing.

This is not to say that medical practice should be solely based on pure and applied science, as understood in the fields of physics and chemistry. Medicine, as pointed out by many of the great minds of medicine, is an art.

Most men and women of medicine recognize that some things are obvious without a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized study. For example, there has never been such a study to see if smashing your finger with a hammer is painful, but we accept it without such pristine evidence. The same is true with removing brain tumors or sewing up severe lacerations.

I find it interesting that there exists an incredible double standard when it comes to our evidence versus theirs. The proponents of vaccination safety can just say they are safe, without any supporting evidence what-so-ever, and it is to be accepted without question. They can announce that mercury is not only safe, but that it seems to actually increase the IQ, and we are to accept it. They can proclaim thimerosal safe to use in vaccines without their having ever been a single study on its safety in more than 60 years of use, and we are to accept it.

Yet, let me, or anyone else, suggest that excessive vaccination can increase the risk of not only autism, but also schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases, and they will scream like banshees— where is the evidence? Where is the evidence? When we produce study after study, they always proclaim them to be insufficient evidence or unacceptable studies. More often than not, they just completely ignore the evidence. This is despite the fact that we produce dozens or even hundreds of studies that not only demonstrate the link clinically and scientifically, but also clearly show the mechanism by which the damage is being done—even on a molecular level. These include cell culture studies, mixed cell cultures, organotypic tissue studies, in vivo animal studies using multiple species, and even human studies. To the defenders of vaccine safety our evidence is never sufficient and, if we face reality, never will be.

We see how questions of medical importance that are nitpicked to death on points of scientific purity can cost a lot of lives—millions of lives. There are more than one million children and adults with autism and the numbers continue to grow. This is a medical disaster of monumental proportions. The link to the vaccine program is scientifically and logically compelling but these same medical elitists refuse to listen.

Like smoking and lung cancer, we have enough proof today to call a halt to the present excessive vaccine program and ban any level of mercury in vaccines. In 1983, before the autism epidemic began, children received 10 vaccinations before attending school and the autism incidence was 1 in 10,000. Today children receive 23 vaccines before age 2 years and 36 by the time they attend school; the autism rate is now 1 in 150 births. Medical “experts” have provided no other explanation for this dramatic and sudden rise in autism cases, despite a draconian effort to find one.

They attempted to say it was genetic, but geneticists were quick to respond that genetic disorders do not suddenly increase in such astronomical proportions. Then they said it was because of better diagnosis, despite the fact that the diagnosis is obvious in virtually every case and that the criteria officially accepted for diagnosis has become more restrictive, not less.

When trapped by a lack of evidence, defenders of a nefarious position resort to their old standby—the epidemiological study. Statisticians will tell you that the least reliable type of study is an epidemiological study because it is easy to manipulate the data so that the study tells you anything you wish it to. Every defense offered by vaccine defenders is based on such studies and never the actual science. Then they announce that the issue is settled and no further studies need be done. After the media has been informed that the issue has been settled, those who continue to present the evidence are considered kooks and the great unwashed ignorant.

The Autism Disaster: Is it Man-Made?

Today, specialists speak of the autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which include a number of related neurodevelopmental disorders such as classical autism, Retts syndrome, Aspergers syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD) and pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS). I have noticed over the years that when specialists know very little about a disorder they spend an inordinate amount of time naming and sub-classifying it periodically. In addition, they go to great lengths to define characteristics and symptoms of the disorder that must be present to meet the criteria of classification. Those who fail to meet these criteria are dispensed with into another dimension, that is, they are ignored.

In the early 1980s, the incidence of autism was 1 in 10,000 births. By 2005, the incidence had leaped to 1 in 250 births and today it is 1 in 150 births and still climbing. One of the strongest links to this terrible set of disorders was a drastic change in the vaccine programs of the United States and many other countries, which included a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines being given at a very early age. No other explanation has been forthcoming from the medical elite.

In this paper, I shall present evidence, some of which has not been adequately discussed, that provides strong evidence for a connection between excessive vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders. In a paper I wrote in 2003, I stated that removing the mercury from vaccines would help relieve the problem, but it would not eliminate it. This was based on a number of studies in the neuroscience literature that indicated that excessive and especially repeated immune stimulation could result in severe disruption of brain development and even neurodegeneration.

In this paper and a follow-up paper, I attributed the central mechanism to excessive and prolonged microglial activation with an interaction between inflammatory cytokines and glutamate receptor subtypes. The Vargas, et al, study, published 2 years later in 2005, strongly supported this hypothesis, with the finding of elevated inflammatory cytokines as well as the presence of extensive, widespread activated microglia and astrocytes in examined autistic brains from age 5 years to 44 years of age. This indicated that the brain’s immune activation persisted for decades. Recent research indicates that this phenomenon is not that uncommon and can be reproduced in the laboratory using a variety of immune-stimulating agents and neurotoxins, including mercury and aluminum.