This post is Part 2 of a long article, we suggest you read Part 1 first, and you can download the fact sheet we are looking at from this page. We are up to the ‘further reading’ section at the end of the fact sheet, we’ll now take up where we left off:
The fact sheet supplies 5 references for further reading. Let’s see if we can find something about vaccines and autism on these pages.
www.science.org.au/immunisation
This page is on the Australian Academy of Science website.
There are 6 videos. We’ll watch ‘Vaccination is safe’, as that might mention autism.
We hear:
A very small and inaccurate study claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism…
Wakefield-bashing again and it’s an outright lie. Wakefield’s paper says “We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.”
Why on earth would an experienced and esteemed researcher like Dr Wakefield, who was head of the international Inflammatory Bowel Disease Study Group, claim the MMR vaccine causes autism after doing an observational report of just 12 children? The answer is he didn’t.
The page also has a link to this article on their website:
How safe are vaccines?
We find the paragraph:
One commonly used example of this is the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The first clinical signs of autism typically appear in the second year of life, which happens to be the same time that the MMR vaccine is given to children. This does not mean, however, that the vaccine is the cause—many comprehensive studies have shown that rates of autism diagnoses are the same among children who have and have not been vaccinated.
But we know there have been no studies looking at autism rates in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Liars.
The Australian Academy of Science say about themselves:
As the Australian Academy of Science, we have access to Australia’s most renowned scientists to assist us by ensuring that our science is accurate. Especially in this period of fake news and mis-represented science, we view our scientific independence as our most valuable asset. The content we publish is rigorously reviewed by Fellows of the Academy and other experts in the specific scientific field.
Just who is spreading fake news here?
www.ncirs.edu.au/consumer-resources/mmr-decision-aid
Now we get to the NCIRS, the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, titans of the Australian immunisation scene, and a page titled ‘MMR decision aid.’
This page is about the MMR vaccine, so we would expect it to claim there’s no link between the MMR and autism. Which it does.
Under FAQ2 there’s a paragraph:
A number of extensive, high quality studies have tested Dr Wakefield’s proposed theory of MMR vaccine leading to gut inflammation, decreased absorption of nutrients, and thus contributing to developmental disorders such as autism. These studies have compared large numbers of both vaccinated and unvaccinated children and have concluded there is no link between MMR vaccine and autism. The best studies looked at autism and MMR vaccination in 537,303 children born in Denmark and 300,000 children born in Japan over a number of years.[11-13]
There we go again, “compared large numbers of both vaccinated and unvaccinated children”, when we know no such thing has happened. What liars. And there’s that dodgy Japanese study where the MMR was discontinued in 1993 but instead children got the 3 vaccines separately but close together, the same thing really, and again, no group of unvaccinated children in the study.
http://www.ncirs.edu.au/provider-resources/ncirs-fact-sheets/
This page has a selection of NCIRS fact sheets on offer. Autism is only mentioned in the one about the MMR. This fact sheet provides a lot more detail than anything we have looked at so far; at risk of sounding repetitive, no matter how many studies they quote about the MMR and thimerosal, they have only looked into one vaccine and one ingredient as a possible cause of autism.
Once again the authors distort the facts about Dr Wakefield, describing the small numbers in his Lancet study and having no controls as a “errors”; a valid case series or case report can have as few as one subject and definitely does not have controls.
www.immunise.health.gov.au
This address redirects to the following link:
https://beta.health.gov.au/health-topics/immunisation
Looking at the ‘Understand vaccine safety” link, as that is the one most likely to talk about autism, we are sent to a number of fact sheets. The one that mentions autism is – guess what – the fact sheet we started with, ‘What About Autism?’
Talk about going round in circles.
IOM (Institute of Medicine). Adverse effects of vaccines: evidence and causality. Washington D.C.: The National Academies Press; 2012.
View the whole book here (recommended).
Or go to this page where you can view it online or download the PDF.
This publication is a very comprehensive report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an independent, non-profit body of medical experts who were asked by the US Congress to regularly review all the medical literature they could find that investigated adverse events claimed to be associated with vaccines, to see if vaccines were safe.
This report is commonly referred to as the 2011 IOM report, because it was released in August 2011, though it is copyright 2012. It looked at 8 vaccines and around 20 conditions for each vaccine that people have reported as adverse events after receiving vaccines.
Seeing this report is given as further reading on our autism fact sheet, and is not on the other ‘fast fact’ sheets written by the 6 PhDs, we might expect it to cast some light on whether vaccines cause autism.
A look through the Contents shows the 8 vaccines, with each of the adverse conditions listed below them. The vaccines are:
MMR (measles, mumps, rubella)
Varicella (chicken pox)
Influenza
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
HPV (human papillomavirus vaccine for cervical cancer)
DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis i.e. whooping cough)
Meningococcal (mainly for meningitis)
Maybe at last we are going to see whether some other vaccines have been examined for autism causation.
The MMR is first up, and it has autism listed as a condition, and the reviewers found the MMR does not cause autism, find:
Conclusion 4.8: The evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism.
This is not surprising; many studies have concluded the MMR does not cause autism.
Then we can look through all the other 7 vaccines, and rather shockingly, autism is only listed as an investigated condition under one other vaccine, the DTaP.
Here they say there is not enough science done to confirm or deny a causal link between the DTaP and autism, see the conclusion:
Conclusion 10.6: The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between diphtheria toxoid–, tetanus toxoid–, or acellular pertussis–containing vaccine and autism.
The report mentions there was one study, Geier and Geier, 2004, which they did not consider because “it provided data from a passive surveillance system and lacked an unvaccinated comparison population.”
This “passive surveillance system” is the very same system, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), that drug companies use in vaccine safety trials; how then is VAERS not good enough for the IOM but is good enough for all that so-called “rigorous” safety testing of vaccines? And the authors also reject the paper for inclusion in their review for not doing the very thing groups around the world are asking for, which is to use an unvaccinated comparison population.
It is bizarre this IOM report is given as further reading on a fact sheet that is trying to establish vaccines do not cause autism. All it does is report that the MMR does not cause autism, and shows us that 7 other vaccines have not been studied for autism causation.
At this point some people may be thinking there must be more to this, so let’s have a look at what the US government says.
A web search for “vaccines autism CDC” brings up an entry:
Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism Concerns | Vaccine Safety | CDC
The CDC is the top health authority for infectious diseases in the US, and its policies are closely followed by many countries including Australia, so it is the place to look for anything to do with vaccines.
We are greeted with the heading ‘Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism’.
Their first paragraph is extraordinary:
Some people have had concerns that ASD might be linked to the vaccines children receive, but studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing ASD. In 2011, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on eight vaccines given to children and adults found that with rare exceptions, these vaccines are very safe.
This is the 2011/12 IOM report we already looked at, the one where reviewers searched the medical literature available and for autism could only find science investigating the MMR vaccine.
It’s true that the IOM looked at eight vaccines, but they only looked at two vaccines regarding autism, so for the CDC to imply 8 vaccines were studied for autism causation is a gross deception.
Also, when they looked at the DTaP the IOM’s finding was that there is not any science done that could confirm or deny a link between the vaccine and autism; this is very different from finding the vaccine does not cause autism.
At this point you may like to watch a video of Stanley Plotkin MD, godfather of vaccines, using extremely warped logic to assert that having no science confirming or denying a vaccine is dangerous means the vaccine is safe.
To see an unedited version, watch this video starting around 15:00 hours
The second paragraph on the CDC page is about a study we haven’t covered yet in this article:
Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism
It’s nonsense, because it looks at the “number of antigens” in a vaccine. The authors are assuming that the number of antigens equates to the degree of immune activation and it doesn’t; vaccines can have small amounts or little variety of antigen material but cause robust immune activation through using strong adjuvants or other means.
This paper also includes this charming sentence, near the end.
Beginning at birth, an infant is exposed to hundreds of viruses and other antigens, and it has been estimated that an infant theoretically could respond to thousands of vaccines at once.
Please see the following article for a full rebuttal of this silly paper.
New SafeMinds Investigative Research Report Refutes Deceptive CDC Vaccine Safety Argument
The rest of the CDC’s page gives us some studies about thimerosal, a link to a 2004 IOM review plus the following sentence:
Besides thimerosal, some people have had concerns about other vaccine ingredients in relation to ASD as well. However, no links have been found between any vaccine ingredients and ASD.
Other vaccine ingredients? Let’s have a look!
The sentence links to another page, Ingredients of Vaccines – Fact Sheet
The only science provided on this page is the following article by Paul Offit:
Addressing Parents’ Concerns: Do Vaccines Contain Harmful Preservatives, Adjuvants, Additives, or Residuals?
Let’s look at what Offit says about aluminium, a vaccine ingredient modern science is connecting to autism, under the heading ‘Adjuvants’.
He says, astonishingly, that “the safety of aluminum has been established by experience during the past 70 years, with hundreds of millions of people inoculated with aluminum-containing vaccines.” Never mind all the deaths and serious injuries people have linked to vaccines over this period. Science this isn’t.
He follows this up with saying a child gets more aluminium orally than they do from vaccines. But he totally disregards the fact that oral aluminium is in dissolved (ionic) form and very little is absorbed into the blood, and the little that is absorbed gets flushed out easily by the kidneys, while vaccine aluminium is injected and is in insoluble compounds in nano-particulate form, so is not flushed out easily (it wouldn’t work if it was). He’s comparing apples to oranges.
The only science he uses to back up his statements is a study where mice were given some oral, dissolved aluminium (aluminum lactate) and they were just fine. Except this is nothing like injecting a baby with nano-particles of solid aluminium salts, which are designed to persist in the body so they can cause strong immune activation due to aluminium’s toxicity. This is hardly a study that investigates whether aluminium in vaccines could be causing harm.
If it was really just a matter of us getting more aluminium orally than we do in vaccines, we would all be walking around in a constant state of immune activation from our oral intake of aluminium, wouldn’t we? And they wouldn’t need to inject aluminium at all, would they?
Read about injected aluminium and how it is carried into the brain by macrophages (a type of white blood cell) in our article: Autism and vaccines
The CDC page finishes with some references that cover the same tired old ground of thimerosal, the MMR, and IOM reports. Nothing to see here.
* * *
So it boils down to this: as far as governments are concerned, science has only looked at whether the MMR and thimerosal cause autism; they have looked at one vaccine and one ingredient of some vaccines. Then there’s the nonsensical “number of antigens” study done by the CDC.
Governments only approve of science that looks for genes for autism, and they ignore promising science showing autism can be caused by aluminium, retroviral agents and DNA fragments in vaccines, which variously can cause inflammation in the brain and elsewhere and random genetic mutations in stem cells.
It’s not as though it’s not important governments get this right. The rate of autism is now around 1 in 40 children, up from 1 in 10,000 children in 1970, and there is definitive evidence this is a real epidemic, not just a matter of changing diagnoses (find sources in Chapter 1 of JB Handley’s book How to End the Autism Epidemic).
We’ll finish with a video of Robert F Kennedy Jr. giving a presentation about vaccine safety science.
https://youtu.be/_K8-PJ0hUsw
