Editor’s Note: This is the first in a two-part series examining the link between childhood vaccines and Autism Spectrum Disorder. This first installment looks at the numbers – and the shocking trend they show. The next installment will address the claim that “the science is settled.”
Back in the year 2000 at the dawn of the new millennium, as Y2K fears faded to thin transparencies in the cultural rear-view mirror – one in 150 children were diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
A mere 16 years later – during an election year in which a reality TV show host quaked the planet by becoming president of the United States of America against all the odds – another seismic shock barely registered in the mainstream media: The percentage of children with autism had risen a staggering 300% to one in 54, according to the CDC.
That was four years ago – the last year for which the CDC has current records. Statistics now strongly indicate that one in 39 children has ASD in New Jersey, the state hardest hit by these dramatic increases.
Think about that.
When you were a child, you likely knew of no one with autism. Now there is roughly one child per classroom in New Jersey with ASD and one child for every two classrooms in every other state in America. Statistically and anecdotally, that means that everyone reading this article probably knows a family or someone personally who has been impacted by this lifelong developmental disorder.
That was unheard of 30 years ago.
So what accounts for the recent explosion in the number of children with autism?
To answer that, consider this: 12.4% of American children had a chronic illness in the 1980s, and 54% of children suffer from one today – an astounding, greater than four-fold increase. This eruption of chronic illnesses includes type 1 childhood diabetes, ADD, ADHD, food allergies, asthma, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, and autism.
What happened between the 1980s and the present day to make our children the sickest of all first-world nations?
One strong contender for the answer to that billion-dollar question is that in 1986, beset by scores of costly vaccine injury lawsuits, pharmaceutical companies effectively blackmailed the federal government. Acting in concert, they asserted they would no longer manufacture vaccines if they were to be held liable for revenue-killing vaccine injuries and deaths – and the government relented.
In 1986, President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) into law. This watershed action shielded pharmaceutical companies, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and all other health care professionals administering vaccines from any liability whatsoever for vaccine injury and death, conferring on them total indemnity from lawsuits. This was a unique carve-out in American history, never before established and never since repeated.
Untethered from the constraints of having to make products that could stand against safety claims in a court of law, the pharmaceutical companies ramped up production of a product that would become a major industry profit center. In 1986, children received 12 vaccinations for eight diseases, as per the CDC vaccine schedule. In 2020, children now receive 54 immunizations for 16 diseases – with hundreds more vaccines in the developmental pipeline.
And yet, with this multiplicity of jabs being administered, our children are somehow far sicker than ever before in the history of our country. How could this be? If vaccines are indeed the scientific miracle they are purported to be, isn’t it both logically and intuitively correct to assume that our children would be much healthier today – given that they are administered more vaccines than ever before?
Yet so many lambast any assertion that vaccines might have anything to do with the rise of autism – and as they intone whenever confronted with the alarming increase, “correlation does not equal causation.” Strictly speaking, that’s correct – but it doesn’t exclude causation, either. Just because there is an ample and growing body of scientific study and opinion that implicates vaccines in the momentous rise in autism doesn’t mean there is a smoking gun.
There are studies, for example, such as the recent Danish study from 2019 that draws no connection between the incidence of ASD and the administration of the MMR vaccine. But at least one scientist has criticized the failure of the study to account for 4,400 children it purports to represent there, the fact that many children in the study were too young to be diagnosed with autism, and the conflicts of interest of two of the lead authors.
Misleading, deceptively designed, often even fraudulent science of this kind is part and parcel of the current COVID-19 zeitgeist, as proven by The Lancet’s shocking retraction of an utterly corrupted study about hydroxychloroquine back in June. But it has been with us for some time and was decried years ago by former editors of the most prestigious medical journals in the world who assert as follows:
“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn toward darkness.” – Richard Horton, current editor in chief of The Lancet
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” – Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine
The one study that would cut through the bad science and finally settle one of the most burning questions of our time – “do vaccines cause autism?” – is a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study. Simply compare the health outcomes of children who have received the full battery of childhood vaccines to those who have not, and the truth will set us free. So why hasn’t the Department of Health and Human Services conducted this study and settled the debate once and for all?
The disingenuous “reasoning” of the federal government on this subject is that it would be unethical to deny children life-saving vaccines to conduct the study. This ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unvaccinated children already exist whose parents opted out, based on their well-founded fears. The government could very easily use the records of these children with parental consent and do the study in months – it just hasn’t. The argument is that these families would not be randomized and would then confound the results. Doth the government “protest too much,” and if so, once again, why?
The real confounder here is the question of safety. As part of the 1986 NCVIA, all claims of injury or death from vaccines are adjudicated under the aegis of the NVICP (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) – a federal court paid for by taxpayer dollars that also foots the bill for injury claims won. Because families cannot sue the manufacturer, as they can in every other scenario in American life, they must petition to have their case heard by the “Vaccine Court.”
So far, over $4 billion have been paid out by the NVICP to the families of those injured by vaccines. This amount represents just 1% of total vaccine injuries or deaths in America, according to a Harvard study which concluded that:
“Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common but underreported. Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of ‘problem’ drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed.”
Multiply four billion by any number other than one and you begin to get a sense of just how many vaccine injuries and deaths have been suffered in the USA by families beleaguered and beset by the trauma, astronomical costs, and life-long trials of caring for their impacted children.
On December 2, 2019, the same profoundly troubling doubt in science lamented by the editors of The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine was echoed by a leading scientist from the World Health Organization when she was caught on camera in an unguarded moment at the Global Vaccine Safety Summit. According to Dr. Soumya Swaminathan:
“I think we cannot overemphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries and this adds to the miscommunication and the misapprehensions because we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine and this always gets blown up in the media. One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the cause of deaths are, but in most cases, there is some obfuscation at that level, and therefore there is less and less trust in the system.”
This is a highly consequential figure in world health admitting on camera that vaccine safety internationally is lacking and that vaccines can cause death – which is breathtaking.
Could it be that vaccines aren’t actually all that “safe and effective”?
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Read more from Pennel Bird.
