Another Autism Study Ignores Elephant in the Room

The mainstream scientific community has historically done little for parents who have witnessed their child regress into autism after vaccination. The mainstream medical community has done even less. The genesis of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are still a relative mystery for most of mainstream medicine and its diagnosis is based on clusters of symptoms and behaviors laid out in a psychiatric manual. Most families are given two options by the mainstream medical community once their child is on the spectrum: a dangerous cocktail of pharmaceutical medications and to make preparations to institutionalize their child.

A newly published study in JAMA Pediatrics set out to determine the following question:

“After receiving an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, do children obtain all of their remaining scheduled vaccines, and are the younger siblings of these children vaccinated according to vaccine recommendations?”

The study included 3729 children with ASD, 592 907 children without ASD, and their respective younger siblings. The researchers found that children diagnosed with autism are less likely to receive additional vaccines, and that their younger siblings are less likely to receive the full schedule of childhood vaccinations as well. The study made the conclusion that “Children with ASD and their younger siblings were undervaccinated compared with the general population.” However, no effort was made to understand why. 

Ever-increasing vaccine uptake is a sacred cow that can neither be questioned or interfered with. Mainstream scientific thinking seems to only understand black and white, zeros and ones. Children are either receiving vaccines or not receiving them. The vaccines themselves are never in question because they fall under ‘settled science’ and are absolved of ever being questioned. Who shoulders the blame for low vaccine update? A trend can be seen when looking at the recent headlines. Corporate media reveled in their one-sided reporting of the recent JAMA study blaming the parents of the ASD children, anti-vaxxers, Andrew Wakefield, the catch-all phrase ‘skeptics’ and the overarching view of a ‘debunked’ connection between vaccines and autism.

While most scientists are continually searching for irrelevant crumbs there remains an elephant in the room. What is that elephant? For starters, the author on the recent JAMA study, Ousseny Zerbo admitted, “We did not look at vaccination rates before the children were diagnosed with autism.” An inconvenient fact for the settled science crowd is that parents continue to tell of their child’s regression into autism after vaccination. Did Zerbo bother to talk to any of the parents in the study to ask why they chose to not vaccinate after their child was diagnosed with autism? If the data was available, why didn’t Zerbo look at vaccination rates before the children were diagnosed with autism? Another elephant in the room is that a great number of the parents the media and medical community label “anti-vaxxers” are in reality ex-vaxxers. They were parents who followed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommend vaccine schedule and witnessed ill-health outcomes in their children leading them to either stop vaccinating altogether or space out their children’s shots.

Since its inception in 1990, the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) was created as a collaborative project between CDC’s Immunization Safety Office and eight health care organizations. The VSD is a nearly 30-year mother-load compilation of US electronic vaccine data with all the ingredients to answer the questions continually posed by the so-called anti-vaxxer, skeptic, anti-science, and conspiracy theory crowds. Zerbo and his colleagues had VSD access to ask the hard questions about vaccine-autism connections using that data and simply didn’t. Despite the VSD’s existence and access by researchers, there still has not even been a basic overarching study looking at the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children following the CDC’s recommended schedule. Why is that?

A 2011 Institutes of Medicine (IOM) review of the available literature on vaccine safety of the DTaP vaccine could not find a single study showing the shot didn’t cause autism. The IOM concluded “The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between diphtheria toxoid–, tetanus toxoid–, or acellular pertussis–containing vaccine and autism.” As with DTaP, there are also no published studies showing that autism is not caused by Hepatitis B, Rotavirus, Hib, Pneumococcal, Inactivated Poliovirus, Influenza, Varicella, or Hepatitis A vaccines – all of which HHS recommends babies receive, typically multiple times, by one year of age 4.

J.B. Handley, jr., co-founder of Generation Rescue and father of a child with autism, has been writing extensively about the international scientific studies that are shedding light on the mechanisms and genesis of autism. After regularly spotlighting these studies in his investigative writings at medium.com, the website abruptly censored him without explanation. Handley has since started his own blog where he has not lost a step writing the following recently:

“Five clear, replicable, and related discoveries explaining how autism is triggered have formed an undeniably clear picture of autism’s causation, and possibly ways to alleviate the symptoms, too. Most of the research that has created this understanding has been published in the last 36 months, and largely from international scientists in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Israel, and China. The American media, public health authorities, and Autism Speaks? Silent.”

To date, none of the recent studies over the last 36 months referenced by Handley, jr. have been addressed by any oversight body, regulatory agency or major medical association in America. US vaccine policy continues full steam ahead with no room for new research running counter to their settled science. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recently green-lighted a highly questionable and experimental vaccine adjuvant [1018] for testing on the entire American public, without their knowledge or consent. In doing so ACIP, the CDC, and the US Department of Health and Human Services continues to show through their actions that the American people are simply one big data grabbing medical experiment for the benefit of vaccine makers, their products, and their profit margins first and foremost.

The American public wants answers. When studies that have the capability to delve into the deeper, vaccine paradigm-threatening questions around vaccine safety fail to use common sense and publish myopic conclusions, mainstream science and medicine lose public trust and integrity.