Each month I write about books, DVD’s, organizations, trends, and events that are “on my radar” as they are important, timely and educational – which means they will empower you to think for yourselves, enable you to challenge the received wisdom, and give you ideas of how you might get involved to help create positive change on issues like vaccine safety, health freedom, individual rights, food safety and freedom, truth in science and medicine, and so much more. We hope it will be useful information to you all.
Thanks for being part of our community. –Leslie Manookian, The Greater Good
April is Autism Awareness Month so autism is the focus of this newsletter.
In the run up to Autism Awareness Month, two very interesting things happened, firstly, CDC announced, with very little fanfare, that the autism rate has increased yet again from the figure of 1 in 88 school children announced in May of 2012 to a whopping 1 in 50 children today or 2% of all American children.1 To be fair, the rate of autism did not jump that much in one year, rather, the data released last May pertain to children who were 8 years old in 2008, whereas the new number of 1 in 50 kids was revealed after a recent national telephone survey of parents. But the bottom line is that autism numbers keep climbing:
1980 1:10,000
1995 1:500
2001 1:250
2004 1:166
2007 1:150
2009 1:110
2012 1:88
2013 1:50
The second very interesting thing that happened, only a week or so after the new autism numbers came to light, was that the Journal of Pediatrics published a study conducted by researchers for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) saying that vaccines don’t cause autism.2 While the timing of all this is interesting, what is also noteworthy is that the story of this CDC report has been carried in literally dozens and dozens of media outlets but when researchers found particles of vaccines and a fatal autoimmune reaction to those particles in young women’s brains who died after their Gardasil shots, the news was picked up by virtually none. Ditto that for pretty much any research identifying a down side to vaccines. Go figure.
So CDC says there is no connection between vaccines and autism, but what exactly did they investigate? The simplest study would have been to compare the rates of autism in kids who were vaccinated with the rate of autism in kids who were not vaccinated. But that is not what they did. Instead, they counted up the number of items in childhood vaccines that are there to stimulate the production of antibodies and tried to determine if there was a change in the rate of autism based on whether the kids got the vaccines according to the CDC schedule or on a more spread out basis. They also looked at whether there was more autism in kids who received more vaccines in a single day. The authors conclusion was that there was no connection between either multiple vaccines given in one day or the entire vaccine schedule given through two years of age.
So what is wrong with the study?
Firstly, vaccines don’t contain only antigens, ingredients designed to provoke an immune response. They contain all other sorts of ingredients like aluminum, formaldehyde, antibiotics, and polysorbate 80 that are known toxins – aluminum is a known neurotoxin and recent research shows it causes not only brain damage but is also linked to cancer.3 To investigate the connection between antigens and autism while excluding from the analysis all the other ingredients vaccines contain is sloppy at best and disingenuous at worst.
Secondly, the data the scientists used was old data from a study that has been called fraudulent. Why? Because the researchers hid the fact that their data showed that kids who received as little as 16 micrograms of exposure to the mercury in thimerosal in utero were 8 times more likely to receive a regressive autism diagnosis.4
Thirdly, the control group was not truly a control group. In scientific research, investigators compare a group of folks who have a condition or problem or receive a drug to folks who don’t have that condition or don’t receive the drug to determine outcomes. So in this study, the investigators should have compared kids who had autism to kids who did not have autism or any of its features. But they didn’t. Instead, 25% of their “control” group had “speech delay or language delay, learning disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or attention deficit disorder, or tics, or had an individual education plan” – all known to be features of autism, even if the children did not test for full blown autism.5
Comparing vaccinated kids to other vaccinated kids to determine whether vaccines cause autism is well, nonsense. The simplest and best way to determine if vaccines cause autism is to study kids who are and are not vaccinated and to compare the rates of autism. It is not rocket science. One has to question the desire of these researchers to actually find the truth given that they did not do that simple study. Parents have been clamoring for that study for years and it still has not been done. The only question you need to ask yourself is why not?
Some great articles to read this month:
Incredible article on autism by one of the Thinking Moms: How I gave my son autism
New research into the dangers of aluminum: Aluminum Adjuvants
NVIC’s new billboard campaign: VACCINATIONS? Know the risks and failures.
