Evidence That Vaccines Cause Autism

by Steve Kirsch

Here’s my favorite short list of evidence that can’t be explained if vaccines don’t cause autism. Does anyone think I’m wrong and can explain the list?

The list (in no particular order)

Here is a list of some of the most compelling evidence I’ve run across.

If there is a hypothesis that is a better fit to this evidence than vaccines cause autism, I’d love to hear it.

1. Madsen study: Even in this heavily flawed study, the raw data showed a strongly elevated risk of autism. So they never showed the raw data odds ratio (did you know that the rate of autism was 45% higher in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group?) and the paper only showed the adjusted numbers! That’s unethical. You can read the flaws in this study that was widely cited to prove that there was no association here. Over 1,000 scientists didn’t see anything wrong with the study! It’s really stunning how easily bad science propagates into the mainstream. Note that this is the single best study that is cited to prove that vaccines don’t cause autism and it is deeply flawed. The authors wouldn’t provide the underlying data and refused to answer any questions. Is that the way science works?

2. 214 papers in the peer-reviewed literature linking vaccines and autism: Autism mom Ginger Taylor compiled a list of 214 studies showing the link between vaccines and autism. Here’s the list as a single download.

3. Wakefield 1998 paper: Wakefield’s retracted paper reported that “We investigated a consecutive series of children… Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children, with measles infection in one child, and otitis media in another.” So 66% of the cases were associated with the MMR vaccine.

4. The 2022 Morocco study: 70% of the 90 parents surveyed affirmed that the first autistic features appeared after vaccination with the MMR vaccine. The rates are nearly identical to the 66% rate in the Wakefield study.

5. DeStefano paper evidence destruction:CDC scientist William Thompson was ordered by his bosses at the CDC to destroy ONLY the evidence linking vaccines and autism. Furthermore, the race subgroup analysis showing the link was omitted from the paper which is also unethical. When Congressman Bill Posey tried to get Thompson to testify in Congress, they shut him down so there was no testimony. This coverup was what convinced Wakefield that he was right: vaccines cause autism. More about the DeStefano paper in this article.

6. Simpsonwood meeting: CDC scientist Thomas Verstraeten did a study in 1999 linking thimerosal with autism. They tried to make the autism signal go away. They couldn’t. The original signal was a RR=7.6 which is a huge signal. See my article for details and a link to the original Verstraeten study.

7. Paul Offit lied to RFK Jr. about thimerosal:RFK Jr told me the story personally, but now, it’s on the Joe Rogan podcast Episode #1999. Start listening at 23:00. The punchline is at 28:33. Basically, the ethylmercury in the thimerosal makes a beeline out of your blood and deposits into your brain (unlike the methylmercury in fish which has a harder time entering your brain so it stays in your blood longer). Offit tried to convince RFK that the mercury gets excreted by referring to a paper. When RFK brought up the Burbacher study, there was dead silence on the line because Offit knew he had been caught in a deception. In short, thimerosal can seriously damage people’s brains. Vaccines are not supposed to cross the BBB. This creates biological plausibility needed for causality.

The CDC study showing how the measles vaccine caused permanent brain damage

The most remarkable paper showing the MMR vaccine causes permanent brain damage is this 1998 paper Acute Encephalopathy Followed by Permanent Brain Injury or Death Associated With Further Attenuated Measles Vaccines: A Review of Claims Submitted to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It is written by CDC authors and has not been questioned or retracted and cited by 90 papers.

This excellent Substack article shows the statistically significant peaks at days 8 and 9 after the shot. That’s causality.

So the CDC knew in 1998 that the measles vaccine was causing brain damage. But the paper said that the relationship “may exist.” Right. No other way to explain the data if it wasn’t causal.

This gives us more biological plausibility.

Studies of the vaxxed vs. unvaxxed

Studies of the unvaxxed vs. vaxxed all show a significantly higher rate of autism and other chronic diseases in the vaccinated (roughly 5X or more for autism).

1. Paul Thomas study showed that the unvaccinated did better on a wide range of health outcomes and that the more vaccinated you were, the more office visits you had.

2. Hooker: 5.03 odds ratio for autism in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.

3. Mawson: 4.2 odds ratio for autism in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated (666 in this study)

4. Control group: 82 odds ratio for autism in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. “For those with zero exposures to post-birth vaccines, pre-birth vaccines, or the K shot, the total rate of autism in the entire CGS is 0% (0 of 1,024)” Doing an OR calculation relative to my survey of 10,000 children: OR=82 CI:5.1197 to 1315 z statistic: 3.114 Significance level. P = 0.0018.

5. Lyons-Weiler: The study was too small to assess autism risk, but showed better health outcomes among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated in other conditions. See this article which notes that the unvaccinated had better compliance to their wellness checks than the vaccinated which eliminates a common argument that anti-anti-vaxxers use. It says, “the unvaccinated families made their well-child visits with greater frequency than the vaccinated families.”

6. A new study of 50,000 kids (submitted for publication but not yet published) shows the same odds ratios for chronic diseases as the Hooker and Mawson studies. The author is well respected and the dataset is very large.

7. The Generation Rescue (GR) study that was done on June 26, 2007 showed that vaccinated kids were significantly worse off in every category they looked at. “For less than $200,000, we were able to complete a study that the CDC, with an $8 billion a year budget, has been unable or unwilling to do.” Where is the CDC survey? Nowhere to be found! They simply don’t want to do it. Read the survey and see this article for more information. GR couldn’t tamper with the study or manipulate the results because it was done by a third party survey firm with no conflicts of interest. If the drug companies didn’t like the result, they could have easily commissioned a different polling company. But they didn’t!!! Or maybe they did and simply chose not to publish the results because they were so bad. In any event, the lack of a poll showing the opposite of the GR poll is very very problematic for the “safe and effective” narrative.

There are large cohorts with a no vaccination policy which have NO autism

1. The Amish: We couldn’t find an Amish child with autism who wasn’t vaccinated or adopted.

2. A large clinical pediatric practice I am personally very familiar with has eschewed the use of all vaccines and acetaminophen and achieved a zero autism rate over the past 25 years even though autism rates were skyrocketing in adjacent clinics. Furthermore, despite the lack of vaccination, the kids were also uniformly healthier than the kids in any of the surrounding clinics. This means that we can end the autism epidemic merely by altering individual choices we make. Unfortunately, this clinic cannot “go public” with this information because the medical boards would take away their license to practice medicine because they failed to push the vaccines on their patients like they were told to do by the medical establishment.

3. There are other pediatric clinics in the US which eschew vaccination. For example, at Homefirst Medical Services, “We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines.” What makes this believable is that other clinics who didn’t vaccinate reported the same results.

4. My survey of the parents of 10,000 kids showed more vaccines mean that an autism diagnosis is more likely.

The Homefirst clinic in Chicago run by Mayer Eisenstein had tens of thousands of patients and not a single case of autism over 47 years. He died in 2014.

From this article in UPI:
In the past, public-health officials have said such an approach [surveying the public to look at health outcomes in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated] would be impractical due to low numbers of never-vaccinated children, but this column found tens of thousands of such children -- beginning with the Amish -- in various locations in the United States. In our anecdotal and unscientific reporting, the rate of autism seemed strikingly lower in never-vaccinated children, …

But this column identified several groups that might fit the bill -- from the Amish in Pennsylvania Dutch country to homeschooled children to patients of a Chicago family practice.

"I have not seen autism with the Amish," said Dr. Frank Noonan, a family practitioner in Lancaster County, Pa., who has treated thousands of Amish for a quarter-century.

"You'll find all the other stuff, but we don't find the autism. We're right in the heart of Amish country and seeing none, and that's just the way it is."

In Chicago, Homefirst Medical Services treats thousands of never-vaccinated children whose parents received exemptions through Illinois' relatively permissive immunization policy. Homefirst's medical director, Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, told us he is not aware of any cases of autism in never-vaccinated children; the national rate is 1 in 175, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have a fairly large practice," Eisenstein told us. "We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines. "We do have enough of a sample," Eisenstein said. "The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We're all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there's no communication. It's frightening. You can't touch them. It's not something that anyone would miss."

The before:after odds measures

The before:after odds measures are the most stunning pieces of evidence there is for vaccines causing autism. Many parents notice a sudden, dramatic change in their child shortly after vaccination. But the funny thing is, none of them noticed this right before the appointment with the pediatrician to get the shot. It’s simply nearly impossible to achieve a disparity like this if the shots are safe.

This isn’t observer bias either. If a child suddenly developed autistic behaviors right before the doctor appointment to get vaccinated, you can bet the first thing out of the parent’s mouth would be telling the doctor before the shot of the sudden change. What pediatrician in the world can recall that ever happening?

Yet we are inundated with stories of parents saying their child got a fever right after the shot, the parent may have given the child Tylenol (which makes everything worse), and within hours, the child is never the same.

These clearly aren’t anti-vaxxer parents who believe Wakefield because if they were, they wouldn’t have vaccinated their child!!! So there is no way to ignore these reports.

1. Pediatrician Doug Hulstedt statistics: He had 150 autism patients, about half where the parents linked the autism to the vaccine. He said there were 44 cases where autism signs developed very quickly. In every single case, the regression happened after a vaccine shot rather than in the days or weeks before a vaccine appointment. That is statistically impossible if the vaccine is a placebo. But even more devastating is that you cannot find a pediatrician in the world where the before/after stats are comparable. Why not? If the vaccines are safe, every pediatrician should have comparable stats and it would be impossible to find a single Doug Hulstedt.

2. My survey of parents of 300 autistic kidsshowed a 0:66 odds for getting autism the month before a vax shot vs. within a month after a shot. This is in remarkable agreement with Doug Hulstedt’s numbers.

Other evidence

1. Autism is brain injury. The only things that could cause such an injury is a pathogen that is either injected, ingested, inhaled, or absorbed by the skin. There may also be a genetic cause. This limits our solution space.

2. There is not a single cause for autism. If you remove the major causes (e.g., vaccination, use of Tylenol, etc.), autism will still happen, but at a much lower rate.

3. The pathogen must be relatively newbecause autism rates didn’t “take off” until 1983. In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control ("CDC") recommended a total of 10 vaccines for our children up to the age of 5. In 2007, the CDC recommended 36, an increase of 260%, or 3.6x. You can see the slope change at both those dates in the graph below.

This rapid climb was not due to a change in criteria to diagnose ASD. Such a change would create a quick step function and just shift the existing line upwards; the slope wouldn’t change.

Also, this growth isn’t due to a genetic issue because genetic traits don’t replicate exponentially over short time periods like this.

The fact that we can dramatically reduce the rate of autism by withholding all vaccines suggests that the vaccines are the major driver.

Distortion of truth

When people on the other side of the argument have to lie and distort the truth to make their point, you really have to wonder why they have to do that.

For example, For example, Matt Carey when he wrote about William Thompson’s study, he claimed that there was nothing wrong with excluding the RACE subgroup analysis from their published paper or being ordered to destroy ONLY the documents that were related to the RACE subgroup analysis (i.e., to ONLY destroy that data that goes against the CDC narrative).

Carey excels at gaslighting people who don’t know how science works. He wrote another article which deliberately misrepresented the results of the Generation Rescue survey (Matt claimed they showed the opposite of what they actually did). Nobody can read the results of the GR survey and think that the vaccines are bad. But he deliberately didn’t link to the source so you can’t easily check out that he’s lying.

As a result, none of the comments pointed out the huge misdirection.

Professor Anders Hviid had to create a bogus study which was designed not to find a signal. And when I notified him that another paper proved that his underlying data was inaccurate, he ignored me. When I asked to see the data, he blocked me. Lots more in my article.

Finally, in general, the anti-anti-vaxxers will not engage in a civil dialog to discover the truth. That should be very very concerning.

Can they simply “explain away”everything in this article? Can we talk about it?

Even more evidence

See my slide deck.

The admission of a top autism expert

Finally, the biggest piece of evidence comes from James Lyons-Weiler who got a call from one of the top autism experts in the world. He told James that “We all know vaccines cause autism. We just aren’t allowed to talk about it.” He was referring to his fellow autism experts.

If they admitted this, they would lose their funding, their job, their license to practice medicine, their hospital privileges, their board certifications, etc.

That’s why I can’t get a debate and when I try to reach out to these experts they ghost me.

And that’s why there are never the before:after studies and why all there are so many studies are designed to not find a signal.

Summary

Science is about matching hypotheses to data to which hypothesis is best able to explain all the data.

It’s clear that there have been studies which have been deliberately or inadvertently designed to not find a signal. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a link; it simply means the study was inadequate to find the link or the underlying data was compromised.

The thing is that if there really is not a link, then no matter what you do, you won’t find a link.

But the problem they have is that there have been other studies which show very clearly that vaccines cause autism that cannot be explained away because the signals are too strong.

Furthermore, I was unable to find a single study showing that the fully vaccinated had better health outcomes than the fully unvaccinated. Judy Gerberding, the former head of the CDC, promised to do such a study in 2005.

Twenty years later, that study has still never been done.

So in the meantime, the precautionary principle of medicine is pretty clear on what we should be doing: nobody should be getting any vaccines.

Original Article:

If vaccines don't cause autism, then how do you explain all this evidence?