Do Vaccines Cause Autism? A Discussion

Do vaccines cause autism?

Health authorities across the world claim vaccines do not cause autism, and that they know this because the question has been studied extensively.

It might surprise a reader new to this topic that this question has not been studied at all, by any common-sense understanding of the word “studied”.

What is really astounding is that it only takes a curious person with an average education having a quick look at authorities’ vaccine-autism science studies, for them to be saying “hey, how does this tell us vaccines do not cause autism?”

It is human nature to believe what we want to to be true, and very few politicians, health authorities or medical people can bear to think vaccines could be causing autism. Because this could mean, for a lot of these people, they have been harming children.

It could even mean, for many of them, they have been risking the health of their own children.

So they don’t actually look at the studies given as references on articles declaring vaccines don’t cause autism.

Or they do have a quick look and assume there must be other studies or other evidence or factors to complete the picture. Unfortunately, there isn’t more evidence to support their case.

Look for yourself

You can see this for yourself by doing a web search for “do vaccines cause autism?” Visit the first few articles in the list, look at the references and you will find one vaccine (the MMR) and one vaccine ingredient (mercury) have been investigated for causing autism.

In Australia we routinely give children vaccines for 15 diseases (including flu) in around 45 doses (plus annual flu doses). To see the vaccines visit Australian National Immunisation Schedule and download the PDF.

The MMR injection consists of vaccines for three diseases (measles, mumps and rubella), and it is given to children twice, at 12 months and 18 months (the second time with the chickenpox vaccine included).

There are a lot of science papers looking into whether the MMR vaccine causes autism. However vaccines for all the other diseases, or combinations, or the effect of the whole vaccine schedule have not been studied with regard to autism, apart from some independent investigations ignored by the health authorities.

The MMR has been studied extensively because in the 1990s, when autism rates began sky-rocketing, many parents in the UK reported their child regressed into autism after the MMR. The MMR was given to children on its own at that time, rather than along with other vaccines as happens today.

Many people now think vaccines given in the first 6 months of life can set up a condition in the body that could lead to autism, and this can be triggered by the MMR at 12-18 months of age.

Mercury was taken out of vaccines years ago (it is still in multidose flu vaccine vials).

So scientists have looked at vaccines for three of the 15 diseases and six of the 45+ doses. And one ingredient that makes up a very low proportion of today’s vaccines.

Trickery

Articles by health authorities and experts will often say something like “thousands of vaccinated and unvaccinated children have been compared for autism and it has been found there is no connection between vaccines and autism”.

You will find the “unvaccinated” group are not unvaccinated at all; they are only missing one vaccine, the MMR, but otherwise the children are vaccinated at the usual rate for their country, which these days is high in developed nations.

This is often easy to see in the introduction of a study, or even its title. You don’t need special understanding to see it, it stares you in the face. See these examples:

Example 1, the Masden paper

A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism

This study is often given as an example of a study comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children, which it clearly doesn’t. There is no unvaccinated group in this study.

Example 2, the Taylor paper

Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies

This meta-analysis reviews results from 10 published studies that investigated whether vaccines cause autism.

If you look at Tables 1 and 2, you will see they did an analysis of results from 6 MMR studies and 4 mercury studies. Across from Intervention, you will see what the authors looked at.

From this they concluded “vaccines” do not cause autism. What about all the other vaccines, combinations, brands and the effect of the whole schedule? Bear in mind none of the 10 studies included a completely unvaccinated group.

If you find an article that is talking more about “anti-vaxxers” than discussing actual science, and/or you are finding it difficult to find their evidence, I’d suggest to you the article is not credible.

These types of articles often carry on endlessly about Dr Andrew Wakefield; you will find a few articles on this website that address claims they make about him.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

The CDC is the US government body that manages vaccines in the US. It decides which ones go on the US schedule, it buys them from the drug companies, and investigates vaccine safety. (When investigating vaccine safety they are investigating their own decisions, which is a red flag 🚩)

The CDC have a big, bold heading on the ‘Autism and Vaccines’ page on their website saying ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’.

They say:

Some people have had concerns that ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder] might be linked to the vaccines children receive, but studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing ASD. The National Academy of Medicine, formerly known as Institute of Medicine, reviewed the safety of 8 vaccines given to children and adults. The review found that with rare exceptions, these vaccines are very safe.[1]

The first roadblock you come to is that reference [1] is missing. At the time of writing, anyway.

IOM investigation

This is the review they are referring to: IOM (Institute of Medicine). Adverse effects of vaccines: evidence and causality. Washington D.C.: The National Academies Press; 2012.

Sections 4 to 11 of the Contents list the 8 vaccines being reviewed, they are: MMR, Varicella, Influenza, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, HPV, DTaP and Meningococcal. Under each vaccine is a list of conditions claimed by the public and their doctors to be possibly caused by that vaccine. There are 147 conditions altogether.

To review the safety of these vaccines, the IOM scientists looked through all the medical literature available worldwide for any studies that had investigated whether each of the 8 vaccines has caused any of the adverse events listed for that vaccine.

Autism is only listed twice as being possibly caused by a vaccine, by the MMR and by the DTaP vaccine.

Results

After looking at all the literature, the IOM determined the MMR was not a cause of autism, and found that results from a study that looked at whether the DTaP vaccine caused autism were inconclusive.

There was only one science study available about whether the DTaP vaccine caused autism, several for the MMR vaccine, and no studies at all about whether the other six vaccines caused autism.

Not available

So the CDC has provided no evidence vaccines in general do not cause autism; they only have some (dodgy) evidence the MMR does not cause autism. And needless to say, there are many more vaccines, brands, and combinations of vaccines than the 8 investigated.

Here we see the CDC has deliberately set out to deceive, by saying the National Academy of Medicine had found 8 vaccines were found to be “very safe”, implying they were found to not cause autism, when there was no evidence for or against this for 7 of the 8 vaccines. The relevant science was simply not available.

In other words, the CDC are saying that having no evidence for or against a vaccine-autism link means the vaccine is safe. Watch Stanley Plotkin, “godfather of vaccines”, saying the same thing under oath in a court case deposition: Plotkin deposition DTaP vaccine IOM, 2018

Antigen study

The second paragraph on the CDC page is about an antigen study:
Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism

This paper is nonsense, read about it in this rescued article:
New SafeMinds Investigative Research Report Refutes Deceptive CDC Vaccine Safety Argument

The next question

It’s logical to wonder whether there is any other evidence relied upon to say vaccines do not cause autism. Maybe it is there, but just not visible to the public.

The folks from ICAN in the US wanted to know this, so they put in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the US health authorities to answer that question. They asked to see any studies of vaccines given in the first 6 months of life that show vaccines do not cause autism.

They asked for the studies of these early vaccines because these days autism is often diagnosed shortly before a child’s first birthday, and it is recommended the MMR is not given until at least 12 months. In other words, many autistic children regress into autism before getting the MMR vaccine.

So if it’s the vaccines that are causing autism in these children, the culprit must be the vaccines given earlier than 12 months.

Here is ICAN’s attorney Aaron Siri giving a talk about this FOIA request and its results to a group of legislators in New Hampshire, in the first hour of this video.

Aaron explains how the FOIA request shows the US health authorities do not have any evidence to support their position that vaccines do not cause autism.

Alternative studies

The most legitimate way to determine whether vaccines cause autism, and to what degree, is to look at many thousands of health records and compare the health of vaccinated and completely unvaccinated people, particularly looking at the amount of neurological and immunological disorders such as ASD, ADHD, epilepsy, allergies and asthma.

Studies like this can be done easily, the information is all there, for hundreds of thousands of people. Science groups from all over the world access this kind of data for their own research regularly.

But the health authorities refuse to do studies like this; they say it would be too difficult, which is nonsense. In Australia back in 2013, Professor McIntyre said on live TV (from 7′ 50″) his group were already doing this study. But as of 2024 it has not been published.

It is tempting to draw the conclusion the authorities have done this quick, easy, study, but don’t want the results to be known. For independent groups to do it would be very expensive.

Paul Offit caught out

An article about autism, vaccines and health authorities would not be complete without a look at what prominent vaccine scientist Paul Offit said in a seminar he apparently thought would be kept private.

The group start talking about the vaccines/autism question at 20 min 20 sec into the video, and continue to 24 min 40 sec. Offit is the one with grey hair on the far right.

Achieving Childhood Vaccination Success in the U.S. Expert Panel, 2016

Offit says (starting at 23 min):

In the scientific method you formulate a hypothesis, and that hypothesis is a null hypothesis, you can either reject it or not reject it. You can’t accept it, which is to say you can never prove never, which is to say you can never really say MMR doesn’t cause autism. But frankly if you get in front of the media, you had better get used to saying it, because otherwise people hear a door being left open when a door shouldn’t be left open.

I think Offit has a point when he says you can’t prove a null hypothesis i.e. you can’t actually prove that any particular thing never happens.

However they are assuming vaccines don’t cause autism, and are thinking in terms of proving they don’t. The thing is, they don’t actually have to test a null hypothesis. They could be testing a regular type of hypothesis, or be doing a completely different type of investigation that doesn’t have a hypothesis, but it doesn’t seem to occur to them to wonder whether vaccines do cause autism in some children.

It’s obvious these people believe very strongly that the question “do vaccines cause autism?” has been looked at extensively—which we know it hasn’t been—so they think it’s okay for them to lie in the cause of convincing parents to vaccinate their children.