Biggest Risk Factor for Autism? Bombarding Young Children with Multiple Vaccines
A comprehensive review of 300 studies has dismantled the falsehood that vaccines don’t cause autism.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
A comprehensive review of 300 studies on possible causes of autism identified vaccination as the leading “modifiable risk factor” for the condition. The authors of the 82-page report said that multiple vaccines given in early childhood may overwhelm infants’ developing systems. They said their report dismantles the falsehood that vaccines don’t cause autism.
Autism arises from a combination of genetic, environmental and medical factors — but multiple vaccines given during the early years of life is the most significant modifiable risk factor for the onset of autism spectrum disorder or ASD, according to a new report by the McCullough Foundation.
The 82-page report, published Monday, reviewed over 300 autism studies that examined possible causes of autism, including genetic, environmental, toxicological and vaccine-related causes.
Of the studies, 136 focused on routine childhood vaccines or vaccine ingredients, and 107 (79%) of those identified links between vaccination and autism or other neurodevelopmental conditions.
Twelve of the studies compared fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated children. All found better health outcomes among the unvaccinated group.
Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher, the report’s lead author, told The Defender the report is “the most comprehensive synthesis on autism’s causes to date.”
Hulscher said that while approximately half of the studies the authors examined “focused on genetics, parental age, immune dysregulation, environmental toxicants, perinatal complications and gut-brain interactions,” none could account for the “rapid, stepwise rise in autism prevalence.”
Data published earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that 1 in 31 U.S. children had autism in 2022 — up from 1 in 36 in 2020 and 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s. Hulscher said the sharp rise in autism diagnoses began after the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and the subsequent expansion of the childhood vaccination schedule.
“Vaccine exposure provides the precipitating trigger for neurodevelopmental injury in susceptible children,” Hulscher said.
John Leake, vice president of the McCullough Foundation and one of the report’s co-authors, said the “evidence that hyper-vaccination is the primary, modifiable risk factor for autism has been presented in published literature, but this reality has been obfuscated by powerful ideological and commercial interests.”
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the report’s findings “are entirely consistent with CHD’s work and what thousands of parents have been reporting for decades.”
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist, called the review “astonishing.” He said it’s “no easy task to assemble such a large review, let alone in a field that is so heavily censored.”
‘Clustered’ administration of vaccines linked to a higher autism risk
In a summary of the study on Substack, Hulscher said the report’s authors “comprehensively examined epidemiologic, clinical, and mechanistic studies” that assessed autism risk factors.
The examination included a look at the relative strengths and weaknesses of each study, assessing outcomes, exposure quantification, strength and independence of associations, temporal relationships, internal and external validity, overall cohesiveness and biological plausibility.
“By evaluating all known risk factors side by side, this analysis uniquely clarifies the relative contribution of vaccination compared to genetic and environmental domains,” Hulscher wrote.
The report’s findings centered on “shared mechanisms — immune dysregulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neuroinflammation” brought on by vaccination.
These conditions were triggered by vaccine ingredients, including antigens — or live viruses, preservatives such as the mercury-containing thimerosal, and adjuvants such as ethyl mercury and aluminum.
Hulscher wrote that one of the report’s key findings is that the “clustered” administration of vaccines is linked to a higher autism risk. This includes the administration of multiple vaccines simultaneously, the administration of combination vaccines such as the MMRV (measles-mumps-rubella-varicella) vaccines, or administering multiple vaccines within a short timeframe.
“These combined toxic exposures may overwhelm infant detoxification capacity, creating a metabolic bottleneck that heightens oxidative stress, immune dysregulation, and autonomic instability” and “may also underlie subsets of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS),” the report states.
Yet, according to the report, of the over 300 studies examined, “very few explicitly examined combination vaccines (e.g., MMRV) or compared simultaneous versus separate administration, and none evaluated the cumulative schedule as a whole.”
The administration of multiple vaccines early in life is another “critical, yet often overlooked, determinant of neurodevelopmental risk” — and the CDC has been aware of this risk since the 1990s, according to the report.
“Early infancy constitutes a window of heightened vulnerability to immune activation and adjuvant or preservative exposure, during which neuroimmune, mitochondrial, and synaptic systems remain under rapid development,” the report states.
“The results dismantle one of the most enduring falsehoods in modern medicine — the declaration that vaccines do not cause autism,” Hulscher said.
In his analysis on Substack, Hulscher noted that previous studies that have found no link between vaccination and autism were methodologically questionable, as they “consistently lacked genuinely unvaccinated control groups, relied on registry data rather than clinical assessments, and failed to confirm vaccine records.”
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Report ‘destroys the fallacy’ that autism has been fully studied
Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead, Ph.D., one of the report’s co-authors, said it’s likely inaccurate to say that vaccines alone cause autism. However, the report helps illustrate how they may interact with other factors, resulting in the onset of autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions.
“The complex multifactorial nature of autism poses a profound research challenge, and epidemiologically robust, well-powered studies are hard to come by,” Mead said. “While I would agree that vaccines alone may lack robust epidemiological evidence as ASD [autism spectrum disorder] causes, their interaction with genomic factors could help explain much of the heterogeneity we see in autism studies.”
The report cited “older parents, premature delivery, common genetic variants, siblings with autism, maternal immune activation, in utero drug exposure, environmental toxicants, and gut-brain axis alterations” as key non-vaccine risk factors that contribute to the onset of autism, Hulscher wrote on Substack.
However, “none can fully explain the sharp rise in autism that coincided with the expansion of the U.S. vaccine schedule post-1986,” Hulscher wrote.
“This obvious timeline and the tens of thousands of witnesses who have attested to their children regressing into autism shortly after receiving multiple vaccines all at once have been systematically obscured by ideological and commercial interests,” Leake said. Those interests “have suppressed open inquiry about autism.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, said the review “destroys the fallacy that ‘the [autism] issue has been fully studied.’”
“The overwhelming conclusion” of the studies examined in the report “is that vaccinated children are more likely to get autism compared to their unvaccinated counterparts, regardless of whether one is looking at the vaccination schedule, the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine, or aluminum exposure … or thimerosal exposure through vaccines,” Hooker said.
Better diagnosis claim ‘no longer credible’
Hulscher said the report also counters a narrative commonly found in mainstream medicine and in the news media that the ongoing increase in autism cases is due to better diagnosis and screening of the condition.
“That argument is no longer credible,” Hulscher said. “Diagnostic criteria have been largely stable since 2013, yet prevalence has continued to skyrocket — especially in the most severe, profound autism cases, which now represent 26.7% of all U.S. autism diagnoses.”
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., agreed. He said “ascertainment and coding drift allowed institutions to attribute the steep rise to ‘better diagnosis’” in recent years.
Lyons-Weiler added:
“For two decades, the public conversation has been fragmented — genetics over here, perinatal stressors over there, toxicants and immune biology in separate either/or silos, with vaccination ring-fenced as untouchable. This report dissolves those firewalls.”
John Gilmore, executive director of the Autism Action Network, said that while there is “no question” that better diagnosis has contributed to the rise in recorded cases of autism, “the definition of autism has been so watered down [that anyone] who experiences social awkwardness can get an autism diagnosis if they want one.”
“‘Autism’ today in the U.S. is inherently a meaningless diagnosis,” Gilmore said.
Leake noted that autism rates in the U.S. and in countries with comparable childhood immunization schedules are significantly higher than the global average.
The “estimated autism prevalence in the U.S. of 1 in 31 children is significantly higher than the World Health Organization’s estimate of 1 in 127 children globally. Australia, which maintains a childhood vaccine schedule comparable to that of the U.S., now has an estimated autism prevalence of 1 in 40 children,” Leake said.
Wakefield’s return to autism research ‘an important restoration of scientific integrity’
The report also marks the return of researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield to scientific research and publication. In 1998, Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet identifying a possible association between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Wakefield’s paper initially didn’t generate controversy. But in 2011, The Lancet’s editors “bowed to pressure to retract Wakefield’s paper,” even though its contents had not been proven to be erroneous.
Hulscher said Wakefield’s co-authorship of the report “marks an important restoration of scientific integrity.”
“His return represents a reawakening of open scientific inquiry into one of the most pressing health crises of our time. It also signals that independent researchers are no longer intimidated by censorship or character assassination from the vaccine industry and its institutional allies,” Hulscher said.
Holland said the retraction of Wakefield’s paper and the lack of subsequent studies by mainstream scientists examining a possible link between vaccines and autism are examples of “draconian censorship.”
Jablonowski said it was fitting that Wakefield co-authored the report, as he “paid a high price for his scientific integrity,” which served as “a warning to others who dared to be curious enough to study vaccinations and their deleterious outcomes.”
Report may contribute to administration’s efforts to research autism’s causes
Publication of the report comes as President Donald Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have launched initiatives to get to the bottom of what causes autism.
Last month, the White House announced that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or HHS will study all possible causes of autism — including vaccines — and that the National Institutes of Health had launched the Autism Data Science Initiative, funding 13 teams of researchers studying autism’s causes.
During the same announcement, Kennedy and Trump said research indicates a possible link between the use of products containing the popular painkiller acetaminophen during pregnancy and autism in young children.
Kennedy announced in April that the public health agencies had launched a “massive testing and research effort” to determine what causes autism, involving hundreds of scientists globally.
“Autism research is still in need of much improvement, which is why Kennedy’s commitment to bolstering this field of investigation is so important,” Mead said. “Our paper reinforces the case for initiating large, well-designed studies of the potential ASD-related effects of vaccines, particularly in the context of multiple or compound vaccinations.”
“The administration is already talking about multiple environmental factors as causes of autism,” Gilmore said. “I expect this study will support widening the range and depth of environmental causes of autism.”
Gilmore said the report may help shift the focus of autism research.
“For a quarter century, genetics has been the preferred cause of autism and has been the almost total focus of autism research despite the lack of statistically significant associations,” Gilmore said. “This study provides rational reasons to reallocate resources to likely environmental causes.”
Holland said the report can help parents make informed decisions about vaccination.
“While we wait on the government to act, families should feel entirely free to take account of this science and act accordingly,” Holland said.
Related articles in The Defender
‘Uncompromising and Relentless’: HHS to Study All Possible Causes of Autism, Including Vaccines
‘Parents Have Waited for 30 Years’: NIH to Study Causes of Autism
RFK Jr. Launches ‘Massive Testing and Research’ Into Autism Epidemic
‘Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism’ Claim Built on ‘House of Cards,’ Authors of New Review Say
Watch: Dr. Wakefield’s ‘Protocol 7,’ Premiering May 29, Takes on Merck’s Mumps Vaccine Fraud
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