Why Are We Ignoring The Coming Autism Avalanche? – OpEd

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By Pennel Bird*

Back in the year 2000 at the dawn of the new millennium, as Y2K fears faded to thin transparencies in the cultural rear-view mirror – one in 150 children were diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

A mere 16 years later – during an election year in which a reality TV show host quaked the planet by becoming president of the United States of America against all the odds – another seismic shock barely registered in the mainstream media: The percentage of children with autism had risen a staggering 300% to one in 54, according to the CDC.

That was four years ago – the last year for which the CDC has current records. Statistics now strongly indicate that one in 39 children has ASD in New Jersey, the state hardest hit by these dramatic increases.

Think about that.

When you were a child, you likely knew of no one with autism. Now there is roughly one child per classroom in New Jersey with ASD and one child for every two classrooms in every other state in America. Statistically and anecdotally, that means that everyone reading this article probably knows a family or someone personally who has been impacted by this lifelong developmental disorder.

That was unheard of 30 years ago.

So what accounts for the recent explosion in the number of children with autism?

To answer that, consider this: 12.4% of American children had a chronic illness in the 1980s, and 54% of children suffer from one today – an astounding, greater than four-fold increase. This eruption of chronic illnesses includes type 1 childhood diabetes, ADD, ADHD, food allergies, asthma, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, and autism.

What happened between the 1980s and the present day to make our children the sickest of all first-world nations?

One strong contender for the answer to that billion-dollar question is that in 1986, beset by scores of costly vaccine injury lawsuits, pharmaceutical companies effectively blackmailed the federal government. Acting in concert, they asserted they would no longer manufacture vaccines if they were to be held liable for revenue-killing vaccine injuries and deaths – and the government relented.

In 1988, President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) into law. This watershed action shielded pharmaceutical companies, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and all other health care professionals administering vaccines from any liability whatsoever for vaccine injury and death, conferring on them total indemnity from lawsuits. This was a unique carve-out in American history, never before established and never since repeated.

Untethered from the constraints of having to make products that could stand against safety claims in a court of law, the pharmaceutical companies ramped up production of a product that would become a major industry profit center. In 1986, children received 12 vaccinations for eight diseases, as per the CDC vaccine schedule. In 2020, children now receive 54 immunizations for 16 diseases – with hundreds more vaccines in the developmental pipeline.

And yet, with this multiplicity of jabs being administered, our children are somehow far sicker than ever before in the history of our country. How could this be? If vaccines are indeed the scientific miracle they are purported to be, isn’t it both logically and intuitively correct to assume that our children would be much healthier today – given that they are administered more vaccines than ever before?

Yet so many lambast any assertion that vaccines might have anything to do with the rise of autism – and as they intone whenever confronted with the alarming increase, “correlation does not equal causation.” Strictly speaking, that’s correct – but it doesn’t exclude causation, either. Just because there is an ample and growing body of scientific study and opinion that implicates vaccines in the momentous rise in autism doesn’t mean there is a smoking gun.

There are studies, for example, such as the recent Danish study from 2019 that draws no connection between the incidence of ASD and the administration of the MMR vaccine. But at least one scientist has criticized the failure of the study to account for 4,400 children it purports to represent there, the fact that many children in the study were too young to be diagnosed with autism, and the conflicts of interest of two of the lead authors.

Misleading, deceptively designed, often even fraudulent science of this kind is part and parcel of the current COVID-19 zeitgeist, as proven by the Lancet’s shocking retraction of an utterly corrupted study about hydroxychloroquine back in June. But it has been with us for some time and was decried years ago by former editors of the most prestigious medical journals in the world who assert as follows:

“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn toward darkness.” – Richard Horton, former editor of The Lancet

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” – Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The one study that would cut through the bad science and finally settle one of the most burning questions of our time – “do vaccines cause autism?” – is a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study. Simply compare the health outcomes of children who have received the full battery of childhood vaccines to those who have not, and the truth will set us free. So why haven’t the Departments of Health and Human Services conducted this study and settled the debate once and for all?

The disingenuous “reasoning” of the federal government on this subject is that it would be unethical to deny children life-saving vaccines to conduct the study. This ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unvaccinated children already exist whose parents opted out, based on their well-founded fears. The government could very easily use the records of these children with parental consent and do the study in months – it just hasn’t. The argument is that these families would not be randomized and would then confound the results. Doth the government “protest too much,” and if so, once again, why?

The real confounder here is the question of safety. As part of the 1988 NCVIA, all claims of injury or death from vaccines are adjudicated under the aegis of the NVICP (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) – a federal court paid for by taxpayer dollars that also foots the bill for injury claims won. Because families cannot sue the manufacturer, as they can in every other scenario in American life, they must petition to have their case heard by the “Vaccine Court.”

So far, over $4 billion have been paid out by the NVICP to the families of those injured by vaccines. This amount represents just 1% of total vaccine injuries or deaths in America, according to a Harvard study which concluded that:

“Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common but underreported. Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of ‘problem’ drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed.”

Multiply four billion by any number other than one and you begin to get a sense of just how many vaccine injuries and deaths have been suffered in the USA by families beleaguered and beset by the trauma, astronomical costs, and life-long trials of caring for their impacted children.

On December 2, 2019, the same profoundly troubling doubt in science lamented by the editors of the Lancet and the NEJM was echoed by a leading scientist from the World Health Organization when she was caught on camera in an unguarded moment at the Global Vaccine Safety Summit. According to Dr. Soumya Swaminathan:

“I think we cannot overemphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries and this adds to the miscommunication and the misapprehensions because we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine and this always gets blown up in the media. One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the cause of deaths are, but in most cases, there is some obfuscation at that level, and therefore there is less and less trust in the system.”

This is a highly consequential figure in world health admitting on camera that vaccine safety internationally is lacking and that vaccines can cause death – which is breathtaking.

Could it be that vaccines aren’t actually all that “safe and effective”?

In 2018, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of Children’s Health Defense and Del Bigtree of ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network) sued the Departments of Health and Human Services and the CDC to compel them to show evidence of having consistently and routinely tested vaccines for safety – as per their lawful responsibility with which they were expressly charged in the NCVIA of 1988.

The plaintiffs won – and proved that the government agencies charged with testing the safety of the vaccines the CDC insists our children get have never done so – a massive dereliction of duty for more than 30 years.

This cannot be lowercased. For over a quarter-century, our government has failed to test for safety the 54 doses of vaccines they compel our children to take, holding hostage – in many states – the right to attend public school. And the United States government conceded its shocking and unconscionable failure of duty in a court of law in 2018.

But the plaintiffs weren’t done yet. An ICAN press release states that the CDC admitted after being sued in federal court that it had no studies to prove that these vaccines don’t cause autism. This bombshell for the ages comes after years of being told that “the science is settled – vaccines don’t cause autism” again and again as part of a sustained media campaign to control the narrative. The government cannot say vaccines don’t cause autism if it can’t provide proof of this assertion.

And the need for vaccine safety – the duty to which our government abdicated, as proven in court – is self-evident in the very fact that pharmaceutical manufacturers sought and received full indemnity for vaccine death and injury. There is no need for federal immunity from a “safe” product. That the Vaccine Court, which pays out claims to those killed or maimed by vaccines, even exists in the first place is further proof that “safe and effective” is more of a PR slogan than hard truth.

For many children, vaccines are not safe. This is now officially conceded and acknowledged by the federal government – which, in a grim twist, still somehow unaccountably mandates that our kids get the full battery of CDC recommended immunizations. These same mandates may well apply to everyone worldwide, including adults unvaccinated since youth, once the Coronavirus vaccine is formulated at “warp speed.” And the same indemnity for vaccine injury and death is already afforded all manufacturers of this imminent miracle jab – including vaccine industrialist Bill Gates.

Many Americans are completely oblivious to this – and that’s by design. The institutions of the Fourth Estate charged with reporting this information won’t cross Big Pharma, the most powerful lobby in Washington DC. Pharma outspends Big Oil and Gas four to one and pays for close to 70% of all advertising revenues in news, even as it spends 30 billion a year on medical marketing to doctors and health care professionals. As a result, for the media to greenlight any reporting that associates increases in autism worldwide with vaccines would be akin to issuing a press release that a certain brand of trucks are associated with brake failure while employed by that company – a questionable strategy at best for professional success.

The 24-hour news cycle has been grooming the public for years to accept that autism is just a normal part of American life. And the Pavlovian response of the media as to why there are so many children with autism when it was vanishingly rare just decades ago is that it’s the result of “better diagnosing.”

Even if this were true (and it may be in some cases) you’d have to accept that a sudden and dramatic sea change occurred in the training of doctors, psychologists, and regional center personnel in the last decade and a half – it would be impossible for a 300% increase to result. Where were all those students hiding for the last 100 years?

The “scientific” hedge is that all autism is genetic – but this seems unlikely as genes take roughly a million years to mutate, and as Dr. Boyd Haley states, “it is statistically impossible to have a genetic epidemic in such a short period of time.” Even so, the lion’s share of all funding goes toward this genetic research – a Titanic-like pursuit doomed to failure that functions as an elaborate diversion designed to draw attention away from the elephant in the room: childhood immunizations.

Were the government bodies charged with protecting our children ever to admit that the Great Autism Gene Hunt is a race to nowhere, they would have to focus instead on possible environmental factors, including mercury from burning coal, aluminum (present as an adjuvant in vaccines and in many household products like deodorant), air pollution, pesticides like as glyphosate, and the CDC vaccine schedule. Don’t hold your breath.

If this were a court case – failing the definitive answer a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study would provide – the preponderance of circumstantial evidence would be highly compelling.

In 2010, The Vaccine Court settled with the family of Hannah Poling, admitting that vaccines had “resulted” in her autism. Hannah had a mitochondrial disorder that is most often referred to as rare – although we have no idea how many children suffer from this confounder that may well be the trigger that fires the autism bullet for some susceptible children.

Hannah’s case was one of three representative test cases chosen for the Omnibus Autism Proceedings – a class action suit in the Vaccine Court back when the millennium was new. When her case yielded the dread result that her autism was a result of a vaccine injury, her case was settled, quietly removed from the Omnibus, and sealed.

The class-action suit was decided in favor of the government, as “no link” was determined. The many families who petitioned went home with neither a settlement nor an admission that vaccines had harmed the 5,400 children represented in the case in any way.

At the time, CDC head Julie Gerberding admitted to Sanjay Gupta on TV that vaccines could trigger autism in those with a mitochondrial dysfunction – then never again said any such thing. She was later given the job of President of the Vaccine Division at Merk Pharmaceutical, a company that was found criminally negligent for its drug, Vioxx. Was this mere coincidence – or payment for her silence?

Back in 2007, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman helped the government and pharmaceutical industry defeat vaccine-autism claims in the Vaccine Court. However, he now says he subsequently learned that vaccines can, in fact, cause autism in certain susceptible children. He told the government over a decade ago –but his opinion wasn’t accurately conveyed to the Vaccine Court. According to investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has filed a fraud complaint against lawyers from the Department of Justice for this astonishing cover-up.

While there are no large-scale studies that have proven a vaccine-autism link, a recent peer-reviewed study found that vaccinated children were at a 4.2% increased risk for autism – as well as a 4.2% increased risk for ADHD, a 5.2% increased risk for learning disabilities, and a staggering 30-fold risk for allergies.

And in 2014, CDC Whistleblower Dr. William Thompson made the following statement through his lawyer:

“My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998. I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”

In a passionate speech to his fellow members of Congress, Representative Bill Posey (R-FL) urged his colleagues to compel William Thompson to testify in front of the government body about his claims of corruption and a cover-up at the CDC of an alleged vaccine-autism connection.

The CDC blocked his testimony.

The CDC named AIDS an epidemic. It labeled deaths from opiates an epidemic. It has also called the incidence of typhus an epidemic. But the CDC doesn’t want to call the startling increases in autism an epidemic because then it would have to address a problem it isn’t able to fix without admitting its failure to safety test vaccines to safeguard our children’s health.

And the CDC – which owns more than 20 vaccine patents and purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually according to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – would also risk discovery of its alleged efforts to cover up a vaccine-autism connection – a revelation that, if true, would land like an atomic bomb on the landscape of American life.

Beware the media drumbeat that the “science is settled” on this issue. As Dr. William Thompson, the CDC Whistleblower asserts:

“The CDC has put the research ten years behind. Because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism.”

In 2014, MIT computer scientist, Dr. Stephanie Seneff crunched the numbers. She predicted that if the astounding increases in autism continued, 50% of all children in America would have autism by the year 2025. Tragically, the escalating numbers of children being diagnosed with autism every day in America suggest we are on course to realizing this devastating prediction.

The blithe, media-prescribed attitudes toward this imminent catastrophe are held by many – particularly at a time when we are distracted and besieged by roiling political divisions, protests, and a pandemic. But the lifelong struggles and back-breaking costs will not only be carried by families who have children with autism. The massive costs of this coming cataclysm have the potential to collapse our health care and social safety nets.

And that will be a burden borne by us all.

*About the author: Pennel Bird is a writer, educator, musician, husband, and father who currently lives in Glendale, CA. He likes Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain.

Source: This article was published by Liberty Nation

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