Having recently listened to How to end the autism epidemic, I think Chapter 5 is its most important section and so I'm including the whole chapter here, with some comments.
Our daughter struggled with a range of neuro developmental issues. We got called in by her primary school teachers to be told “we think she has ADHD and should see a doctor”. Neither of us believed them, and neither of us had any intention of getting her hooked onto Ritalin. Interesting how you can be comatose to what is really going on but have an instinct whispering to you from the deepest depths of your soul that something is not quite right here.
Our daughter also had a terrible stutter that took several years of therapy to help her get on top of it.
My wife gets all the credit for putting in the work to ask different questions, talked to a good friend of ours, a naturopath, who put her onto the gut-brain connection which she studied, and this led to her changing the way we all ate, removing gluten from the families diet (mainly for our daughter but we all went along) plenty of probiotic gut-repair work and like “magic” our daughter improved.
Here stutter faded away.
Her hyperactivity and inability to focus faded away.
She “normalised” into a healthy, active, able to focus little girl.
What we both now realise is that my wife discovered, by accident, a pathway to healing from vaccine injury. But at the time we had no idea we were in the midst of vaccine injury.
We got lucky. Mainly because my lovely wife went down the rabbit hole and discovered truths hidden from others. It was my turn to return the favour during the GMC.
As Handley says in his book:
Since 2004 there have been eleven groundbreaking discoveries in separate but related scientific fields that, taken together, reveal the cause of autism. Because of this science, we now know that autism is created by immune activation events in the brain during critical phases of brain development, typically by the time a child is thirty-six months old, and that these immune activation events in the brain can be triggered by the aluminum adjuvant in vaccines.
What he does wonderfully in his book is connect a range of dots invisible to most (including “scientists” in the space) and act as a bridge between the dense, inaccessible science, and us the average Billy & Betty’s going about our lives, trying to figure out who to trust and what the hell is going on.
I’m going to trying to further build on the bridge that Handley has built. Here is a simple, “in English” take on Handley’s great summaries:
1. The brain has its own immune system, and it has been woken up, activated, to fight “something”, and this fight is causing inflammation and swelling.
2. Activating the brain’s immune system causes (or to be polite and probabilistic: significantly increases the risk of) autism.
3. The brains immune system produces too much IL-6 and that interferes with synapse formation
4. Immune activation in the child can be triggered by the mother, or by “something else” after birth.
5. Aluminium adjuvants cause immune activation and brain swelling.
6. A particular type of white blood cell, a macrophage, acting as the body’s garbagemen, and doing their job, “clean up” or “gobble up” the aluminum, but they cannot “digest” it, so it stays inside them “the garbage truck” and gets sent around the body, including to the brain.
The garbage men deliver the aluminum to the brain, acting, unwittingly, as Trojan horses.
Watch this amazing clip of “a garbage man” in action.
7. The aluminium causes the immune activation, and because it cannot be “processed” it causes permanent immune activation, inflammation and swelling.
8. Small regular doses of aluminum, as in a 42 (Australia) or 72 (USA) dose vaccine schedule are much more dangerous than a single large dose, because the body reacts to the large dose in a way that “packages” it and keeps it in the arm. It doesn’t put it in the garbage truck and move it around. It will simply “warp” it safely and let it sit on the street to be thrown into a nearby landfill.
9. Aluminium, in the brain, triggers elevated IL-6, which causes autism.
10. One of the vaccines, Hep B, causes increased IL-6, which causes autism.
11. We have discovered large amounts of aluminium deposits in autistic brains.
I now have a much better understanding of what was going on in my daughter’s brain.
If you have Autism, Asperger, or any of the other “spectrum” disorders, or have someone in your family, or any of your friends afflicted with this scourge. This article is for you, to give you a bridge, or a couple of bridges, to better understand what the hell is going on, and even possibly a pathway to some understanding, healing and/or improvement.
If you are planning on having a child or have one and are being led by the nose down the “vaccine schedule” corridor, this article is for you. It will help you understand what your GP or paediatrician don’t know. It will help you better decide how much Russian Roulette you want to play with your newborn.
I watched this documentary a few years back (when I was asleep) and remember it as excellent. I need to go back and watch it again, with a new set of eyes. It’s about the “tobacco playbook” of manufacturing to protect industry. But I think the sleight of hand they use is to also say that the same “dirty playbook” is being used to cast doubt about “truth about climate change”, well we know that The Climate™ is the mother of all industrial lies, so using truth to dismantle that is not the same as concocting “research” that claims that “Lead is Safe”. You have to be constantly on alert for these “tricks”.
Since 2004 there have been eleven groundbreaking discoveries in separate but related scientific fields that, taken together, reveal the cause of autism. Because of this science, we now know that autism is created by immune activation events in the brain during critical phases of brain development, typically by the time a child is thirty-six months old, and that these immune activation events in the brain can be triggered by the aluminum adjuvant in vaccines. While the first of these discoveries occurred in 2004, the critical missing pieces have only fallen into place since 2010. What you’re about to read is arguably the most important chapter in this book; in it I will walk you through each of these eleven discoveries and its significance.
These discoveries have been made and then published in peer-reviewed journals by scientists from all over the world in many different disciplines. Dr. Carlos Pardo-Villamizar of Johns Hopkins is a neurologist. Dr. Christopher Exley of Keele University in England is a professor of bioinorganic chemistry. Dr. Paul Patterson of Caltech was a professor of biological sciences (he passed in 2014). Dr. Romain Gherardi of the Université Paris-Est specializes in neuromuscular diseases. I could go on, but my point is that this is how science works: Scientific understanding rarely comes into focus from a single breakthrough study; more often it comes from a collective and cumulative picture—in this case, of how autism is created and triggered—that emerges over time.
A 2017 article in University Affairs explained how slowly science and medicine can move:
Not many patients would be happy to hear that there’s a lag of about 17 years between when health scientists learn something significant from rigorous research and when health practitioners change their patient care as a result.1
This is such an important point and glad that some put a number on it. The gap between discovering truth and having it widely accepted in “standards of care”. It even feels too short for me, as it depends on how much resource is allocated to “manufacturing doubt” and hunting down the truth tellers and “seeking them out and destroying them where they live…”.
The Mexican Cartels have nothing on these guys.
This time lag between when rigorous research is published and when patient care changes in a clinical setting is really significant—and unbearably frustrating. This is true of all medicine but especially when it comes to autism because there are kids everywhere who urgently need us to understand this science yesterday, not fifteen years from now or whenever the lumbering, bureaucratic (and frankly corrupt) public health establishment gets with the program.
When my son was diagnosed with autism in 2004, nothing I’m about to share with you had yet been discovered. I didn’t even know that the brain had its own, distinct immune system (it does). Even now, most of what I’m about to walk you through is not widely known or recognized, except among the scientists doing the work, many of whom have recently chosen to become publicly vocal (at great risk to their careers). But here’s what I hope everyone will take away from this chapter: Actually, the science now exists—in abundance. It’s up to the adults in the room to read it, understand it, and change these devastating policies as soon as possible in order to end the autism epidemic.
So what are the eleven key discoveries? Read on:
Discovery #1: In 2004 Dr. Carlos Pardo-Villamizar at Johns Hopkins University discovers that autism brains are permanently inflamed.
In late 2004 the press release from Johns Hopkins proclaimed, “Brain’s Immune System Triggered in Autism.”2 Titled “Neuroglial Activation and Neuroinflammation in the Brain of Patients with Autism,”3 Dr. Pardo- Villamizar’s research demonstrated “an active neuroinflammatory process” in the brains of people with autism, in what was the first time scientists looked at the actual brains of people with autism.
Dr. Paul Patterson of Caltech, the scientist behind Discovery #2, provided one of the best explanations for the importance of Dr. Pardo-Villamizar’s work:
There is also very striking evidence of immune dysregulation in the brain itself.… A group led by Carlos Pardo at Johns Hopkins found what they’re calling a “neural inflammation” in postmortem examination of brains of patients with autism who died between the ages of eight and 44 years. But these people weren’t infected—they died of such things as drowning or heart attacks. The study found that the microglial cells, which act as the brain’s own immune system, were activated. The study also found amazing increases of certain cytokines in the brain, and of others in the cerebro-spinal fluid. This is a landmark paper, in my opinion. It presents the first evidence that there’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people. It’s a subclinical state, because there’s no overt infection. But it’s there.4
This passage is so important, I want to walk you through it in a bit more detail. We learn, for the first time, that these autism brains have an immune system in a permanent, active state. It also mentions, for the first time, the discovery that certain “cytokines” are highly elevated. Cytokines are small proteins released by the immune system to tell other cells how to behave. They are also biomarkers for inflammation. Dr. Pardo-Villamizar didn’t know it yet, but scientists would soon identify certain cytokines that are clear markers for immune activation that all brains with autism seem to share.
I’ve been haunted by Dr. Patterson’s quote ever since I first read it, because of this one line: “There’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.”
I can’t help but think, “Is this what my son is experiencing?” His head always seems to hurt. Sometimes he slaps himself in the head, he often seeks head pressure, seemingly to alleviate discomfort. Is his brain permanently swollen and in a state of subclinical infection? And if it is, how in the world did it get that way? What created this condition? What triggered it? And of course, how do I reduce the inflammation and help him feel better?
Dr. Pardo-Villamizar and colleagues were the first to find this “microglial activation” in the brains of children with autism, and this finding has now been replicated many times. As just one example, a study from Japan in 2013
—“Microglial Activation in Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder” — found the same thing:
In conclusion, the present PET measurements revealed marked activation of microglia in multiple brain regions of young adults with ASD. The results strongly support the contention that immune abnormalities contribute to the etiology of ASD.5
At the time Dr. Pardo-Villamizar and his colleagues weren’t sure why the brains were inflamed; they just knew they were:
These findings reinforce the theory that immune response in the brain is involved in autism, although it is not yet clear whether the inflammation is a consequence of disease or a cause of it, or both.6
Soon enough, through ten additional discoveries, that answer has become clear.
In English:
The brain has its own immune system, and it has been woken up, activated, to fight “something”, and this fight is causing inflammation and swelling.
Discovery #2: In 2005 Dr. Paul Patterson at the California Institute of Technology discovers that immune activation events lead to autism.
Dr. Patterson credits Dr. Pardo-Villamizar’s 2005 paper with forcing him to research what, exactly, causes a brain to develop autism. Over the next nine years, until his passing in 2014, Dr. Patterson would develop a robust body of work that today has created scientific certainty: Immune activation events in the brain at critical times of brain development lead to autism. As his obituary explained:
[His] research focused on interactions between the nervous and immune systems—a connection that was not universally acknowledged in the early days of neuroscience.… He became intrigued by epidemiological studies that had linked a severe viral or bacterial infection during pregnancy with the increased risk of a woman’s giving birth to a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder such as schizophrenia or autism. Patterson and his coworkers reproduced this human effect in mice using a viral mimic that triggers an infection-like immune response in the mother, producing in the offspring the core behavioral symptoms associated with autism and schizophrenia.7
In 2006 Dr. Patterson introduced the complex interaction between the immune system and neurodevelopment through an article in the journal Engineering & Science, titled “Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism.”8 This is the foundational work for the modern understanding of how autism is triggered, and it’s widely accepted today by leading scientists. Dr. Patterson explained his discovery in lay terms:
As we learn more about the connections between the brain and the immune system, we find that these seemingly independent networks of cells are, in fact, continually talking to each other. As an adult, the activation of your immune system causes many striking changes in your behavior—increased sleep, loss of appetite, less social interaction—and, of course, headaches. Conversely, stress in your life (as perceived by your brain) can influence immune function—the brain regulates immune organs, such as the spleen, via the autonomic nervous system. Recent evidence shows that this brain- immune conversation actually starts during the development of the embryo, where the state of the mother’s immune system can alter the growth of cells in the fetal brain. As we shall see, such alterations can lead to an increased risk of schizophrenia or autism in the offspring.
If a pregnant mother becomes sick (virus, bacteria) while pregnant—an event that “activates” her immune system—that activation can impact the neurodevelopment of the fetus, potentially leading to neurological problems after birth. This is where the term “immune activation event” comes from, and it’s an immune activation event that can lead to autism. Dr. Patterson’s work was largely focused on pregnant mothers, and what he termed “Maternal Immune Activation.” In his 2006 seminal paper, Dr. Patterson asked a foreboding question; he was well aware of where the science might lead in the next few years:
Should we really be promoting universal maternal vaccination? … Remember that double-stranded RNA experiment—we activated the immune system, and it caused all these downstream effects on the fetus. And what does a vaccination do? It activates the immune system. That’s the point of vaccination. In practice, not all pregnant women receive flu shots, and I think that universal vaccination of pregnant women could get us into a whole new set of problems.
It's interesting to read this through the GMC and mRNA jab lens.
We jabbed pregnant women all over the world and in so doing turned them into “antigen factories” and sure as hell activated their immune systems. Have we further accelerated immune activation in babies’ brains, and ramped up autism rates?
Dr. Patterson tied the immune system and brain together in ways previously not recognized. Even better? His theories have since been replicated many times. In 2012 Dr. Patterson and his colleagues produced a paper—“Maternal Immune Activation Yields Offspring Displaying Mouse Versions of the Three Core Symptoms of Autism”—which was more autism specific and reached a similar conclusion:
These results indicate that MIA yields male offspring with deficient social and communicative behavior, as well as high levels of repetitive behaviors, all of which are hallmarks of autism.9
In 2014 the MIND Institute at UC Davis published “Activation of the Maternal Immune System during Pregnancy Alters Behavioral Development of Rhesus Monkey Offspring.”10 This study took Dr. Patterson’s work in mice and replicated it in monkeys. Why do monkeys matter? The study authors explained:
Maternal infection during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia and autism in the offspring. Supporting this correlation, experimentally activating the maternal immune system during pregnancy in rodents produces offspring with abnormal brain and behavioral development. We have developed a nonhuman primate model to bridge the gap between clinical populations and rodent models of maternal immune activation (MIA).
The MIND Institute scientists saw results similar to what had been found in mice:
In this rhesus monkey model, MIA yields offspring with abnormal repetitive behaviors, communication, and social interactions. These results extended the findings in rodent MIA models to more human- like behaviors resembling those in both autism and schizophrenia.
In English:
Activating the brain’s immune system causes (or to be polite and probabilistic: significantly increases the risk of) autism.
Discovery #3: The cytokine interleukin-6 is the key biomarker for immune activation.
If you’re an autism parent, you may have heard the expression “cytokine storm.” In 2006 Dr. Patterson and his colleagues were speculating that the immune system’s cytokines, which are cell modulators released during times of infection, might be responsible for altering the brain development of the fetus during gestation:
Cytokines are produced by the white blood cells, and their levels in the blood increase when we get an infection.… We think that maternal immune activation alters brain circuits.… There’s that permanent, subclinical, altered immune state in the autistic brain— those increased cytokine levels.… Are they [cytokines] actually interacting with the brain in an ongoing fashion, with consequences visible in the patients’ behavior? I favor [the cytokine] hypothesis.
Just a year after Dr. Patterson published his article about maternal immune activation (MIA) in 2006, he and his colleagues produced the first study that presented their understanding of cytokines at a more detailed level. Knowing that MIA was producing offspring with neurological disorders (in their mouse model), they wanted to find out what—exactly WHAT—was causing the altered brain development. They hypothesized it was a cytokine (there are many), but which one? As Patterson and his colleagues noted, “however, the mechanism by which MIA causes long-term behavioral deficits in the offspring is unknown”— that is, until they discovered it:
Here we show that the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) is critical for mediating the behavioral and transcriptional changes in the offspring. A single maternal injection of IL-6 on day 12.5 of mouse pregnancy causes prepulse inhibition (PPI) and latent inhibition (LI) deficits in the adult offspring.11
Patterson and his colleagues injected pregnant mice with a specific cytokine —interleukin-6 (IL-6)— and saw changes in the neurology of their offspring. Other studies support Dr. Patterson’s findings. For example, “Brain IL-6 Elevation Causes Neuronal Circuitry Imbalances and Mediates Autism-Like Behaviors ” was published in the journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta in 2012:
In summary, our study supports a critical role of IL-6 elevation in modulating autism-like behaviors through impairments on synapse formation, dendritic spine development, as well as on neuronal circuit balance. These findings suggest that manipulation of IL-6 may be a promising avenue for therapeutic interventions.12
What’s the takeaway of these first three discoveries? We now know with certainty that immune activation events in the brain, at critical moments of brain development, can create autism. We also know that IL-6, a cytokine of the brain’s immune system, is a biomarker for immune activation, meaning that when the IL-6 level is elevated, we know immune activation is present.
In English:
The brains immune system produces too much IL-6 and that interferes with synapse formation
Discovery #4: Immune activation can take place after birth.
Dr. Patterson’s important work remained focused on immune activation events that happened during gestation, but a recent study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology in January 2018 from Harvard affiliate McLean Hospital showed that immune activation events after birth can trigger conditions of autism, too:
While previous research in laboratory animals has established that immune activation during critical prenatal (before birth) developmental periods can later produce the core features of ASD, including decreased social interaction, aberrant communication, and increased repetitive behavior, we wanted to evaluate whether postnatal (during infancy) immune activation could also produce other symptom clusters that are often seen in ASD and related conditions. Our findings demonstrate that early-life immune activation can lead to long-lasting physiologic perturbations that resemble medical comorbidities often seen in ASD and other neuropsychiatric conditions.13
The primary limitation of Dr. Patterson’s pioneering work on immune activation is that he never did any studies like this one to bridge the divide between a child in gestation and a child during infancy. If immune activation events after birth could also trigger the development of autism, then something besides the mother would have to trigger the immune activation.
Vaccine Papers, a website written and maintained by scientists who think vaccines should be held to the same scientific standards as other drugs, addresses this topic of postnatal immune activation:
Diverse evidence indicates that the brain can be adversely affected by postnatal immune activation. Postnatal immune activation experiments, human case reports, and consideration of brain development timelines suggest that the human brain is vulnerable to immune activation injury for years after birth.
So far, the science has shown us how autism can be created by an immune activation event at a critical phase of brain development. But what can cause, or trigger that immune activation event? We know that a maternal infection can cause an immune activation event; Dr. Patterson proved this. But what about an illness or infection after a child is born? Could, for example, a bout of the flu trigger autism? And if so, how would that explain the permanent, ongoing immune system activation of the brains of people with autism that Dr. Pardo- Villamizar discovered? Are vaccines actually important to prevent autism if, in fact, a childhood infection would be enough to trigger an immune activation event and create autism? To answer these questions, we turn to the work of a researcher in Canada named Christopher Shaw who, almost by accident, opened the door in 2009, after which a cascade of subsequent research followed.
In English:
Immune activation in the child can be triggered by the mother, or by “something else” after birth.
Discovery #5: Aluminum adjuvant in vaccines produces behavior and motor function deficits.
Dr. Christopher Shaw of the University of British Columbia in Canada found himself faced with a simple question that science could help answer: Were vaccines causing Gulf War syndrome in Canadian soldiers? His laboratory became the first one to ever test the aluminum used in vaccines in a biological setting, in a study published in 2009.14
Shaw has a starring role in Uninformed Consent. Listening to him was one of the highlights on the documentary for me.
Dr. Shaw and his colleagues “examined the potential toxicity of aluminum hydroxide in male, outbred CD-1 mice injected subcutaneously in two equivalent-to-human doses.” As he recounts:
We did the really simple experiment of taking the same stuff out of the vaccines, the aluminum hydroxide, and injecting it into mice, into the muscles, to see what would happen if we tried to mimic the vaccine schedule.15
Dr. Shaw’s findings were troubling, and they demonstrated neurological problems in mice who received the aluminum injections after they were born:
We were quite surprised to see how rapidly the behavioral symptoms emerged. They showed not only behavioral deficits of motor function but they ultimately showed cognitive deficits as well. Once we sacrificed the animals and started looking inside their brains and spinal cords, we found massive damage to motor neurons.
Once Dr. Shaw realized how toxic aluminum adjuvant appeared to be to the neurological system of the mice, an obvious question emerged: What about the aluminum adjuvant in all of the pediatric vaccines?
Aluminum compounds (both Al hydroxide and Al phosphate) are currently used as adjuvants in the hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTaP, Tdap), Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), human papillomavirus (HPV), and pneumococcus (PCV) vaccines, which are all part of the childhood schedule for vaccines.
The amount of aluminum being injected into children’s bodies skyrocketed beginning in the early 1990s for two reasons: (1) more vaccines were added to the schedule and (2) the number of kids receiving all vaccines rose (from 50 to 60 percent in the mid-1980s to over 90 percent today). A fully vaccinated child in the mid-1980s would have been injected with 1,250 micrograms of aluminum by his eighteen-month birthday. A fully vaccinated child today is injected with 4,925 micrograms of aluminum, a near quadrupling.
Aluminum makes most vaccines “work.” It’s not the weakened strain of the hepatitis B virus (called the antigen), for example, that provokes an immune response when a child receives the hepatitis B vaccine. It’s the aluminum adjuvant that provokes the immune response.
This is a point that is poorly understood.
Vaccine don’t work without the heavy metals, the “adjuvants”, but WHY is never properly explained, so here goes, in English.
When you put a dead or hobbled (attenuated) virus into the body, your immune system is NOT STUPID. It allocates resource only when it needs to, and it knows that this new biological matter (the dead or disabled virus) is nothing to really be worried about so it either doesn’t go to work or barely lifts a finger to produce antibodies. Seeing that “antibody production” is the hallmark of a “working vaccine” THEY end up loading the body with heavy metal adjuvants that make the immune system GO CRAZY. Think of the immune system in a crazed like state, as if it was “on ice”. It is now running around and “attacking” all sorts of things and “producing antibodies” to things it would not have bothered with in it “not crazed” state.
So, now they can measure “increased antibodies” and say “see, the vaccines work” without every telling you how they conned the immune system into “working”.
Think of the “adjuvants” as ICE and think of your immune system as a crazed being running around with a machete attacking anything it “perceives as a threat”.
It’s simply one huge sophisticated and most glorious (for industry) con.
When you understand aluminum’s role and what a vaccine adjuvant is intended to do, the next question becomes obvious: Could an ingredient in vaccines whose purpose is to hyperstimulate the immune system trigger immune activation events in the brain at critical points during brain development?”
Figure 5.1. How Vaccination Corresponds to Brain Development. Arrows indicate vaccines given at 0, 2, 4, 6, 12, and 15–18 months. Data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chart adapted from Semple et al., “Brain Development in Rodents and Humans: Identifying Benchmarks of Maturation and Vulnerability to Injury Across Species,” Progress in Neurobiology, 106/107 (July–August 2013): 1–16.
One of the charts that woke me up to how risky vaccinating infants can be is shown in figure 5.1 and illustrates how the timing of the infant vaccination schedule matches up to critical phases of brain development. As you can see, an infant’s brain continues to develop long after a child is born, and vaccines are injected during many of the most critical phases. Remember how worried Dr. Patterson was about vaccinating pregnant women with the flu shot? Well, as of today, the vaccination rate for pregnant women with the flu shot is only 35 percent.16 And most pregnant women who do receive vaccines while pregnant only get two vaccines: flu and DTaP. Infants, on the other hand, receive twenty different vaccines by their first birthday, and vaccination rates in the United States are above 90 percent. If vaccinating pregnant women might produce some unintended immune activation, vaccinating infants still undergoing brain development might in fact be catastrophic.
It’s important to understand that aluminum was grandfathered into pediatric vaccines without safety testing. You might want to read that again. Injecting aluminum has never been tested in the pediatric population. Dr. Shaw and his colleague, Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic, addressed this omission in a 2011 study they published in Current Medicinal Chemistry titled, “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are They Safe?”17 They wrote:
Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted. Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.
In 2012 Drs. Shaw and Tomljenovic published another paper, “Mechanisms of Aluminum Adjuvant Toxicity and Autoimmunity in Pediatric Populations,” in which they expressed grave concerns about the limited understanding of aluminum adjuvants’ toxicity:
It is somewhat surprising to find that in spite of over 80 years of use, the safety of Al adjuvants continues to rest on assumptions rather than scientific evidence. For example, nothing is known about the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Al adjuvants in infants and children.… Yet, in spite of these observations children continue regularly to be exposed to much higher levels of Al adjuvants than adults, via routine childhood vaccination programmes.18
The two scientists called for an urgent reevaluation of the safety profile of aluminum adjuvant–containing vaccines:
However, the existing data (or lack thereof) raise questions on whether the current vaccines aimed at pediatric populations can be accepted as having adequate safety profiles. Because infants and children represent those who may be most at risk for complications following vaccination, a more rigorous evaluation of potential vaccine-related adverse health impacts in pediatric populations than what has been provided to date is urgently needed.
In English:
Aluminium adjuvants cause immune activation and brain swelling.
Discovery #6: Aluminum adjuvant in vaccines, injected into the body, can be carried to the brain by macrophages.
In 2013 French scientists Drs. Romain Gherardi and Josette Cadusseau from the Université Paris-Est demonstrated that aluminum adjuvant, when injected into the body of a mouse, ended up in the brain one year later, in a study titled, “Slow CCL2-Dependent Translocation of Biopersistent Particles from Muscle to Brain.” The study authors expressed serious concerns about this very new discovery:
However, continuously escalating doses of this poorly biodegradable adjuvant in the population may become insidiously unsafe, especially in the case of overimmunization or immature/altered blood brain barrier.19
“Insidiously unsafe” should cause any parent worry. Unfortunately, the very thing they express real concern about—escalating doses—is exactly what has been happening to children since the early 1990s, when the immunization schedule in the United States and all over the world more than tripled, largely due to new vaccines being introduced that contain aluminum adjuvant.
There was another nuance to this French discovery that’s very important to understand. CCL-2 is a cytokine that “recruits monocytes, memory T cells, and dendritic cells to the sites of inflammation produced by either tissue injury or infection.”20 In lay terms CCL-2 sounds an alarm to the immune system, and “macrophages” come running. Macrophages are the immune system’s garbagemen, and they travel the body eating up debris, infections, and so on. When aluminum adjuvant enters the body, it’s not recognized by the body because it’s a foreign, man-made substance. The macrophages grab it, but they don’t have the means to eliminate it, so they carry it, and bring it to soft tissue places in the body, like the brain. And guess what the brain’s immune system does when it encounters the aluminum, a foreign substance it doesn’t recognize? It reacts. Said differently, it activates.
In English:
A particular type of white blood cell, a macrophage, acting as the body’s garbagemen, and doing their job, “clean up” or “gobble up” the aluminum, but they cannot “digest” it, so it stays inside them “the garbage truck” and gets sent around the body, including to the brain.
The garbage men deliver the aluminum to the brain, acting, unwittingly, as Trojan horses.
Watch this amazing clip of “a garbage man” in action.
Discovery #7: Aluminum adjuvant stays in the brain for much longer than anyone realized.
In 2015 another study from the same group of scientists at the Université Paris- Est, “Biopersistence and Brain Translocation of Aluminum Adjuvants of Vaccines,” showed that aluminum adjuvant slowly makes its way to the brain, where it then stays, possibly forever. 21
The French scientists explained that aluminum adjuvant can generate a long- term immune response because of its “biopersistence,” which basically means our body has no ability to rid itself of aluminum adjuvant, because it’s a man- made substance we have no natural designs to eliminate:
Thus alum and other poorly biodegradable materials taken up at the periphery by phagocytes circulate in the lymphatic and blood circulation and can enter the brain using a Trojan horse mechanism similar to that used by infectious particles. Previous experiments have shown that alum administration can cause CNS dysfunction and damage, casting doubts on the exact level of alum safety.
I think this is a moment worth tying something together that we learned a while back. Remember Dr. Paul Patterson? He said, “There’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.” What if the brain’s immune system is just sitting there, in a constant battle with the aluminum, that it doesn’t know how to get out of the body? What if that’s what’s causing the inflammation Dr. Pardo-Villamizar talked about back in 2005?
In English:
The aluminium causes the immune activation, and because it cannot be “processed” it causes permanent immune activation, inflammation and swelling.
Discovery #8: Small Doses of Aluminum Adjuvant Are Actually More Dangerous.
In the fall of 2016, an important and revealing study done on aluminum adjuvant, “Non-linear Dose-Response of Aluminium Hydroxide Adjuvant Particles: Selective Low Dose Neurotoxicity,” provided more bad news, and insight.22 This study’s conclusions revolutionized our understanding of aluminum adjuvant. From the journal Toxicology the French study authors were very concerned about the widespread use of aluminum adjuvant:
Concerns about its [aluminum adjuvant’s] safety emerged following recognition of its unexpectedly long-lasting biopersistence within immune cells in some individuals, and reports of chronic fatigue syndrome, cognitive dysfunction, myalgia, dysautonomia and autoimmune/inflammatory features temporally linked to multiple Al- containing vaccine administrations.
They also discovered, through mouse models, an alarming and unique characteristic of aluminum adjuvant: Low, consistent doses were more neurotoxic than a single bolus (large) dose:
We conclude that Alhydrogel [aluminum adjuvant] injected at low dose in mouse muscle may selectively induce long-term Al cerebral accumulation and neurotoxic effects. To explain this unexpected result, an avenue that could be explored in the future relates to the adjuvant size since the injected suspensions corresponding to the lowest dose, but not to the highest doses, exclusively contained small agglomerates in the bacteria-size range known to favour capture and, presumably, transportation by monocyte-lineage cells. In any event, the view that Alhydrogel neurotoxicity obeys “the dose makes the poison” rule of classical chemical toxicity appears overly simplistic.
Vaccine Papers provides more insight:
Remarkably, the study found that the lowest dosage (200 mcg/Kg) was the most toxic! For many outcomes, the 400 and 800 mcg/Kg dosages had no observable adverse effects, but the 200 mcg/Kg dosage did. The low toxicity of the higher dosages appears to be a consequence of dosage-dependent inflammation at the injection site. The high dosages caused intense inflammation at the injection site, forming “granulomas.” The 200 mcg/Kg dosage did not produce granulomas.… This suggests that it is more dangerous and harmful to administer numerous small injections of Al adjuvant, compared to a large single injection capable of inducing a granuloma.
The French scientists also disputed the way the FDA and CDC currently think about aluminum adjuvant toxicity, basically saying that the current approach is wrong: “As a possible consequence, comparing vaccine adjuvant exposure to other non-relevant aluminium exposures, e.g. soluble aluminium and other routes of exposure, may not represent valid approaches.”
The French scientists finished with a conclusion that all parents should find troubling: “In the context of massive development of vaccine-based strategies worldwide, the present study may suggest that aluminium adjuvant toxicokinetics and safety require reevaluation.”
This conclusion raises an obvious question: How is the safety of aluminum calibrated by the FDA and CDC for use in pediatric vaccines? It’s hard to believe, but the entire basis for declaring that aluminum adjuvant can be safely injected into the bodies of newborns is based on a single study published by a single FDA scientist, Dr. Robert J. Mitkus, in 2011.23 “Updated Aluminum Pharmacokinetics Following Infant Exposures through Diet and Vaccination” appears to be a reassuring response to any concerns parents might have, which Dr. Mitkus directly addresses in the study’s abstract:
Because concerns have been expressed by the public that aluminum in vaccines may pose a risk to infants, we developed an up-to-date analysis of the safety of aluminum adjuvants.
What would be lost on the average layperson is that the only biological science Dr. Mitkus considered in making his safety assessment was a single study that infused (rather than injected) aluminum citrate (rather than aluminum hydroxide) into adults (rather than babies). It’s hard to put this seemingly minor detail in proper context. In no other drug on the planet (except for vaccines) would safety standards ever be determined without using the actual product (aluminum hydroxide) administered in the proper way (intramuscular injection), into the proper patient population (infants).
Vaccine Papers provides additional perspective on Dr. Mitkus’s study:
Mitkus 2011 is the best scientific evidence vaccine promoters have for defending Al adjuvant safety. It is fatally flawed and incredibly bad. It is not based on any toxicity experiments with actual Al adjuvant. It ignores key studies that contradict the assumptions it is based on.… Aluminum adjuvant nanoparticles are very different from dissolved aluminum ions. Consequently, the only scientifically- valid way to establish the safety of injected aluminum adjuvant, is by experiments with injected aluminum adjuvant. Studies of ingested, soluble aluminum salts cannot establish the safety of Al adjuvant. Models of only dissolved aluminum cannot be used to determine the toxicity of the particles. Ignoring the toxicity of Al adjuvant particles is scientifically indefensible. Why do the vaccine promoters rely on oral ingestion studies to defend Al adjuvant safety? It is because they have no experimental research showing that injecting Al adjuvant is safe! They are empty-handed.
In early 2018 a paper published in the prestigious Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry took dead aim at the safety standards used for vaccine aluminum adjuvant. Titled, “Critical Analysis of Reference Studies on the Toxicokinetics of Aluminum-Based Adjuvants,” the paper addressed the limitations of studies, in particular Dr. Mitkus’s, that both the FDA and the CDC have relied on to declare vaccine aluminum “safe” to be injected into children.24 The study authors, from France and the U.K., included most of the leading experts in the world on the neurotoxicity of aluminum, including Dr. Romain Gherardi, Dr. Guillemette Crepeaux, and Dr. Christopher Exley. Their criticism was incisive:
To date, aluminum adjuvants per se have, perhaps surprisingly, not been the subject of any official experimental investigation, and this being in spite of the well-established neurotoxicity of aluminum.
The study authors also mention a laundry list of countries that have produced studies implicating aluminum-containing vaccines in chronic illness:
The occurrence of myalgia and arthralgia, chronic fatigue and neurological disorders following multiple injections of aluminum- containing vaccines against hepatitis B, tetanus and human papilloma virus (HPV) has been reported in many countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, and USA.
The gist of their paper? None of the studies done to date on aluminum safety actually tell us if aluminum is, in fact, safe. All the study authors of this paper have done their own biological studies of aluminum adjuvant and found it to be highly neurotoxic. Their conclusion:
Both paucity and serious weaknesses of reference studies strongly suggest that novel experimental studies of Al adjuvants toxicokinetics should be performed on the long-term, including both neonatal and adult exposures, to ensure their safety and restore population confidence in Al-containing vaccines.
Words like “paucity” and “serious weaknesses” are not words you want to hear when you are the CDC or the FDA and your job is to certify that something is safe when it appears that’s not remotely true. Then again, “paucity” and “serious weakness” are not words you want to hear when you are a parent and your job is to protect the life of your child.
In English:
Small regular doses of aluminum, as in a 42 (Australia) or 72 (USA) dose vaccine schedule are much more dangerous than a single large dose, because the body reacts to the large dose in a way that “packages” it and keeps it in the arm. It doesn’t put it in the garbage truck and move it around. It will simply “warp” it safely and let it sit on the street to be thrown into a nearby landfill.
Discovery #9: Aluminum causes immune activation in the brain.
A study from the Middle East published in 2015 provides a critical bridge between aluminum adjuvant and IL-6, which is the cytokine released during an immune activation event. In this case, scientists were using aluminum to induce Alzheimer’s in rats, which they appear to have done successfully, showing that aluminum caused a fourfold increase in IL-6:
The results also showed that aluminum administration increased the hippocampus pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-α by 3.8-fold, IL-6 by 4-fold, and iNOS by 3.8-fold compared to the normal control group.25
This study is critical in connecting several discoveries together. We know immune activation events in the brain can trigger autism. We know aluminum is highly neurotoxic and poorly studied, but we need clear evidence that aluminum can—by itself—trigger an immune activation event. As you already learned, one of the key biomarkers of an immune activation event is the cytokine IL-6, which this study showed was triggered by aluminum. Moreover, this injected aluminum triggered IL-6 in the brains of the rats, which means the aluminum found its way through the body and into the brain, which we already knew it would do.
In English:
Aluminium, in the brain, triggers elevated IL-6, which causes autism.
Discovery #10: Hepatitis B vaccine induces IL-6 in postnatal rats.
When this paper was published in China, it didn’t make national news or create a reaction from the CDC, even though it should have. Some of it was probably the name, quite a mouthful: “Neonatal Vaccination with Bacillus Calmette–Guérin and Hepatitis B Vaccines Modulates Hippocampal Synaptic Plasticity in Rats.” And the scientists weren’t looking to prove vaccines can trigger autism, even though they did. You had to appreciate all of Patterson’s work. You had to understand the IL-6 connection to immune activation and to autism. You had to appreciate the new insights about aluminum adjuvant toxicity, the low dose implications, and that aluminum adjuvant was ending up in the brain. And you had to read a paper from China that covered a lot of other ground.26 Vaccine Papers has written extensively about this study:
This is the first study to test the effects of immune activation by vaccination on brain development. All other studies of immune activation have used essentially pathological conditions that mimic infection and induce a strong fever.… This 2016 study demonstrates that vaccines can affect brain development via immune activation. Hence, the immune activation experiments are relevant to vaccines. … The hep B vaccine increased IL-6 in the hippocampus (the only brain region analyzed for cytokines).
And the Vaccine Papers scientists continue, explaining the timing of the injury to the rats vaccinated with the Hep B vaccine:
An important finding in the rat BCG/Hep B study is that many of the effects of hep B vaccine did not appear until age 8 weeks. This finding undermines claims of vaccine safety, which are almost always based on short-term outcomes of a few days or weeks. Furthermore, 8 weeks is a long time in rats. 8-week old rats are almost fully mature adults. This suggests that adverse effects of vaccines may take years or decades to appear in humans. This is consistent with what is known about immune activation and schizophrenia. Immune activation in the fetus can cause schizophrenia 20–30 years later.
This study is extraordinary. There were three different groups of rats: rats receiving a BCG vaccine (not given in the United States), rats receiving the hepatitis B vaccine (given on day one of life in the United States), and a control group with no vaccine. The BCG vaccine does not contain aluminum adjuvant, and the impact on the rats’ brains from BCG was actually positive! The hep B vaccine rats, however, showed the kind of immune activation event we are seeing in autism (high IL-6). This is biological proof of the link between a vaccine given to a postnatal animal inducing an immune activation event, including the cytokine marker for autism, IL-6. A scientific first.
In late 2016 the same Chinese scientists replicated their own work, this time focusing exclusively on the biological impact of the hepatitis B vaccine in a paper titled, “Neonatal Hepatitis B Vaccination Impaired the Behavior and Neurogenesis of Mice Transiently in Early Adulthood.” Their results were confirmatory and very disturbing, including bringing up the risk of autism explicitly: “This work reveals for the first time that early HBV vaccination induces impairments in behavior and hippocampal neurogenesis. This work provides innovative data supporting the long suspected potential association of HBV with certain neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism and multiple sclerosis.”27
In English
One of the vaccines, Hep B, causes increased IL-6, which causes autism.
Discovery #11: High Levels of Aluminum Are Uniquely Located in Brain Tissue of People with Autism.
In early December 2017 Dr. Christopher Exley of Keele University in England and his colleagues published a paper that for the first time looked at the brain tissue of subjects with autism to determine the level of aluminum found within it.28 With the most complete database of aluminum levels in human brains in the world (over one hundred), Professor Exley and his colleagues were in a great position to put the results of their new study in proper context, as Professor Exley said in explaining the groundbreaking results:
While the aluminium content of each of the 5 brains [of people with autism] was shockingly high it was the location of the aluminium in the brain tissue which served as the standout observation.… The new evidence strongly suggests that aluminium is entering the brain in ASD via pro-inflammatory cells which have become loaded up with aluminium in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminium adjuvants.29
Dr. Exley’s quote includes a reference to “monocytes at injection sites” and an interaction between monocytes and aluminum that is critical to appreciate. A “monocyte” is a type of white blood cell. One form of monocyte is a “macrophage,” which we already discussed. Dr. Exley is saying that macrophages are escorting aluminum injected from a vaccine directly into the brain. The location of the aluminum within the autism brains is the most important finding of Exley’s study, because it serves as a marker for the route the aluminum took to get to the brain. In a private email to the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Exley explained that the location of aluminum in the brain proved to him “that aluminium adjuvant could be transported to the brain from a vaccine injection site.” In a blog post, Dr. Exley expanded on that same point:
I have seen the same cells that we will see at an injection site [from vaccination] carrying a cargo of aluminum into the brain tissue of individuals who died with autism.
In English:
We have discovered large amounts of aluminium deposits in autistic brains.
Eleven Discoveries Light a Clear Path to Autism
Figure 5.2 shows in simple terms how aluminum adjuvant can trigger autism, as demonstrated by the published science. Science shows that autism is caused by an immune activation event. The adjuvant in vaccines—aluminum adjuvant— can activate the brain’s immune system and is more neurotoxic than previously realized. Aluminum can trigger IL-6, the key cytokine implicated in autism. Chinese scientists—for the first time anywhere in the world—used a vaccine to trigger an immune activation event and recorded elevated levels of IL-6 in rats. And British scientists discovered extraordinarily high levels of aluminum in the brains of people with autism, particularly inside cells, the macrophages, that served to transport the aluminum into the brain from the injection site.
Figure 5.2. How Aluminum Adjuvant Can Trigger Autism. Courtesy of the Vaccine Papers.
I can’t help but tie everything I read and see here to my own son’s experience. Born in 2002, my son seemed to get sicker with every vaccine appointment, and his head always seemed to be hurting. And with each vaccine appointment, unusual behaviors and odd movements began to appear. A really sad reminder of this reality appeared in a study published in 2017 in Nature that described how children with autism developed enlarged foreheads:
Brain enlargement has been observed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the timing of this phenomenon, and the relationship between ASD and the appearance of behavioural symptoms, are unknown. Retrospective head circumference and longitudinal brain volume studies of two-year olds followed up at four years of age have provided evidence that increased brain volume may emerge early in development.30
Wouldn’t the above theory about how autism is triggered do a pretty good job of explaining why these children have large (swollen) heads? As you know, the immune activation event leads to what Dr. Patterson called “an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.” And guess what: Permanent immune system activation means inflammation … which would lead to a “large brain” and a “swollen forehead.” Is that why children with autism are known to head bang? Perhaps you would, too, if your brain was in a state of permanent inflammation.
Aluminum’s newly discovered role in triggering immune activation events in the brain changes everything about the science of vaccines and autism, because it establishes a clear biological basis for how a vaccine can cause autism. In late 2017 Dr. Exley expressed the risk he was taking by talking so publicly about the vaccine-autism connection with some dark humor:
I am very prudent. I only put my neck on the guillotine when it is absolutely necessary. And that time is now.31
What will it take for our health authorities to stand up and face the truth? We have new, credible biological science showing us that we are deliberately damaging our babies, and likely creating the autism epidemic. As Dr. Christopher Exley said:
We need to think carefully, is this vaccine a life-saving vaccine or not? If it isn’t, don’t have it with an aluminum adjuvant.32
Why a Biological Basis Matters
In 1953 Adele B. Croninger, working out of her research laboratory located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, painted the fated white mice three times a week with a liquid solution of cigarette tar. In her recollection of the experiment she recalled that “after about eight months, these animals first lost the hair on the painted area and then little warts, or papilloma as we call them, appeared … and in the 11th month of painting, we had our first cancer.”33 Ms. Croninger’s meticulous laboratory work represented a landmark moment in science. From this experiment with mice, the first domino fell, and the result was the ultimate legal, marketing, and moral censure of the most powerful industry on earth at the time, Big Tobacco.
Ms. Croninger’s 1953 study was published in the journal Cancer Research.34 The title of the paper foreshadowed its catastrophic conclusions, “Experimental Production of Carcinoma with Cigarette Tar.” In the study, eighty-one mice were painted with the cigarette tar and 59 percent developed papillomas [tumors], while 44 percent developed skin cancer. Ms. Croninger and her study authors noted that “it is not known which fraction or fractions in tobacco tars are carcinogenic,” but they felt further study in this area was “urgent” in the hopes that it might promote “some practical aspects of cancer prevention.”
Ms. Croninger’s work is an excellent example of biological science, a scientific approach, whereby a clear cause-and-effect relationship can be established between a potentially toxic substance (tobacco tar) and a laboratory animal. Her 1953 study generated panic within the tobacco industry because the results were unassailable: Tobacco tar and cancer were linked.
In autism science we now have our own mice studies, most published since 2010, and they are demonstrating exactly how vaccines can trigger autism. Unlike bogus epidemiological studies you read about in part 1 where very narrow components of the vaccine schedule (MMR, thimerosal) are analyzed with population data that can be manipulated, biological science has a much harder time hiding from the truth.
Critically, I want to address the MMR vaccine for a moment, for two reasons. First, many parents I know blame the MMR vaccine appointment as the one where their child slipped into autism. Second, the MMR vaccine, because it’s a live virus vaccine, does not contain aluminum adjuvant. How could this be? In many ways, MMR actually makes the aluminum adjuvant story more airtight. MMR, using live viruses, provokes a very strong response from the immune system and triggers the release of a macrophage transport mechanism known as MCP-1. As Vaccine Papers explains:
When MCP-1 is produced by microglia, macrophages from around the body travel into the brain.… “MCP” stands for “macrophage chemoattractant protein,” which of course describes its primary function of summoning macrophages.… MCP-1 production is stimulated by some types of immune activation. Hence, a vaccine that stimulates MCP-1 may cause AANs [aluminum adjuvant nanoparticles] (e.g. from prior vaccines) to move into the brain. Some infections or toxins induce MCP-1. Interestingly, Al adjuvant induces MCP-1, suggesting that it may stimulate its own transport.
… We can speculate that AANs from vaccines may remain “dormant” for years, until MCP-1 production is stimulated. The MCP-1 will cause macrophages containing AANs to mobilize and transport AANs into the brain and other sensitive tissues. This may explain some of the damage from the MMR vaccine. MMR is given at 15–18 months of age, which is after Al-containing vaccines are given (at 0, 2, 4, and 6 months). The measles vaccine can stimulate MCP-1 production. Therefore, the MMR vaccine may stimulate the movement of AANs (received from prior vaccines) into the brain. This may explain how MMR could cause Al toxicity, even though it does not contain aluminum adjuvant.
In lay terms, the MMR vaccine, which isn’t typically given until a child is thirteen months old (and has already received twenty other vaccines), serves to round up all the aluminum already in the body and bring it right to the brain, by summoning macrophages to accelerate the transport of aluminum. This would certainly help explain the many children I know who experienced seizures and regression immediately following the MMR vaccine.
In 1999, in response to a new law (the FDA Modernization Act), the FDA publicly announced that mercury levels in pediatric vaccines—through a preservative called thimerosal, which I discussed in chapter 3—exceeded safety standards. With autism rates beginning to skyrocket and many parents seeing changes in their children after vaccine appointments, the mercury hypothesis was valid. Unlike with aluminum, vaccines don’t “need” thimerosal to be effective; the only role it plays is as an antibacterial in multidose vaccine vials. When the switch was made to single-dose vials, the need for thimerosal disappeared, and it was largely removed from vaccines by 2003. Since that time a “natural experiment” has reduced the likelihood that thimerosal has played a primary role in autism, although injecting infants with mercury remains a profoundly dangerous thing to do and no doubt has caused harm. In fact, even the CDC published a study showing thimerosal increased tics, a neurological disorder, in children. Unlike aluminum adjuvant, thimerosal does not hyperstimulate the immune system, which, with the benefit of all the newly published science, explains why aluminum, rather than mercury, appears to be the likely trigger for immune activation in the brains of infants, causing autism. As Vaccine Papers explains:
There is evidence that thimerosal in vaccines causes harm. It is idiotic to inject thimerosal in any amount into infants or pregnant women.
Three Extraordinary Letters
In mid-2017 three of the leading scientists in the world who have spearheaded many of these important discoveries did something extraordinary: They wrote private letters to the directors of the three agencies that make up the US public health service: the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health. Their letters were a warning about the newly discovered dangers of aluminum adjuvant and its relationship to autism. I was heartened, and a little astonished, when I read each of their letters, each one drafted on the letterhead of their respective university. Here are three excerpts:
From Dr. Christopher Shaw of the University of British Columbia:
We have studied the impact of aluminum adjuvants in animal models of neurological disease, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
… These studies and the broader existing literature regarding aluminum toxicity, lead almost invariably to the conclusion that aluminum in any chemical form is always neurotoxic when administered to humans. Further, I am convinced that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines may contribute to neurological disorders across the lifespan. In adults, such adjuvant may induce macrophagic myofasciitis, a disease with neuropathological aspects. In children, there is growing evidence that aluminum adjuvants may disrupt developmental processes in the central nervous system and therefore contribute to ASD in susceptible children.… In regard to the above, it is my belief that the CDC’s claim on its website that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” is wholly unsupported.
From Dr. Romain Gherardi of the Université Paris-Est:
I am an expert in the field of aluminum adjuvants toxicity in humans and animal models. I have been working in this field since the initial description of the Al vaccine-induced macrophagic myofasciitis in 1998. Since that time I have written 40 peer-reviewed scientific publications and one book on this subject. I strongly support the contention that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines may have a role in the etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). My view is founded on a significant and burgeoning body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence which makes the link between ASD and exposure to aluminum through vaccinations and other sources.
From Dr. Christopher Exley of Keele University:
I am an expert in the field of aluminum adjuvants and aluminum toxicity. I have been working in this field for more than 30 years during which time I have written in excess of 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications on this subject.… As an expert in the field of aluminum adjuvants and aluminum toxicity I solemnly declare that more research on the role of aluminum adjuvant in vaccines and neurological disorders, including ASD, is essential and urgently required.
A French Nobel Laureate Speaks Up
In late 2017 a mandatory vaccination decree arose in France, spearheaded by French prime minister Édouard Philippe. Mr. Philippe’s task was challenging, due to general sentiment in France about vaccinations, according to The Independent:
A recent survey found more than three out of 10 French people don’t trust vaccines, with just 52 per cent of participants saying the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.35
Compounding France’s challenges of passing a mandatory vaccination law, Dr. Luc Montagnier, arguably the most famous scientist in France, decided to step into the debate about vaccines soon after Prime Minister Philippe announced his intentions. Dr. Montagnier, a French virologist, is, by every standard, a bona fide science rock star, having won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2008 for his discovery of HIV and proving that it led to AIDS. Dr. Montagnier has won dozens of prestigious awards and is a member of both the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medicine.
In early November of 2017, Dr. Montagnier held a press conference against the “vaccine dictatorship” at the Theatre Michel in Paris to discuss the proposed mandatory vaccination law. Dr. Montagnier was joined on stage by another heavyweight of the scientific world, Dr. Henri Joyeux, a former professor of oncology and laureate of the prestigious Antoine Lacassagne Cancer Prize of the Ligue Nationale contre le Cancer. Their comments were startling in their honesty and clarity, loudly warning the French populace on the dangers of vaccines.
Dr. Montagnier opened his press conference by explaining that his motivation was to “launch an alert to all France and the world” and that he and Dr. Joyeux “urge members [of the French parliament] not to vote in favour of this law, which goes against the interests of children’s health and imposes an industrial and administrative diktat on doctors and families.”
The two doctors dropped their own bomb about aluminum, sounding very much like all the other aluminum scientists previously discussed:
The sum of the proposed vaccines gives the infant an excessive amount of aluminum, a bio-persistent adjuvant which has demonstrated its harmfulness locally at the injection site and also its penetration in the form of aggregates to the brain and other areas of the body (Bone, Kidneys) as has been demonstrated in the dust-breathing workers during the extraction of bauxite (Occupational Diseases). In addition, aluminum in veterinary vaccines has been found to be toxic to animals, directly or indirectly responsible for sarcoma (cancers) in the vaccination area within 3 years of vaccination and in other areas of the body. 5 years later: Ostéosarcomes, fibrosarcomes, chondrosarcomes, limbs, chest and abdomen. Would our cats be better treated than our children, since aluminum was removed from veterinary vaccines by a Sanofi subsidiary?
Blessed by Dr. Patterson’s Colleagues
Paul Patterson, the scientist from Caltech who first helped us understand how an immune activation event can trigger autism, passed away in 2014. However, after a February 2017 blog post I wrote about all his pioneering work and the other discoveries, I heard directly from his widow Carolyn, who wrote me the following in an email:
I shared your article with several people who had worked with PHP [Dr. Paul Patterson], and they all were favorable about your conclusions. As scientists, none of them would go against the vaccination theory, per se, but they were also aware of the numerous anecdotes of changes in behavior, around 18 months, in a set of children—which corresponds to the time when vaccinations are given. They were inspired by your connections and appreciative of your ingenuity.36
I want to make several points about Carolyn Patterson’s email. First, the group of studies I just shared with you and how they all interrelate were viewed “favorably” by Dr. Patterson’s protégés. Second, despite their favorable view, his widow felt compelled to tell me that none of these scientists would “go against” the vaccination theory, meaning they’re scared to endorse the vaccine- autism connection (because they don’t want to be “Wakefielded”). This is how taboo the vaccine-autism connection is in the mainstream world of science. Even protégés of Dr. Paul Patterson, the scientists in perhaps the best position to understand exactly how a vaccine could cause autism, are scared to touch the topic. In the same email Ms. Patterson told me the story of her sister’s baby boy: “My sister and her husband had a baby boy 18 months before we had our son. He turned out to be on the autism spectrum, and while he was a ‘late talker,’ my sister noticed a profound difference after he had his immunizations at 18 months,” she said. “My sister had his blood levels tested, and he was always extremely heavy with metals in his blood,” she continued.
Dr. Paul Patterson’s nephew regressed after his vaccines—Paul Patterson, the man who discovered how immune activation events lead to autism.
I’ve often wondered about scientists who know the truth about the cause of autism but have yet to say anything publicly. How do they live with themselves? As one example, I feel that Caltech’s Dr. Patterson, were he still alive, would be standing with scientists like Professor Exley and publicly telling the truth about immune activations events, vaccines, and his own nephew. But what about so many others?
In late 2016 two scientists, in legal depositions, affirmed everything I could have hoped for, and more. And not just any scientists, but Drs. Andrew Zimmerman and Richard Kelley, arguably the two leading mainstream autism scientists in the world. Their intimate relationship with the “vaccine court” almost ended the autism epidemic in 2009, and their ongoing willingness to tell the truth will likely contribute to the ending, I hope very soon.
Chapter 5: Emerging Science and Vaccine-Induced Autism
3. Carlos A. Pardo, “Neuroglial Activation and Neuroinflammation in the Brain of Patients with Autism,” Annals of Neurology 57, no. 1 (2005): 67–81.
4. Paul H. Patterson, “Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism,” Engineering and Science 69, no. 3 (2006): 14.
5. K. Suzuki, et al., “Microglial Activation in Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” JAMA Psychiatry 70, no. 1 (2013): 49–58.
6. “Brain’s Immune System Triggered in Autism,” John Hopkins Medicine.
7. Jessica Stoller-Conrad, “Noted Neuroscientist Paul Patterson Dies,” Caltech (blog), June 30, 2014.
8. Patterson, “Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism.”
9. Paul Patterson, “Maternal Immune Activation Yields Offspring Displaying Mouse Versions of the Three Core Symptoms of Autism,” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 26, no. 4 (2012): 607–616.
10. Melissa Bauman et al., “Activation of the Maternal Immune System during Pregnancy Alters Behavioral Development of Rhesus Monkey Offspring,” Biological Psychiatry 75, no. 4 (2014): 332–341.
11. Paul Patterson et al., “Maternal Immune Activation Alters Fetal Brain Development through Interleukin-6,” The Journal of Neuroscience : The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience 27, no. 40 (2007): 10695–10702.
12. Xiaochong Li et al., “Brain IL-6 Elevation Causes Neuronal Circuitry Imbalances and Mediates Autism- like Behaviors,” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1822, no. 6 (2012): 831–842.
13. William Carlezon et al., “Perinatal Immune Activation Produces Persistent Sleep Alterations and Epileptiform Activity in Male Mice,” Neuropsychopharmacology 43, no. 3 (2018): 482–491.
14. Christopher Shaw et al., “Aluminum Adjuvant Linked to Gulf War Illness Induces Motor Neuron Death in Mice,” Neuromolecular Medicine 9, no. 1 (2007): 83–100.
15. From an interview Dr. Shaw provided in the documentary The Greater Good.
21. Romain Gherardi et al., “Biopersistence and Brain Translocation of Aluminum Adjuvants of Vaccines,” Frontiers in Neurology 6 (2015): Article 4.
22. Guillemette Crepeaux et al., “Non-linear Dose-Response of Aluminium Hydroxide Adjuvant Particles: Selective Low Dose Neurotoxicity,” Toxicology 375 (2017): 48–57.
23. Robert J. Mitkus et al., “Updated Aluminum Pharmacokinetics Following Infant Exposures through Diet and Vaccination,” Vaccine 29, no. 51 (2011): 9538–9543.
24. Romain K. Gherardi et al., “Critical Analysis of Reference Studies on the Toxicokinetics of Aluminum- Based Adjuvants,” Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry 181 (2018): 87–95.
25. Gherardi et al., “Critical Analysis of Reference Studies.”
26. Zhibin Yao et al., “Neonatal Vaccination with Bacillus Calmette–Guérin and Hepatitis B Vaccines Modulates Hippocampal Synaptic Plasticity in Rats,” Journal of Neuroimmunology 288 (2015): 1–12.
27. Zhibin Yao et al., “Neonatal Hepatitis B Vaccination Impaired the Behavior and Neurogenesis of Mice Transiently in Early Adulthood,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 73 (2016): 166–176.
28. Christopher Exley et al., “Aluminium in Brain Tissue and Autism,” Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology 46 (2018): 76–82.
29. Exley et al., “Aluminium in Brain Tissue.”
30. Heather Hazlett et al., “Early Brain Development in Infants at High Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Nature 542, no. 7641 (2017): 348–351.
34. Ernest L. Wynder, Evarts A. Graham, and Adele B. Croninger, “Experimental Production of Carcinoma with Cigarette Tar,” Cancer Research, December 1953, 855–864.
Great article. One typo that I saw 'Shaw has a starring role in Uniformed Consent -> Uninformed Consent. Missing the 'n'.
One sliver of hope out of the mess that is the vaccine schedule is perhaps we can do so much more of kids with Autism if we just support the science that needs to be done that isn't getting done. This article highlighting that effort is about the only inspiring thing on the day given the ACIP decision on the Covid Shots. Thanks.
Real Autism Science
Congratulations on your Mammoth research which I hope gets more widely spread.
Great article. One typo that I saw 'Shaw has a starring role in Uniformed Consent -> Uninformed Consent. Missing the 'n'.
One sliver of hope out of the mess that is the vaccine schedule is perhaps we can do so much more of kids with Autism if we just support the science that needs to be done that isn't getting done. This article highlighting that effort is about the only inspiring thing on the day given the ACIP decision on the Covid Shots. Thanks.