Hearing that millions of dollars are going to a researcher who doesn't believe that the autism has increased or that the environment plays a role in autism is bad enough, but I also ran across a video of a recent discussion between Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and head of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, and Dr. Peter Bearman, chairman of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. (HERE)
Bearman is described as "a sociologist at Columbia University who has undertaken a monumental task: figure out what is behind the increase in autism prevalence."

(The National Institutes of Health liked the work of Bearman so much that in 2007 he received a $2.5 million award to study the "social determinants of autism." HERE) It seems that Bearman stopped in at NIMH to chat with Insel about autism.  This is what was said in their discussion: (See pdf here.)

What's clear from the conversation is that autism isn't a crisis to either expert.  They exuded the feeling that we still don't know much for sure but we have all the time in the world to speculate about autism.  They tossed out the terms "prevalence" and "increase in diagnosis," instead of admitting that THERE ARE REALLY MORE KIDS WITH AUTISM.
 
There's something that really bothers me when I see two supposed experts charged with addressing the autism crisis, sitting around, looking relaxed, smiling and STILL speculating over the increase and the cause.  I kept waiting for some inkling of horror over what's happening to hundreds of thousands of our children.  The feeling I got from this talk was that they were curious about autism, but not at all worried.
 
At the start of the video, Insel asked this stunning question:

"Is there an increase in the number of children with the disorder or autism spectrum disorder or does this largely reflect the changes in the way the diagnosis is used or some sort of increase in ascertainment?" 
 
Bearman tossed out all kinds of possibilities.  He used the word "ascertainment" a number of times and it seemed to be another way of saying, better diagnosis: "There's been a really fundamental change in ascertainment."   He made references to "parental age,"  "diagnostic change," and genetics.  His rambling rant flittered to a number of bizarre topics: "It looks like it should be some toxicological environment that's shared because of the spatial clustering, but because there's a very strong process of amplification of ...the understanding of autism that leads to increased diagnosis, as parents learn to recognize symptoms, a very very small event that would transform the environment five years ago, ten years ago, even you could imagine [forty] years or fifty years ago when the moms of children with autism now were in utero as eggs, a very small event could cascade into a larger epidemic now."
 
Bearman and Insel ended their chat with this cryptic exchange:
 
Insel: (Looking slightly amused) "So what do you tell parents who ask about this, when they, if you have friends who have autistic children who say, What's going on here?  Why this epidemic?  What do you say in response?"
 
Bearmann:  "Well, I think parents are, you know, they are struggling with just enormous...You know...it's just enormously difficult to have a child with autism, you know it's incredible.  It's very hard. And I think parents are naturally searching for explanations.   I think that message now is to search for a quick and dirty explanation, might not be advancing science."
 
Insel: (Smiling broadly) "Thank you very much.  Good discussion."
 
The phrase "a quick and dirty explanation" seemed a veiled reference to the claim that vaccines cause autism and it drew an immediate reaction from Insel.  Maybe the whole purpose of their talk was to again point out that no one knows anything for sure---except that it's not vaccines.
 
And while Bearman didn't specifically talk about the controversy in his dialogue with Insel, he has addressed the claim in other places.  (HERE)  In this video, Bearman showed evidence linking increasing exemption rates to the presence of autism organization in the local area:
"Prof. Bearman notes that vaccine refusal rates in California are higher in areas where autism organizations have a presence. However, vaccine refusal rates are not higher in areas with high autism prevalence.

"In other words: autism isn't scaring people away from vaccination. But, autism organizations are.

"[They] can be as much as 7 times higher if there are autism organizations in a given area. The baseline refusal rate in California is about 1.6% (in 2003). In other words, there are pockets of vaccine refusal of 10% or more in California, correlated with autism organization presence.

"There are those who gloat about increasing fear of vaccines. It is too bad that time, money and effort didn't go into something valuable to the autism communities. Let's hope it doesn't backfire on us in the form of infectious disease outbreaks blamed on the autism community."
So what do Peter Szatmari, Thomas Insel and Peter Bearman all have in common?  They're contribute to the cover-up.  They're continuing the lies.   These are the people we're supposed to believe are addressing autism.  They're the accepted experts.  They're getting millions of dollars to figure out why so many children are disabled like never before in our history. 

The truth is their efforts are a travesty.  They show no interest in the suffering of countless children.  They're not alarmed about children who were talking and potty trained as two year olds and are now non-verbal and in diapers as teenagers.  They're not interested in why so many autistic children have seizures and bowel disease.  No one has been able to find adults with autism at a rate even remotely close to what we see in our children and these experts could care less. Most of all, Szatmari, Insel, and Bearman act like these children with autism will never grow up.  Nowhere is there any mention of what our country will be like in a few years when one percent of children and adults alike are autistic.  Their obfuscation in the face of this nightmare is a disgrace.

Anne Dachel is Media Editor of Age of Autism.