Michelle Guppy and her son Brandon

By Anne Dachel

On November 1^st, Psychology Today published a report with the title, New Study Reports Dramatic Increase in Autism Prevalence, by Amy Lutz, a medical historian.

This headline wasn’t really alarming. By now, everyone is used to 20 years of always increasing rates of autism with no real explanation. This was no different.  

We were reminded that rate increases are expected.

JAMA article confirms what we already knew about autism. But what does it mean?

A new study published in JAMA reported that autism prevalence dramatically increased between 2011-2022.

Why is this happening?

Factors driving increased prevalence remain undetermined.

That autism prevalence has been steadily increasing is not controversial, and it is not news. Hotly contested, however, is why. The Kaiser Permanente paper briefly references some of the more common explanations, including increased awareness, environmental factors, changes in screening practices, diagnostic criteria and others, but doesn’t pick a side: “We didn’t have the data to do that,” Grosvenor told me. “The goal of our study wasn’t to determine the possible causes.”

More autism among the youngest

But his team’s findings do problematize some of these theories. For example, the paper reports a 352 percent increase in the number of autistic children aged 0-4 between 2011 and 2022. . . .

Enough awareness, it’s all about acceptance

By 2012, the public was so aware that The Autistic Self Advocacy Network was calling to replace “Autism Awareness” with “Autism Acceptance.”

It’s very difficult to imagine there was much room for awareness to increase over the decade under study, never mind that it could increase enough to cause autism prevalence to more than quadruple in the youngest age group.

Still no answers

[Lead author of the study, Luke] Grosvenor considers this magnitude of increase too great to be accounted for by just one factor. When I ask him whether he thinks the increased prevalence might represent a real and dramatic increase in the number of autistic children, he acknowledges, “We can’t rule that out as a possibility.”

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s amazing victory in the 2024 election, I feel like it is also a victory for THE TRUTH ABOUT AUTISM.

President Trump has promised that Robert Kennedy, Jr. will have a leading role in the movement to MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN by focusing on the chronic disease epidemic. For so many of us parents, this means honestly addressing what autism is doing to America’s children.

My son John is 38 and has mild autism. When he was diagnosed in second grade, the school system had to get a psychologist from Minneapolis to come a hundred miles to Chippewa Falls, WI to diagnose him because, as we were told, autism was such a rare disorder.

My town is around 14,000 people, and we learned that John was probably the only child here who had autism. That was a devastating blow to my husband and me. I was a teacher myself, and I had never known a student with autism. We felt totally alone.

I did lots of research and basically learned that autism is a genetic disorder. We found a local MD who told us that my husband and I were genetically mismatched, and that’s why John had autism.

Then incredibly, things changed in the years that followed. I kept reading about more and more children with autism. Starting after 2000, the rate kept making enormous gains every couple of years, always attributed to “better diagnosing,” “expanded spectrum” and “greater awareness.”

Among the younger students, suddenly autism became a recognized disorder. We were all pretty much convinced that autism had always been here like this, we just called it something else. We were told that parents used to keep these children at home, or they were previously put in institutions.

At first, as the increases showed no signs of slowing down, there were hearings on Capitol Hill, and people seemed willing to listen to parents who talked about how their normally developing children lost learned skills and regressed after routine childhood vaccinations.

Reporters like Sharyl Attkisson honestly covered the link between vaccines and autism. In 2011 it was revealed that the government had secretly compensated over 80 vaccine injury cases that resulted in a child becoming autistic.

What followed was damage control by those with strong financial ties to the vaccine program. Medical organizations, federal health officials and the media, all under the power and control of the pharmaceutical industry, massively shut down any discussion of a link between vaccines and autism. Pharma-funded researchers produced easily manipulated population studies all showing no link between vaccines and autism. The media denounced anyone who wouldn’t believe that the science was in, calling them anti-vaccine and dangerous.

Autism was left as a mystery. Endless studies came out linking the disorder to the mother, much like the claim of a link to the “refrigerator mom” of the 1950s and 1960s.

20 years of phony science

Blame-the-mom studies found associations between autism and old moms, moms who married old dads, fat moms, drinking moms, smoking moms, moms on drugs, moms who lived too close to freeways, moms who had babies too close together, moms on antidepressants and most recently, moms who expose their children to plastic particles while pregnant.

All this research didn’t prove anything, and it was never meant to. NIH and other funders were happy to give grants to dead-end studies like these. I like to call it all, autism busywork because it made the public think that officials wanted to understand autism, which of course, they had no intention of doing.

Then in 2008, Autism Speaks launched the first April, Autism Awareness Month to further normalize and celebrate the disorder. Places like Niagara Falls, the Empire State Building, the White House, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil are among the 16,000 iconic places around the world that go blue each April in recognition of autism.

Awareness of autism has now become acceptance of autism, no matter what heights the rate eventually reaches. It’s all good. Places around the world are now vying to become recognized as “autism friendly” and “Certified Autism Centers,” which actually makes good sense business-wise considering the never-ending increases in autism.

What’s missing of course is any recognition that autism a devastating disorder that robs a child of normal development and impacts the entire family. Every April, when there’s all kinds of feel-good news coverage of autism, we see lots of kids who look pretty typical, interacting with teachers and therapists. It’s easy to believe autism has always been here like this.

Missing is any reporting on the third of children on the spectrum who experience unexplainable regression or the third of children who are clinically non-verbal or the third of children who engage in self-harm or the third of children with autism who are prone to escaping from their caregivers.

We don’t hear about the parents caring for adult non-verbal children still in diapers.  These are the people increasingly desperate about what will happen to their children after they are no longer able to care for them.

Here is an article I wrote 10 years ago that illustrates exactly what I mean. I wrote this after I found the story of Brandon Guppy and his mother, Michelle, and was so moved by the photo of the two of them.

Sept 14, 2014, Age of Autism Life With Autism in Pictures Tells Story Media Ignores

I recently found this: Life with Autism in Pictures: The lion who had no courage.

The photo really needs no words.  It's a mother with her disabled son.  The young man in diapers is the side of autism we never see in feel good stories during  April, Celebrate Autism Month.  The photo made me think of Michelangelo's Pieta, the Virgin Mary grieving as she holds the body of her crucified son, Jesus.   Or maybe one of the Mary Cassatt paintings of a mother and child.  The image of this maternal bond is universal.  It's also heartbreaking when it involves someone who was left like this because of the vaccines he received as baby. . .

I interviewed Michelle, and she told me about how her healthy baby boy declined after each round of vaccinations ending up profoundly disabled. I recorded her sharp criticism of the media for covering up the truth about autism. I would ask everyone to hit the link and read what she had to say.

I think that the Jama report is meant to prepare us for yet another leap ahead in the autism rate this April. One in 36 could easily become one in 30 or one in 25.

Currently the autism rate in Australia is one in every 25 children.

In Scotland, it’s one in every 23 children.

In California, it’s one in every 22 children.

In Ireland, it’s one in every 21 children.

And in Northern Ireland, it’s one in every 20 children.

None of the above official rates raised any alarms when they were faithfully reported in the press over the last two years. And when our new rate comes out, U.S. health officials will briefly mention it and quickly move on.

THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE before every child born eventually ends up on the autism spectrum. With Trump back in the White House and Kennedy in a position of power, it’s time to end the autism lies. We need to admit that what we call autism is vaccine damage. We have to stop the epidemic NOW.

Your thoughts?

Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism.

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Denial: How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future

by Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted | Jul 25, 2017