Note: Our dear Dan Olmsted wrote this post in 2015. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has mentioned Dan's work many times during his interviews, particularly his "The Age of Autism" UPI series from which this site was born. In 2025, we'll feature his work regularly as new families enter the age of autism themselves. Perhaps by 2028 their numbers will diminish as America returns to health.

By Dan Olmsted - 2015

We probably all know the saying that Ideas Matter. Lately I’ve been mulling a handful of ideas – very bad ideas, I’d say – that have come together to trigger, expand, and perpetuate the autism epidemic and a host of allied disorders that constitute The Age of Autism.

Today I’m going to lay them out in brief, and in coming days I’ll say more about each one, and end with the counter-ideas that could really bring us a happy new year.

Please add your own!

Bad Idea Number One. Vaccines are the Eric Clapton of Medicine; they are God. Vaccines are the number one medical accomplishment of all time, and every day in every way they make our world safer and safer. Bow down!

Bad Idea Number Two. The evidence for Number One is clear. “Study after study” has shown that vaccines work wonderfully and that the so-called “risks” are effectively zero – a one-in-a-million chance of anything serious happening. (“One in a million” is pharma speak for zip, zilch, nada, roll up your sleeve.)

Bad Idea Number Three. Disagreeing with Numbers One and Two is Unacceptable Speech. Claims that vaccines are more dangerous than advertised are bogus and should be suppressed. You need to be a conspiracy theorist, a purveyor of junk science, a pathetically gullible parent looking for someone to blame for your damaged kid, or out-and-out anti-vaccine to harbor such ideas.  

Bad Idea Number Four. Conflicts Don’t Count. Drugmakers, doctors, legislators, bureaucrats, TV programs buoyed by pharma money are immune to the usual concerns that conflicts of interest -- profits, incentives, campaign contributions, ad dollars, liability worries -- require extra vigilance by the press and public. The drug companies may be caught red-handed in corrupt dealing, Congress bought off, the media lazy and desperate for drug dollars, but when it comes to vaccines (see Number One), they have only our health at heart!

Bad Idea Number Five. Because the first four are true, we must trust The Experts who are working hard every day to help us stay happy and healthy. They are god’s messengers on earth.

Bad Idea Number Six: Because all the foregoing is undisputed fact, no one should be exempt from any of the vaccines currently recommended, and there is no limit except for medical ingenuity on the number of vaccines we can and should receive. Experts say we can take 10,000 vaccines at once with no ill effects.  There are hundreds of new vaccines in the pipeline, which is unalloyed good news. Vaccines should continue to be given for any reason “the experts” propose.

You and your children and their children are so very, very fortunate to live in a time when more and more safe and effective vaccines are available. And you haven’t seen anything yet!

OK, that’s my list. To me all those ideas fit together and explain how we got from a few targeted shots against the ancestral scourges of mankind (to use Harris Coulter’s marvelous phrase) to a runaway public health nightmare of chronic and developmental illnesses that most people don’t notice are caused by vaccines that most people don’t need.

There are other ways to put the ideas together – as we did in our book The Age of Autism, for example, showing that a long history of medical use and abuse of mercury fed into vaccine dangers that went unrecognized even as they increased exponentially, with regulators in too deep to ever face the truth. That the autism epidemic started with the first uses of ethyl mercury and then rose along with that exposure. That the truth has been covered up by the CDC and a whistleblower’s testimony has been suppressed by the medical and media vaccine establishment.

We could start with the corruption of science, move on to bogus studies, suppression of dissent, and so on.

They all lead to the same place – a very bad one triggered by a small number of very bad ideas that interlock like the links in a fence and keep out the truth. Ideas matter, and we need to make clear how bad these are, then propose new and better ones. As Thomas Kuhn said in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, big bad ideas – he called them paradigms – don’t just vanish on their own, they need to be displaced by new and better ones.

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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.