Note: Please read and share James Lyons-Weilers's most recent Substack article from Popular Rationalism. If what we're hearing is true about the new CDC Chief nominee Susan Monarez, MAHA is becoming MA HA HA HA and the joke is on us. We launched MAHA. You. All of us in the autism vaccine injury community. Lyons-Weiler tackles the latest cover up from Johns Hopkins:

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Johns Hopkins Continues to Mislead the Public on the State of the Science on Vaccines and Autism

Major medical institutions just are not getting the message. The science is not only not settled: The question is the most important neglected question in medical science - ever.

“The science is settled” is a phrase invoked not to convey certainty but to halt inquiry. This rhetorical flourish has been used repeatedly in public health communications, particularly regarding the long-standing controversy over a potential link between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A recent example of this can be found in the March 19, 2025 article from Johns Hopkins Public Health, titled “Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism. Why Do Some People Think They Do?”

In the article, Dr. Daniel Salmon, a vaccinologist and director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety, discusses the origins of the vaccine-autism debate, attributing it mainly to the 1998 case series published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and colleagues. The article, which claims that 16 studies exist that definitively answer the question of vaccines and autism, argues that Wakefield's now-retracted paper initiated a cascade of misinformation that public health authorities have spent decades refuting. It claims that a wealth of rigorous studies has “settled the science” and that the persistence of public doubt stems from cognitive biases and unfortunate timing rather than legitimate scientific controversy.

This narrative is both misleading and incomplete. It fails to acknowledge a substantial body of peer-reviewed evidence across disciplines—epidemiology, immunology, toxicology, molecular biology, and clinical medicine—that supports concern over vaccine-related neurodevelopmental outcomes. It omits biological plausibility, disregards whistleblower disclosures and court-admitted vaccine injuries, and relies on an artificially narrow scope of reference. It also ignores the history of the CDC sharing 27 studies, 22 of which where rejected by the National Academy of Science’s Institutes of Medicine, leaving 5; four of these were underpowered, leaving one study. That history will be part of future article.

The purpose of this rebuttal is not to assert that vaccines do cause autism in all cases, but to make the case—based on published literature and verifiable findings—that the issue remains scientifically unresolved, and prematurely declaring it “settled” is a disservice to science, to public trust, and to families seeking answers, and that the Johns Hopkins article blissfully ignores peer-reviewed studies worth considering that show their conclusion is recklessly irresponsible.

The Johns Hopkins article frames the entire vaccine-autism controversy as a consequence of a single discredited case series—Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 paper in The Lancet. While that paper did draw international attention, it was a pilot study that never concluded that vaccines cause autism. It was also not the first nor the most substantial source of information on the topic raising concerns about vaccine safety. Reducing decades of inquiry to one retracted article is both historically and scientifically false.

CDC’s Own Early Findings: The Verstraeten Signal

In 1999, CDC epidemiologist Thomas Verstraeten presented findings at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) conference based on internal analyses of the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). The results showed a relative risk (RR) of 7.6 (95% CI: 1.8–31.5) for autism in children receiving more than 25 μg of mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) in the first month of life compared to those with no exposure (Verstraeten et al., Simpsonwood VSD communication). The degree of institutional suppression found in the minutes of the meeting is massive. Notably, this finding was never published in its original form. Instead, subsequent iterations of the dataset were revised over four years, after discussion by participants:

"The number of dose related relationships [between mercury and autism] are linear and statistically significant. You can play with this all you want. They are linear. They are statistically significant." - Dr. William Weil, American Academy of Pediatrics. Simpsonwood, GA, June 7, 2000

"The issue is that it is impossible, unethical to leave kids unimmunized, so you will never, ever resolve that issue [regarding the impact of mercury]." - Dr. Robert Chen, Chief of Vaccine Safety and Development, Centers For Disease Control, Simpsonwood, GA, June 7, 2000

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