By  John Stone

(for Anne Dachel)

This is the text of my submission to the current Parliamentary Education Committee Inquiry into the UK’s special educational needs (which evidently they do not intend to publish). Weep…

Solving the SEND crisis (submission House of Commons, Education Committee) 

John Stone (Age of Autism)

I am UK editor of the US based web journal Age of Autism [1] and have also received payment for various inputs from Children’s Health Defense, a charity founded by Robert F Kennedy Jr [2]. I have corresponded with various UK public bodies, notably the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) for at least a quarter of century including the Department of Education, the Science and Technology Committee, the Treasury and the Office of Budgetary Responsibility: the DCMS and Health and Social committees have published my submissions to inquiries.

It has to be said that if there is more disability in our schools than in say the 1980s - the sort that costs reluctant local authorities piles of money - then the DHSC and the politicians that failed to hold them to account are to blame. In truth no one wants to know what they are doing wrong, meanwhile our public officials maintain the practices outlined by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit 170 years ago only on industrial scale he never dreamt of - doing everything wrong and blocking all investigation: conceding as little as possible late as possible. Almost invariably politicians watching their own backs defer to them or hide behind them.

I note that when I first wrote to the Department of Health (as it was in those days) perhaps early in 2000 they were hyper-defensive about Andrew Wakefield and vaccination although I had not mentioned either, but even then they sent me a paper by Dr Wakefield’s prominent opponent Prof Brent Taylor which showed a steeply rising autism trend (albeit not apparently associated with MMR) [3]

Whilst this was somehow supposed to reassure me it simply confirmed my concerns, and the DH itself seemed to be engaged in Orwellian “doublethink”: providing they were “off the hook” with MMR nothing else apparently mattered.

I have a very long history questioning the official response to these issues but to cut to the chase I will fast forward to my attempt to engage Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies in 2018-19. At the time I summarised my conclusions entirely compiled from official data (only stopping to note that six years on the position is already as I predicted radically worse) [4]:

-          ASD in schools is at least 15 times the level of 25 years ago

-          1.74% of all schoolchildren in the recent Northern Ireland census (the most complete data we have at the present time) had a severe/complex level of ASD disablement (education Stage 5)

-          The overall rate is 2.9% for the province but 4.7% for Belfast

-          Epidemiologists trying to explain the rise in ASD at the beginning of the millennium were still only talking about a rate of 0.2%

-          1999 National Statistics for schools’ mental health showed a rate of 0.2% for ASD/PDD for those born between 1984 and 88 but by of the 2004 survey the overall rate was 1%

-          The rate appears to have risen 5 times during the years following the introduction of MMR and 3 times since, and the majority of cases are not fringe diagnoses

-          There is still no robust or adequate evidence of a large ASD population over the age of 35 and Dame Sally was unable to cite any

-          Our schools, and their finances, are breaking down under the burden of disablement, with ASD being frequently mentioned as the major cause

-          The social cost of ASD, once almost invisible, is set to outstrip old-age in the near future and is only likely to keep rising

-          There is no robust or adequate evidence base for MMR safety: the six studies in the single review cited by Dame Sally were flawed and inadequate

-          The first of these studies was only published 14 years after the products were introduced in the UK, and Dame Sally failed to cite any pre-marketing data, so the question also arises what the evidence base was for safety before they were introduced?

-          The MHRA yellow card scheme would be incapableof picking up long term neurological effects of vaccination

-          The government has no coherent or convincing explanation of these events which are set to engulf everybody

That was six years ago: presently, we live with huge and growing population damage, and we cannot make it go away even with the most carefully crafted government rhetoric - like Merlin I feel I have been living backwards to this time. In order to ameliorate the crisis we have like Robert Kennedy Jr in the US to look at all the things that our public servants and our medical profession have avoided for generations. In all probability there are few people left who would believe them anyway.

[1] https://www.ageofautism.com/

[2] https://childrenshealthdefense.org/

[3] B Taylor , E Miller, C P Farrington, M C Petropoulos, I Favot-Mayaud, J Li, P A Waight, ‘Autism and measles, mumps and rubella vaccine: no epidemiological evidence for a causal association’, Lancet 1999 Jun 12;353(9169):2026-9. doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(99)01239-8

[4] John Stone, ‘Chief Medical Officer to the British government defends MMR safety: autism up 15 times and still no explation’, Age of Autism, 7 March 2019, https://www.ageofautism.com/2019/03/chief-medical-officer-to-the-british-government-defends-mmr-safety.html The full text:  https://www.ageofautism.com/2019/01/confirmation-bias-and-the-united-kingdom-department-of-health.html Documented in FOI: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/john_stone_letter_mmr_safety/response/1323604/attach/2/Redacted%20correspondence%20CMO%20and%20John%20Stone%20003.pdf?cookie_passthrough=1