Genes Are Cofactors for Autism Risk, Not Confounders
By James Lyons-Weiler, PhD
Genes Are Cofactors for Autism Risk, Not Confounders
"It's genetic" shows a profound dearth of scientific literacy.
In the increasingly nuanced conversation about autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a fundamental misunderstanding continues to undermine both scientific progress and public discourse: the misuse of the term confounder when describing genetic contributions to autism.
This mischaracterization appears not only in media reports, but at times even in scientific literature, where genes are incorrectly framed as “confounding variables” in studies of environmental exposures. This language betrays a fundamental confusion about epidemiologic models, systems biology, and the nature of causality in complex disorders like ASD.
Let me be perfectly clear: genes are not confounders in autism risk—they are cofactors. They do not obscure causality; they interact with environmental factors to shape outcomes. To call them confounders is to fundamentally misunderstand how biology works.
Genes: The Blueprint for Susceptibility
Autism is a developmental condition that arises from the intersection of genetic predisposition and environmental triggers. Genetic variation alone does not cause autism in the vast majority of cases—if it did, monozygotic twins would be 100% concordant. Instead, susceptibility genes influence how an individual responds to environmental factors such as immune activation, toxins, dietary components, and infections.
In toxicological and systems biology terms, these genes are modifiers of effect. They shape the body’s ability to detoxify, repair, regulate, and adapt. When challenged with environmental insults—such as heavy metals, which are increasingly implicated in ASD pathophysiology—these gene variants may amplify the damage, reduce the efficiency of detoxification pathways, or exacerbate oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction.
That is not confounding. That is mechanism.
What Is a Confounder?
Let’s revisit the epidemiological definition for clarity. A confounder is a variable that:
Is associated with both the exposure and the outcome,
Is not in the causal pathway between them, and
Can distort or obscure the apparent relationship between the exposure and the outcome.
Take for instance, socioeconomic status (SES). Lower SES may be associated with both higher environmental toxin exposure and higher likelihood of ASD diagnosis. If not properly controlled for, SES could create a false association between environmental exposure and ASD. That’s a confounder.
But genes? Genes don’t hide causal relationships. They modify them. Genes sit at the very foundation of the causal web—part of the scaffold that determines whether an environmental exposure results in damage, or is handled gracefully and discarded. READ MORE AT POPULAR RATIONALISM HERE.
May 7, 2009 Autism Debate with Jenny McCarthy on 'The Doctors' (Part 1) By The Doctors
Jenny McCarthy, Dr. Jerry Kartzinel and J.B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, join The Doctors to discuss the causes of autism. Are vaccines to blame? Watch the first part of the heated debate.
https://youtu.be/6oEtF8FdqpA?si=gnPp8ubQBg7N40Hk
Posted by: Gary Brown | May 07, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Jay Bhattacharya - the covid MRNA covid vaccines
https://old.bitchute.com/video/0eLJ7FEMldhC/
Jay speaks the truths about Covid jab risks we have called out from the beginning.
Posted by: Emmaphiladelphia | May 06, 2025 at 06:14 PM
Without shooting up babies and children with Neurotoxic ALUMINUM, CANCER Causing Formaldehyde, Aborted Fetal cell DNA (Boys often get girls and visa versa confusing them as to whether they are a boy or girl) Deadly peanut oils, cells from Dog Kidney cells, cows, monkeys PIGS, Insects, polysorbate 80, food dyes, forms of antifreeze and many other Toxic chemicals there would be hardly any autism-certainly not the 1 in 12.5 boys that California has.
Posted by: Shelley | May 06, 2025 at 04:00 PM
I am The Science.....
Let's keep the tariffs on Chinese robots HIGH:
https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1918290935680508155
Good clear definitions of confounder and cofactor.
The MSM could care less about inconvenient facts.
I am an eye witness to what happened to my child after his 15 month shots. The end results matches the outcome of thousands of other parent's experience with their vaccinated child.
It's not complicated.
1917: State of the art Rockefeller Institute pneumonia serum (vaccine forerunner) trials....
Check out pp. 69-74 "Serum Reactions"
Acute lobar pneumonia; prevention and serum treatment, by Oswald T. Avery, M. D., H. T. Chickering, M. D., Rufus Cole, M. D., and A. R. Dochez, M. D.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t7wm1tx9r&seq=75
What happened in 1918, during America's entrance into WW1? The beginning of the "Spanish" Flu epidemic. Turns out it was neither Spanish nor the flu:
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Bacterial Pneumonia Caused Most Deaths in 1918 Influenza Pandemic
"The majority of deaths during the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 were not caused by the influenza virus acting alone, report researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. Instead, most victims succumbed to bacterial pneumonia following influenza virus infection. The pneumonia was caused when bacteria that normally inhabit the nose and throat invaded the lungs along a pathway created when the virus destroyed the cells that line the bronchial tubes and lungs."
"The work presents complementary lines of evidence from the fields of pathology and history of medicine to support this conclusion. "The weight of evidence we examined from both historical and modern analyses of the 1918 influenza pandemic favors a scenario in which viral damage followed by bacterial pneumonia led to the vast majority of deaths," says co-author NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "In essence, the virus landed the first blow while bacteria delivered the knockout punch.""
So, Fauci was interested in the cause of the 1918 pandemic.....
Please note his co-author, Jeffery Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D:
"NIAID co-author and pathologist Jeffery Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., examined lung tissue samples from 58 soldiers who died of influenza at various U. S. military bases in 1918 and 1919. The samples, preserved in paraffin blocks, were re-cut and stained to allow microscopic evaluation. Examination revealed a spectrum of tissue damage "ranging from changes characteristic of the primary viral pneumonia and evidence of tissue repair to evidence of severe, acute, secondary bacterial pneumonia," says Dr. Taubenberger. In most cases, he adds, the predominant disease at the time of death appeared to have been bacterial pneumonia. There also was evidence that the virus destroyed the cells lining the bronchial tubes, including cells with protective hair-like projections, or cilia. This loss made other kinds of cells throughout the entire respiratory tract — including cells deep in the lungs — vulnerable to attack by bacteria that migrated down the newly created pathway from the nose and throat.
In a quest to obtain all scientific publications reporting on the pathology and bacteriology of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, Dr. Taubenberger and NIAID co-author David Morens, M.D., searched bibliography sources for papers in any language. They also reviewed scientific and medical journals published in English, French and German, and located all papers reporting on autopsies conducted on influenza victims. From a pool of more than 2,000 publications that appeared between 1919 and 1929, the researchers identified 118 key autopsy series reports. In total, the autopsy series they reviewed represented 8,398 individual autopsies conducted in 15 countries."
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/bacterial-pneumonia-caused-most-deaths-1918-influenza-pandemic
The Rockefeller/WW1/pneumonia serum treatment connection:
"Cole followed a strategy that had been successful in treating other infectious diseases. Working with Alphonse Dochez (1882-1964) he made an antiserum from the blood of horses inoculated with bacteria isolated from pneumonia patients. The researchers soon discovered that there were different strains of pneumococcus, as the bacterium was then called, and that they differed in virulence. By the end of 1912, Cole and Dochez had developed a serum against Type 1 pneumococcus and had devised a method for testing whether a patient was infected with this or some other type of the bacterium. The horse antiserum was the first effective treatment for infection with Type 1 pneumococcus. The development of antisera continued in Cole's laboratory. In addition, during World War I, Army and Navy medical officers came to the Rockefeller Hospital before being dispatched to base hospitals to learn methods of typing pneumococci and treating patients selectively."
Rufus Cole, the Guiding Philosophy of the Rockefeller Hospital, and the First Effective Therapy for Lobar Pneumonia
https://centennial.rucares.org/index.php?page=Lobar_Pneumonia
Back to Jeffery Taubenberger:
His father- Heinz Karl Taubenberger, 73, a computer systems analyst who served more than 40 years with the Defense Department, including 20 years of active duty with the Army....Maj. Taubenberger retired from the Defense Department in 1993 as chief of the customer service branch of Defense Information Systems.
A resident of Springfield, he was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. He immigrated to the United States in 1951 and six months later was drafted into the Army, where he served until 1972, when he retired as a major.
He was a computer programmer and systems analyst, and he served at various posts in the United States and overseas, including stints in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 and 1970 and 1971. He was assigned to the Pentagon from 1967 to 1970 and in 1971 and 1972."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2003/10/10/obituaries/2ce61d40-0ba6-4afe-b9cc-2cc0a6a728f8/
Guess who took Fauci's place at NIH?
Researcher of 1918 flu virus takes over NIAID
Jeffery Taubenberger becomes acting director of NIH’s second largest institute
"Jeffery Taubenberger, who gained fame for unearthing samples of the 1918 flu virus, and ultimately sequencing its entire genome, has been named acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Science has learned. Taubenberger, who has been an intramural researcher at NIAID for nearly 19 years, replaces HIV/AIDS researcher Jeanne Marrazzo, whom President Donald Trump’s administration removed from the job on 31 March."
https://www.science.org/content/article/researcher-1918-flu-virus-takes-over-niaid
The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications
"Nonetheless, in seven years of work on a history of the pandemic, this author conducted an extensive survey of contemporary medical and lay literature searching for epidemiological evidence – the only evidence available. That review suggests that the most likely site of origin was Haskell County, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, in January 1918 [1]. If this hypothesis is correct, it has public policy implications."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC340389/
Did these soldiers receive experimental pneumonia serum?
Posted by: Emmaphiladelphia | May 06, 2025 at 02:11 PM