By Mark Blaxill

June 19, 2023

A number of news articles have reported on the death last Thursday of Donald Triplett in Forest Mississippi. Triplett was the first individual with autism—Case 1--described in Leo Kanner’s landmark 1943 paper “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.” Contrary to assertions made in the recent flurry of articles, he was not the oldest individual ever diagnosed with autism. That distinction belongs to Vivian Murdock, Case 6 in Kanner’s paper, who was born on August 29, 1931 (see Her Name Was Vivian The Age of Autism's First Born Child) ; Triplett, who was born on September 8, 1933, was two years younger than Vivian. Nor was he the first seen at Kanner’s clinic at John Hopkins, a distinction that belongs to David Speck, born on June 20, 1932, who was first seen at Hopkins in November 1935. But when Triplett’s parents, Beaman and Mary, brought Donald from Forest Mississippi to see Kanner at Hopkins in October 1938, he was undoubtedly the first person with autism Kanner had ever encountered; Donald clearly made a lasting impression.

Dan Olmsted was the first journalist to locate Kanner’s Case 1; he tracked Triplett down in 2005 in Forest Mississippi, but the recent coverage inappropriately gives that credit to John Donvan and Caren Zucker, who featured Triplett in their 2016 book, In a Different Key. Dan’s discovery came when he was working as an investigative journalist at United Press International (UPI) and Triplett became a centerpiece of our 2010 book The Age of Autism. For the sake of the record (and Dan’s legacy), I have excerpted the section below from our 2017 book Denial.

In 2005 we identified Donald T. as Donald Gray Triplett of Forest, Mississippi. The tipoff was a short paper by Leo Kanner from the 1970s.  He referred to Donald as a bank teller in the small town of Forest, Mississippi—a classic case of too much information in this modern Internet age about a supposedly anonymous medical case study. Looking online for Donald T* in the white pages for Forest, we saw one name and one name only—Donald Triplett, phone and street address given.

A child as disabled as Donald T.—the index case of a striking new condition—now had a house and a listed phone number? We dialed it and got a recording of a perfectly pleasant-sounding older man. After cross checking other information about his family, we realized this had to be Case 1, Donald T. 

After discussing how to approach this discovery, Dan got on a plane and flew to Jackson, then drove into the small town of Forest. We knew that Donald had an older brother, Oliver Beaman Triplett III—known as O.B. (their father went by Beaman). Like his father, O.B. had a law firm on the second floor of a building on the town square. Dan walked in, identified himself, and proceeded to have a conversation we have recounted elsewhere—about how Donald had been severely autistic, but then, in early adolescence, developed a near-fatal case of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The treatment—injected gold salts given over a period of months at the famed Campbell Clinic in Memphis—cleared up not just the arthritis but the most severe autism symptoms, allowing Donald to go to college, work at the family’s Bank of Forest, and now in retirement travel worldwide. In fact, he was out of town during Dan’s visit.

“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” O.B. told us, attributing the improvement to the gold salts regimen. Dan asked him more than once if the treatment, rather the time he had spent with a kindly farm family when he was taken ill, had made the difference. "It sure did," O.B. said. "He became more social.…He just had a miraculous response to the medicine. The pain in his joints went away." Donald has one fused knuckle to show for the nearly fatal affliction.

There was more good news.

"When he was finally released, the nervous condition he was formerly afflicted with was gone," his brother said. "The proclivity to excitability and extreme nervousness had all but cleared up, and after that he went to school and had one more little flare-up (of arthritis) when in junior college.”

Then a correspondent for United Press International, Dan wrote up the discovery. The article appeared on August 15, 2005: “The Age of Autism: Case 1 Revisited,” read the headline. “The first person ever diagnosed with autism lived in a small town in Mississippi,” the article began. “He still does.”

We weren’t the only ones to comment on Donald’s improvement after his gold salts therapy. John Hopkins has kept in touch with the Tripletts for years, and in 1956, Leon Eisenberg, Kanner’s colleague at Hopkins wrote, “On the basis of a tentative diagnosis of Still’s disease [JRA], he was placed empirically on gold therapy with marked improvement....The clinical improvement in his behavior…was accelerated during and after his illness and convalescence at home.”

Dan’s article continued: “Donald T is now 71, and after a ‘miraculous response’ to medical treatment at age 12, he appears to have recovered significantly since his original diagnosis as a 5-year-old.”

Dan didn’t name him. A few years later, we both visited him in Forest for an in-depth interview that we published in our book, The Age of Autism. This time we did name him, using our recorded interview verbatim in our book, whose publication date was September 15, 2010.

There are obvious reasons why Dan’s priority is disregarded in favor of Donvan and Zucker. For one, the propagandistic narrative that pervades their 2016 book, subtitled “The Story of Autism,” takes pains to minimize the relevance of connections between the sharp increases in autism prevalence and exposures to environmental factors, most notably vaccines. Incredibly to us, they argued that “it shouldn’t matter whether there’s an epidemic or not.” In addition, Triplett’s near miraculous recovery has been misused to minimize the seriousness of the disability Kanner diagnosed and that now affects 1 in 36 American children. Instead of noting his remarkable progress, the coverage focuses on the idea that Triplett’s life should “give.. people who have children on different levels of the spectrum hope that their children can live happy and full lives.”

Donald Triplett did live a long and productive life. I met him when Dan and I visited Forest in July 2009; although he clearly showed autistic traits, he had clearly recovered well from his early disability and was a lovely and charming man who had lived a full and independent life.

But Dan and I both felt strongly that the message of his life shouldn’t be the treacly blather that Donvan and Zucker traffic in. Instead, we believed there were far more critical questions about his life experience, the answers to which might provide useful lessons:

• What risk factors did he share with Kanner’s other 10 cases, all of them born in the 1930s?
• Could his physical proximity to lumber operations using ethlymercury-based fungicides have played a causal role in his autism?
• Was his diagnosed autoimmune condition, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, connected in any way to the brain dysfunction underlying his autism?
• How did the treatment with gold salts lead to his recovery and his capacity to live a productive, independent life?

To the extent that Donald Triplett’s life story can shed light on these questions, he can give more to the autism community than just hope. He can give us answers.

Mark Blaxill is co-founder and Editor-At-Large for Age of Autism.

The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children’s Health Defense)

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#1 on AMAZON, and a NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA TODAY and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Over 1,000,000 copies sold despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries, and hit pieces against the author.

The Wuhan Cover-Up: How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19 (Children’s Health Defense)
 
From the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly bestselling author of The Real Anthony Fauci comes an explosive exposé of the cover-up behind the true origins of COVID-19.

Mark Blaxill has updated his prevalence slides to reflect the most current data. The slides are at the end of this post. The article below from The Defender quotes Mark, who is AofA's Editor-At-Large and co-founder.

1 in 36 Kids Have Autism, CDC Says — Critics Slam Agency’s Failure to Investigate Causes

One in 36 (2.8%) 8-year-old children — 4% of boys and 1% of girls — have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), based on an analysis of data from 2020, published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One in 36 (2.8%) 8-year-old children — 4% of boys and 1% of girls — have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), based on an analysis of data from 2020, published today (actual date, 3/23/23) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The latest findings, reported in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, show an increase from the last report, which found 1 in 44 8-year-olds (2.3%) had autism in 2018.

Since the CDC started collecting the data, prevalence estimates have skyrocketed from 1 in 150 in 2000, to today’s estimate of 1 in 36 children.

The trend has persisted for decades. Autism prevalence in the 1990s, which was 1 in 1,000 children, already represented a tenfold increase over the condition’s estimated prevalence in the 1970s.

Commenting on today’s report, Mark Blaxill, from the Executive Leadership Team at Health Choice, told The Defender:

“As the American culture wars have intensified, the harsh reality of the autism epidemic has been tucked away into obscurity as attention has turned to a whole new set of health concerns.

“Today’s new report from the CDC’s ADDM [Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring] Network places the latest ASD rate at 1 in 36 children born in 2012, but that’s not even the largest number out there (a recent survey using NHIS data reported a rate of 1 in 29 children in 2020).”  READ MORE AT THE DEFENDER HERE.

We're approaching the second half of 2022. Another year races on, and real help for autism is at a low point. Go ahead and Google "Autism," just the word. Then look at the news features. Elizabeth Bonker is featured prominently, which is terrific. She's the college Valedictorian who uses spelling to communicate. I will note, and I mean no disrepect to Elizabeth's success, NPR and other news outlets have written that she lost her speech at 15 months.  If she had lost her ability to walk, surely the reports would have said the reason. But regressive autism? Gloss over it and move on. The other news stories are all based on neurodiversity. I suppose we should be grateful there was not a drowning story. Mercury is in retrograde, I'm told. And the world seems to be as broken as can be. I think we should revisit Mark's work. And remember our roots.  Deep and painful as they may be.

###

NOTE:  We'll have an audio file to accompany Anne's transcription.  This is part 1 of a 5 part series. Thank you.

By Anne Dachel

Mark Blaxill Autism Tsunami Part 1

Question 1: Tell us about your study, Autism Tsunami: the Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States.  What motivated you and the other authors to look into the future impact of autism? 

Mark: My motivation has been 20 years long. (Inaudible)…and it was pretty obvious for too long, the numbers were exploding.

California and everywhere you looked, the numbers were going up, and that invalidated the orthodox story line.

(Inaudible) Mark dismissed the official claims of better diagnosing/diagnostic substitution.

And we’ve known that for a long time, Anne.

I first started writing about that in 2001, 2003, in that area. I started writing in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders when they started trying to blame it on diagnostic substitution.

It was obvious that the work that they were doing …(inaudible)

I wrote to them. I got some colleagues to write. …

The authors that argued that it was diagnostic substitution had to retract their findings because it was obvious that they were arithmetically wrong.

The rate of autism was going up, and the rate of intellectual disability was not declining.

Then I wrote a paper that was published in 2004, What’s going on? The question of time trends in autism.

I argued that the rates were going up and it was real, all over the world, particularly in the United States and the UK.

I know you focus very heavily on the United States and the UK both of which have rates that are going up.

And then I kept writing about it.

I wrote a book called The Age of Autism.

I wrote another book called Denial, both with Dan Olmsted.

One in 2010 and another in 2017.

You’re kind of screaming at the universe, please pay attention. This is a crisis.

Anne, you do this every day. I do this in longer cycle projects. We’re doing much of the same work.

Going on a DECADE.  But now Pfizer is King. Why?

###

2019:  As mumps or "mumps like illness" is in the news, we're re-running this post from Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill from 2012. Here we are, 7 years later - 9 years after Krahling and Wlochowski originally launched the suit. Merck is more powerful than ever and vaccine mandates are racing across the nation like wildfires.

From June, 2012.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

At its core, the 55-page whistleblower lawsuit unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia makes one stunning allegation – that pharmaceutical giant Merck traded children’s health to protect monopoly profits, and engaged in a systematic, elaborate, and ongoing fraud to do so.

If the charges – which Merck denies – are true, a 12-month-old child getting a recommended shot containing the mumps vaccine at their pediatrician’s office this morning would not be adequately protected from the disease, and could face serious health complications down the road as a result.

The alleged fraud: a multi-year effort to hide the fact that the mumps vaccine is no longer anywhere near as effective as Merck claims. The project was widely known and approved within the company’s vaccine division and even had a name, Protocol 007, according to the two former Merck scientists who filed the suit more than two years ago under the federal whistleblower statute. Virologists Stephen A. Krahling and Joan A. Wlochowski claim they witnessed the fraud firsthand when they worked at the Merck vaccine laboratory in West Point, Pennsylvania, between 1999 and 2002, and were pressured to participate.

They describe a supervisor manually changing test results that showed the vaccine wasn’t working; hurriedly destroying garbage-bags full of evidence to keep the fraud from being exposed; and lying to FDA regulators who came to the lab after being alerted by the whistleblowers. A top Merck vaccine official told Krahling the matter was a “business decision,” the suit says, and he was twice told the company would make sure he went to jail if he told federal regulators the truth.

The alleged fraud occurred because, in order to maintain its license for the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine, known as the MMRII, Merck needed to show that the mumps vaccine was still as potent as when originally approved in 1967 as a single vaccine, able to induce immunity in 95 percent of those vaccinated. That number, according to vaccine authorities, is crucial because it leads to “herd immunity,” protective against outbreaks even among unvaccinated people. The problem with the mumps vaccine lay in the fact that by the late 1990s, after decades of producing it with the original strain of mumps virus, the vaccine’s effectiveness had steadily declined, the suit says.

By Anne Dachel

Every couple of years when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gets around to updating the autism numbers, which are always increasing and never at a plateau, I’m left wondering one thing: WHAT IF THINGS GET EVEN WORSE?

Part 5

HOW BAD DO THINGS HAVE TO GET?

When will autism become a crisis in America?

 (It should be noted, since I follow this news religiously, that no U.S. health official has ever called autism a crisis. The “C” word is never to be used in the same sentence with the word autism. I’m sure that’s directive sent out to all staffers when talking about autism.)

No reporter has ever inquired about worsening numbers, and officials are never worried.

Ten years ago we learned that one in 38 children in South Korea had autism. We’ve seen one in 27 in Hong Kong, one in 22  school children in Northern Ireland, and most recently, one in every 14 kids in Toms River , NJ, including one in every eight boys.

It’s clear that the people in charge of public health will never really care about autism, even as it buries us.

Question 5: How will we manage to provide for more and more children with developmental disorders in our schools at the same time huge numbers of autistic young people are aging out of school and looking for adult services?    

Mark Blaxill Autism Tsunami Part 5

Mark: One thing about our models, Anne, was that they were all arithmetic. They were programmed. … We had to make assumptions about birth cohorts in children who have not yet come into the world. So we had to assume what the rate of autism was going forward.

So we did arrange some scenarios, because we don’t know that.

And then we applied cost per individual by age. There are numbers on that. You can find that. There’s a literature.

But when you add all that up together and you project it forward, what is left out of that is the budget.

Where does the money come from?

Will there be constraints? What will happen? Will we hit some brick wall that we can’t afford?

We’ll have ghettos of autistic adults because all of a sudden state legislators won’t provide funding, or it’ll break the bank.

There’s a whole dynamic: the provision of dollars and the demand for dollars.  We basically modeled the demand for dollars, but the provision of dollars will not be infinite. It can’t rise forever. There will be pushback, and the system might just break.

You talk to Toby Rogers. Toby and I and Cindy talk about that.

It’s a model, but it’s not the flesh and blood of the real world and the interplay of markets and institutions and resources.

Resources are not endlessly available for populations that don’t earn.

NOTE:  This is part 4 of a 5 part series running all week. Parts 1, 2 and 3 are below. At the end of the series, we'll reorganize to run it in order. Thank you.

By Anne Dachel

What is autism going to cost?

One of the convenient results of the lie that autism is nothing new in the human population is that it seems we’ve somehow been able to handle things. If autistic people have always been around, we’ve provided for them, even if we didn’t call their disability autism.

That’s a delusion, yet it’s still going strong, no matter how bad the numbers get.

The one thing no official has ever called for is a study on the autism rate among adults. Telling us something but never having to show proof is pretty much the history of the federal government when it comes to autism.

My often repeated question has never been talked about: Why can’t young autistic adults go where autistic adults have always gone? We must have done something with them, even if we didn’t call them autistic.

The fact that we’re desperately short of services for these disabled young  adults is more proof of lie we’ve been told.

Meanwhile there are endless stories from across the country over the last two decades about training people to deal with autistic children: fire fighters, ER personnel, police, teachers, airport staff, librarians, doctors and lots of other groups.

We’ve made other adjustments like sensitive Santas in stores at Christmas, autism-friendly movie showings, sensory/calming rooms in schools, to name only a few.

And as this population of autistic children ages out of school and into the adult population, many more adjustments will have to be made, and we’ll all be paying for them. Autism awareness will be everywhere.

Incredibly all this seems to be happening with no questions being asked. Somehow it’s insensitive to talk about where all these kids are coming from.

Mark Blaxill Autism Tsunami Part 4

Question 4:  Where will we see the biggest drain on resources and funding: federal, state, or local levels?

Mark: The question of who pays is going to be a big one, and what we know is that we will see a massive shift in who pays.

Right now most of the autistic population is children, and so what that means is parents pay. Either they pay directly out of their pocket or they lose the ability to work. So there is lost parental productivity.

We’ve all felt that. Autism and fighting for your autistic child is not a good career move.

There’s lost productivity. It’s more often women than men, but there are subtle effects. People’s lives change, and they have fewer children.

There are just so many effects of autism on the parents. There’s a large burden that is borne by the parents.

NOTE:  This is part 3 of a 5 part series running all week. Parts 1 and 2 are below. At the end of the series, we'll reorganize to run it in order. Thank you.

By Anne Dachel

For years I’ve written about something I call “the really big lie about autism.” That is  the continual and baseless claim that all the autism everywhere among our children is merely the result of “better diagnosing/greater awareness/expanded definition” of a disorder that’s always been around.

Each and every time an official increase in the autism has been announced, there was always some federal official assuring the public that they weren’t sure IF THIS INCREASE represented a true increase in the number of children with autism.

Their real meaning was FROM THE LAST OFFICIAL INCREASE, but they knew that the media lackeys  would spin the message to read, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A REAL INCREASE IN AUTISM.

As long as that lie works, they can all relax. Autism only requires recognition and services. Allocate more funds and life goes on.

Back in 2006 I was in Washington with two doctors visiting congressional offices. We had an appointment with the chief of staff of my representative, Dave Obey of Wisconsin. During our meeting we laid out the evidence on the increases in autism and the cost predictions.

Obey’s chief of state’s response was this: “So what’s the solution? Congressmen don’t like problems without solutions.”

The three of responded together, “We have to stop it.”

That pretty much ended our conversation. She wasn’t interested in what that would involve.

Mark Blaxill autism tsunami Part 3

Question 3: Why aren’t health officials focused on this? Why do they continue to tell us with each new rate increase that they are still not sure if more children actually have autism?

Mark:  That’s a really interesting question. I think there are multiple answers.

At one level, most of the people in these jobs have relatively short career time horizons, so they’re looking for their next job. They’re in for not very long.

If they can defer dealing with tough questions for two, five, 10 years, they don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Autism parents have a much longer time horizon. Our time horizon is longer than our own lives. Our time horizon goes decades long

We’re worried about the lives of our children when we’re gone, so we are the ones carrying the message.

At some level it’s just short term, long term thinking.  .

It’s a tough question to answer.

Another reason they don’t answer is they don’t have a good answer that  they like.

NOTE:  This is part 2 of a 5 part series running all week. Part 1 is below. At the end of the series, we'll reorganize to run it in order. Thank you.

By Anne Dachel

A few years ago, the parent of a daughter with severe autism talked with me about the last IEP meeting he attended during her final year in high school.

The father asked the staff about what was next for his child. What adult programs would there be for her?

Her teachers had to admit that they didn’t know of any specific programs in the area at the same time they assured him that they were sure there would be something.

It was no big surprise for him to learn that no one is prepare for young adults with autism. His daughter was moved from one program for developmentally disabled adults to another, with none of them equipped to deal with her behavioral needs. Today social services pays a relative to babysit her all day.

This is but one tiny example of the future that Mark Blaxill talks about here.

Mark Blaxill Autism Tsunami Part 2

Question 2: How bad will things get if the autism rate increases continue at the rate they have in the past?

Mark: It’ll get really bad. We know that. I like to say that before 1930, the rate of autism in the world was effectively zero.

Then Leo Kanner discovered it in a handful of children who were born in the 1930s. He wrote his paper in 1943 after seeing a bunch of children who were unlike any other group he’d ever seen before.

He was the world’s leading expert in child psychiatry. For many years thereafter, in the U.S. at least, the rates were really low, one in 10,000.

Then they began to tick up a little bit in the 70s and 80s, but in the late 90s they went vertical. We haven’t seen the plateau in that curve.

The latest numbers we have are something like three percent in American children. There are numbers that are even higher than that in some places.

What that means is, if you were born in 1930, you’d be 90 today. … So there are people who are alive today who were around when there was no autism. The first cases of autism, some of them are still alive. I have met a couple of them, but they are vanishingly rare.

So we have no system for elderly adults with autism whose parents are no longer with us.

We have been struggling all over the world in special education programs to deal with the onslaught of children.

NOTE:  We'll have an audio file to accompany Anne's transcription.  This is part 1 of a 5 part series. Thank you.

By Anne Dachel

Mark Blaxill Autism Tsunami Part 1

Question 1: Tell us about your study, Autism Tsunami: the Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States.  What motivated you and the other authors to look into the future impact of autism? 

Mark: My motivation has been 20 years long. (Inaudible)…and it was pretty obvious for too long, the numbers were exploding.

California and everywhere you looked, the numbers were going up, and that invalidated the orthodox story line.

(Inaudible) Mark dismissed the official claims of better diagnosing/diagnostic substitution.

And we’ve known that for a long time, Anne.

I first started writing about that in 2001, 2003, in that area. I started writing in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders when they started trying to blame it on diagnostic substitution.

It was obvious that the work that they were doing …(inaudible)

I wrote to them. I got some colleagues to write. …

The authors that argued that it was diagnostic substitution had to retract their findings because it was obvious that they were arithmetically wrong.

The rate of autism was going up, and the rate of intellectual disability was not declining.

Then I wrote a paper that was published in 2004, What’s going on? The question of time trends in autism.

I argued that the rates were going up and it was real, all over the world, particularly in the United States and the UK.

I know you focus very heavily on the United States and the UK both of which have rates that are going up.

And then I kept writing about it.

I wrote a book called The Age of Autism.

I wrote another book called Denial, both with Dan Olmsted.

One in 2010 and another in 2017.

You’re kind of screaming at the universe, please pay attention. This is a crisis.

Anne, you do this every day. I do this in longer cycle projects. We’re doing much of the same work.

Congratulations to authors Mark Blaxill (Age of Autism Editor-At-Large), Toby Rogers and Cynthia Nevison.

Blaxill, M., Rogers, T. & Nevison, C. Autism Tsunami: the Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States. J Autism Dev Disord (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05120-7

Abstract

The cost of ASD in the U.S. is estimated using a forecast model that for the first time accounts for the true historical increase in ASD. Model inputs include ASD prevalence, census population projections, six cost categories, ten age brackets, inflation projections, and three future prevalence scenarios. Future ASD costs increase dramatically: total base-case costs of $223 (175–271) billion/year are estimated in 2020; $589 billion/year in 2030, $1.36 trillion/year in 2040, and $5.54 (4.29–6.78) trillion/year by 2060, with substantial potential savings through ASD prevention. Rising prevalence, the shift from child to adult-dominated costs, the transfer of costs from parents onto government, and the soaring total costs raise pressing policy questions and demand an urgent focus on prevention strategies. Read here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05120-7

The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders is the leading peer-reviewed, scholarly periodical focusing on all aspects of autism spectrum disorders and related developmental disabilities.

By Judith Pinborough-Zimmerman and Mark Blaxill

Like it or not.  Legal or not.  Government collects, maintains, and even shares and sells massive amounts of your personal data.   This data collection starts before you are born and continues after you die.  Government knows your name(s), social security number, age, birthdate, if and whom you married, and when.  Were you ever divorced?  Do you have children? What are your unchanging physical characteristics, like your height and eye color?  Government likely has several photos at different ages, and possibly even your DNA and fingerprints.  Government knows how much you weighed at birth and how much you weighed when you got your first driver’s license.  They know what kind of student you were, if you received special education services, and if you attended public schools, what your grade point average was.  They certainly know how much money you reported making, and how you earned it, every time you filed a tax return.  This list could go on and on including the use of your identifiable data for medical and educational profiling of you, your immediate and extended family members, alive or dead, for any research purpose they deem appropriate. And all of this without your consent.   

Not only is government collecting massive amounts of your personal data, so are private entities.  Your information is routinely gathered by social networks, websites, and businesses across a broad spectrum of situations and circumstances.  Have you ever queried a product or topic in a search engine then to see advertisements or news feeds inundating your social media accounts, emails, etc. about the very topic or product you had just searched hours before? It seems impossible to avoid.  Sometimes helpful and other times extremely annoying and invasive.

These government and private data efforts have become an industry of its own. That industry has many names, but for our purposes here we will call it “big data”. This industry has many components, the keys to which are large diverse sets of information growing at rapid, often exponential, rates.  The purpose of “big data” is to help someone make money somehow, either quickly (often by way of targeted advertisements) or in the future (often by way of targeted research). Many agree “big data” is now a hot new asset class, a way to invest in a new form of intellectual property. 

Businesses all over the world have turned their focus to data as a source of competitive advantage. But some of the biggest participants in the ecosystem of “big data” are large universities involved in medical, pharmaceutical, and biochemical research. These universities typically represent their primary mission as educational: to teach, train and prepare their students for productive careers as scientists and physicians. Increasingly, however, these universities have become focused on a different mission altogether: applying for grants, conducting basic and applied research, pursuing medical innovation, and ultimately securing patents for commercially valuable ideas, which they can then turn around and license for huge returns. If you thought universities paid their bills exclusively through tuition and alumni giving, think again. Increasingly, these universities participate in a different kind of industry, one best described as “big research.”

In the world of big research, whether it’s conducted in public or private universities, “big data” is deployed in the service of multiple applications all the way from electronic health records, drug safety and efficacy, finding a cure for cancer, or new buzzword topics and efforts such as “personalized healthcare”, or “large population-based disease surveillance”.   All the medical data being collected must go somewhere, and it does, into databases all over the world.  With “big data” growth comes huge benefits and the ever-increasing challenges of collecting, transmitting, storing, securing, protecting, sharing, displaying, analyzing, accessing provisions, and -yes-monetizing it.  

It is hard to overstate the value and scope of “big data”.  One area in which big data and big research have come together over the last few decades has been the pursuit of genomic research. Inputs to this research take many forms and require many kinds of data, including (but not limited to), genealogy, disease patterns, heritability patterns, DNA markers, gene expression, etc. Big research grant funds flow liberally to researchers with access to unique archives of such big data.   

UTAH’S UNIQUE POSITION IN THE WORLD OF “BIG DATA”

NOTE: That headline is as relevant today as it was in 2009, when Age of Autism's Mark Blaxill wrote a scathing report on the utter failure of the CDC to act during what we now know is a worldwide autism PANdemic.  An pandemic born from the malicious minds at the CDC from the top down to the scientists who worked on vaccine programs.  Several commenters recalled Mark's brilliant analysis in our comments yesterday, so here it is as a Best Of. 



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By Mark Blaxill - 2009

With the recent (this report was written in 2009) announcement of the "largest ever" study to investigate the causes of autism, run through Kaiser Permanente (the HMO that lost vaccine safety data implicating thimerosal in harming children) and led by Lisa Croen (the epidemiologist who first attempted to deny the autism epidemic with faulty data), sometimes you just want to shake your head and wonder, what on earth is going on down in Atlanta?

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was once a proud and prestigious agency, staffed by the most elite corps of disease fighters on the planet, manning the front lines of the most threatening health problems facing mankind. Today, riven by dissension and ridiculed by many, the CDC has made a mockery of itself in failing to get to the roots of the most critical public health challenges of the day, including, but not limited to, autism. The consequences of its failures are profound. Morale has deteriorated and Congress has been investigating the agency for months.

Reflecting their loss of trust in the CDC's objectivity, autism advocacy groups have actively lobbied to reduce (and even zero out) CDC funding in the Combating Autism Act. The CDC has dual responsibility for monitoring vaccine safety and promoting the vaccine schedule; at the same time it's also responsible for surveillance on diseases like autism. In light of widespread concern over the link between autism and vaccines in the autism parent community, when the CDC announces that it's launching a new effort to find the cause of autism, it's hard not to think of OJ Simpson offering a reward for finding his wife's killer.

It was not always so. Indeed, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, it was the CDC that took the lead—often against the intransigence and conservatism of NIH researchers—in tracking down the causes of the AIDS epidemic and taking steps to reduce its toll on society. For many years, CDC was held up to the world as a model government agency. Yet in autism, we have truly seen the downward spiral of the agency reaching its nadir: defensive, secretive and non-responsive to a health crisis in full flower. There are undoubtedly larger forces affecting the agency and its leadership. But if (as I believe to be the case) there are turning points in the lives of large institutions, critical crossroads at which difficult choices are made, then the CDC's handling of the autism epidemic is certainly one such turning point. Poor choices at crucial moments can lead, not only to negative consequence on a specific issue, like autism, it can cause the institution to lose its way. In a way, autism has been both a strategic and a moral problem for the CDC. For it's in the autism epidemic, I would suggest, that the CDC has truly sold its soul.

Surprisingly, U.S. mortality rates have declined among young people during the lockdown, especially among infants. These trends have gone largely unnoticed and remain unexplained.

Lessons from the Lockdown
Why are so many fewer children dying?

A White Paper from Health Choice

View this paper on the Health Choice website and subscribe to alerts

By Amy Becker and Mark Blaxill

(To review, share and print this White Paper it its original formatting, Download Lessons from the Lockdown HERE..)

June 18, 2020

Covid19 is a serious public health issue, but the breathless reporting among the media of positive tests and an ever-rising death toll does little to instruct us about the true nature of the virus and the unprecedented steps taken to prevent its impact. As in many complex and pervasive health phenomena, there are many ways to measure health effects, but in our view the proper measure of impact is not a narrow or intermediate metric, but rather total health outcomes. In the case of a pandemic virus affecting large populations and where the immediate concern is sharp increases in deaths, the best measure of outcomes is not a selective measure of deaths somehow attributed to the disease but instead is deaths from all causes. For perspective, these deaths must be compared to historical death rates from all causes in prior years (Percent of Expected Deaths). As we will show, a balanced view of the broader American Covid19 experience demonstrates both the scale and variability of its negative outcomes in older Americans, especially the elderly, but also some unexpected positives. Surprisingly, U.S. mortality rates have declined among young people during the lockdown, especially among infants. These trends have gone largely unnoticed and remain unexplained.

Death rates from all causes vary widely and somewhat predictably. The most pronounced variation occurs by age cohort (most deaths occur in the elderly) and by time of year and to a lesser extent by geography. All-cause deaths are cyclical, commonly rising in the winter months and “flu season” and then falling to lower levels as warmer weather arrives. To the extent that death rates vary by region, this is mostly a result of differences in the age mix of residents. In the case of Covid19, death rates are not yet known to be cyclical but they do vary significantly by age and geography.

In the analysis that follows we have examined the evidence on total death rates by geography (mostly by state), by age group and by week (and flu season). We have extracted eight main lessons. Some of these are part of the ongoing conversation around Covid19; others are unexpected or at least have not been widely circulated. Why this discrepancy? Since the infectious disease establishment has controlled the “pandemic” narrative, the variance between this evidence and conventional wisdom is largely driven by longstanding bias and error patterns among the experts in that community.

1. Overall US trend. The Covid19 impact on all-cause deaths has been sharp and clear.
   
   
   
   

 ⁽¹⁾

Tens of thousands more Americans than expected died in a brief period. Before mid-March, overall U.S. deaths were trending at a level no different from recent years at between 55-60,000 per week. Beginning in the week ending on March 28, all-cause deaths began rising sharply, peaking in the week ending April 11 at around 75,000, or 137% of Expected Deaths for the week. Immediately thereafter, all-cause deaths began dropping sharply. Within five weeks, all-cause deaths were back to their typical range. By the week ending May 16, the measurable pandemic death impact had ended even though Covid19-related deaths most certainly had not.

 (2)

Attributing a Cause of Death (COD) to COVID-19 is not always clear-cut, due to significant overlap among COVID-19, Pneumonia, Influenza, and presumably other primary CODs.

 (2)

That said, the spike in deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 occurred in tandem with the spike in all-cause deaths, leaving little doubt that Covid19 was the main contributor to the excess of expected deaths between March 22 and May 9.

By Judith Pinborough Zimmerman and Mark Blaxill, Editor-At-Large, Age of Autism

Despite ongoing increases in the number of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has consistently failed to declare ASD an epidemic.  This public messaging decision highlights the CDC’s ongoing disregard for prevalence increases over time that support the overriding importance of environmental causes rather than genetics causality in this serious childhood health condition.  According to the most recent 2018 survey from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), 1 in 35 American children ages 3-17 have an Autism spectrum Disorder (ASD), over 1.7 million children (see HERE) .

Using a different method, the recently released CDC report from its Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, reported an average ASD rate of 185 per 10,000 among 8-year-old children born in 2008, or 1 in 54. (see,  HERE).  The CDC proudly promotes ADDM as the only collaborative network to track the number and characteristics of children with ASD.  This new rate represents a 9% increase over the 2014 ADDM Network report, which reported a rate of 1 in 59. (see HERE).  Comparing recent ADDM Network ASD rates to those first reported by the network in 2000, there is a staggering 176% increase when compared the earliest ASD report rate of 1 in 149 among 8-year-old children in 2000. (see HERE).  Changes by year and site are shown in Figure 1.

The only acknowledgment of urgency in the 2014 ADDM report, is a sentence buried deep in the text stating that autism was “an urgent public health concern.” In the most recent ADDM 2016 report, an autism rate of 1 in 54 is merely “a continuing public health concern” as shown in Figure 2.    

Instead of raising the alarm over their unbending upward trend line, the CDC reserves its main concerns for racial equality: applauding the fact that autism in African Americans is now broadly similar to that of white and Asian Americans.  Using the ADDM Network methodology, ASD cases are identified through a review and abstraction of records followed by experienced clinicians who systematically review information to determine ASD case status.  The CDC claims its methodological approach provides the “best possible estimate currently available of prevalence of ASDs without conducting complete population screening and diagnostic clinical case confirmation.” (see, HERE).  If the CDC believes ASD rate increases over time are result of racial inequities, why haven’t they recommended population screening and diagnostic case confirmation in underserved populations to obtain more accurate statistics?

The ADDM Network has no evidence of overall flattening or declining ASD rates.  There are, however, anomalies in the data reported from a number of sites, including most notably Utah, and Maryland.    Maryland’s ascertainment areas changed with the inclusion of a second site with reduced access to school records. In Utah’s case, as one of us has pointed out in her 2013 complaint, intentional deviations from the ADDM Network methodological procedures were allowed and covered up by the ADDM Network and University of Utah (U of U).

The two of us share a longstanding concern over the CDC’s failure to sound the alarm with respect to the sharp and ongoing increases in autism rates. One of us has been critical of CDC’s fraudulent misuse of statistics for nearly two decades. Another of us, was once a CDC insider and Principal Investigator for the Utah ADDM site, Utah Registry of Autism and Developmental Disabilities. After beginning to raise concerns over environmental causation, data errors and privacy violations in the Utah autism data one of us (Zimmerman) was summarily dismissed from her position. She has since filed a series of successful lawsuits against her former employer the U of U.

In addition, Zimmerman became so concerned about intentional data manipulation and public messaging by ADDM officials, she asked two United States Congressmen, Utah Democrat Ben McAdams and Florida Republican Bill Posey, to support a congressional investigation into research fraud by the ADDM Network and U of U. ( Read the letter here) Zimmerman was the original CDC grant awardee and the Utah ADDM principle investigator from 2002-2013.   Zimmerman believes she now has enough evidence to show serious violations of federal health and education privacy laws and intentional deviations from predetermined ADDM study protocols by U of U with the complicity of ADDM Network Officials.

While the world panics over COVID 19, the CDC’s official autism rate keeps rising, up 10% from 2006 to 2008 birth years

View a 12 Powerpoint Presentation here: 1 in 54 born in 2008 by Mark Blaxill. Each slide also follows at the end of this post.

By Mark Blaxill

Every two years, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts out a new report from its Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network. The 2016 report, a survey of 11 states, was just released and reported an average autism rate of 185 per 10,000 among 8-year-old children born in 2008, or 1 in 54. That rate was an increase over the 2014 ADDM Network report, which reported a rate of 1 in 59. I’ve summarized the new reports findings in the attached slides (see HERE).

Nestled within the report’s detail are a number of disturbing findings

• New Jersey, one the ADDM Network’s most experienced and consistent reporting sites, reported an autism rate of 3.14%, or in 1 in 32, the highest rate reported anywhere
• Among young boys born in NJ in 2008, the autism rate reached 5%, or 1 in 20 boys
• Overall rates rose despite actual declines in 4 of 11 reporting states like Minnesota, Maryland, Missouri and Colorado.
• The overall autism rate in boys rose to 1 in 34 from 1 in 38.
• This ongoing explosion in autism rates is echoed by similar increases in rates from the National Survey of Childhood Health (NSCH), which has reported rates of 1 in 36 and higher (see 1 in 36: ASD Rate Set a New Record High in 2016 ).

All of this news will be lost as the report has been released in the midst of the COVID 19 panic. It’s always dangerous to compare public health crises, but consider this. If instead of raising the threat of death among the elderly for a few short months, some new but different coronavirus permanently disabled close to 3% of American children in a pandemic fashion, how do you think our country should react?

I don’t doubt the public health response would be even more aggressive than today’s COVID 19 response. But because the autism epidemic has been normalized, these new findings will pass by almost entirely unnoticed.

Instead, the CDC not only continues its practice of autism epidemic denial, it has downgraded its concern. In the 2014 ADDM report, a sentence buried deep in the text acknowledged that autism was “an urgent public health concern.” In today’s release, an autism rate of 1 in 54 is merely “a continuing public health concern.” And instead of raising the alarm over their unbending trend line, the CDC reserves its main concerns for racial equality: applauding the fact that autism in African Americans is now broadly similar to that of white and Asian Americans.

“Overall, the magnitude of prevalence differences by race and ethnicity has declined in recent year. Reduction of these disparities might indicate progress toward enhanced detection of ASD among all children.”

This is all a part of CDC’s ongoing to a commitment to its own orthodoxies, beliefs that fly in the face of the reality of the evidence on autism time trends. All in the interest of their self-congratulatory talking points, which persistently claim that if autism rates are rising, well then they must be doing a better job! From their Frequently Asked Questions page, we can still see the following pabulum

Q: Is there an ASD epidemic?

A: More people than ever before are being diagnosed with an ASD. It is unclear exactly how much of this increase is due to a broader definition of ASD and better efforts in diagnosis. However, a true increase in the number of people with an ASD cannot be ruled out. We believe the increase in the diagnosis of ASD is likely due to a combination of these factors.

CDC is working with partners to study the prevalence of ASD over time, so that we can find out if the number of children with these disorders is rising, dropping, or staying the same.

We do know that ASD are more common than we thought before and should be considered an important public health concern.

I wrote at greater length on this several years ago. (see Mark Blaxill: Lies, Damned Lies and CDC Autism Statistics ). How truly tragic how little things have changed.

Mark Blaxill is Editor-At-Large for Age of Autism.

Mark wrote this post 3 years ago, following Dan's death on January 23, 2017. We miss his humor, his insight, his journalism expertise and his guiding hand each and every day.

By Mark Blaxill

Dan Olmsted’s “Weekly Wrap,” his regular Saturday column, was one of my favorite weekend pleasures. Dan’s death last weekend makes his January 21^st version his last. So in his honor, I spent much of this week connecting with a few folks who knew him well in order to write a tribute to him in this space. A final wrap.

Dan was born and raised in Danville Illinois, started his career there and maintained close ties to friends and family in the region. His sister Sallie died last year but his other sister Rosie still lives in Wilmette. She has long been a fierce supporter of Dan’s work. Rosie knew from an early age that Dan was a uniquely brilliant and talented journalist. She was a great advocate for the books we wrote together and especially pleased—Dan told me-- that in The Age of Autism, I insisted that we put Dan’s name first on the marquee! (Dan and I actually competed to be the second author and eventually decided to take turns).

Dan was a journalist from very early in life. While in high school he wrote a column, High Times (the “high” stands for high school, nothing illegal!), for Danville’s local newspaper The Commercial News. His talent was apparent early.

“Dan and I were classmates at Danville High School,” wrote Bina Connelly on the comments section underneath his obituary. “Even then, we knew he would leave a mark, make a difference. He was kind, thoughtful, intelligent, passionate. I am humbled to have known him.” Dan’s friend of 40 years, Melissa Merli, tells me he is still in touch with his high school English teacher, who plans to attend his memorial service.

A career in journalism was on Dan’s radar from the very beginning. An English degree at Yale (class of 1974) separated his stints at The Commercial News, a Gannett paper. From there he went to The Democrat and Chronicle, Gannett’s flagship paper in Rochester, New York. On the Gannett fast track, Dan went on to be a founding editor of USA Today in 1982 and its 1984 spinoff, USA Weekend, where he worked for 15 years. Following a brief and abortive stint at an internet start-up in 1999, Dan moved over to United Press International in 2000. Laid off in 2007 after a series of cutbacks at UPI, he moved on to launch the Age of Autism, “the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic.”

Below is Mark Blaxill's testimony to the Public Health Committee in Massachusetts last Tuesday. Despite a snowstorm that delayed proceedings, more than 600 people attended to voice their opposition to bills including the "Community immunity act."  The "day" ended after midnight on Wednesday, such is the dedication of the Health Choice community.

###

Vaccine mandates are bad policies based on false premises

My name is Mark Blaxill. I’m a co-founder of Health Choice 4 Action and the Canary Party. A graduate of Princeton and the Harvard Business School. I lived in Boston and Cambridge for close to 40 years, much of it working for The Boston Consulting Group where I was a Senior Vice President and leader of the Strategy Practice. I’ve written four books, published numerous scientific papers and represented the autism parent community on a range of government panels. Depending on who you talk to, I’m either a stealth representative of the “controlled opposition” or a dangerous “anti-vaxxer” and a serious threat to the public health.

The truth? I’m neither of the above. What I am is the parent of a beautiful 24-year-old daughter who I believe to be vaccine injured. I became an advocate because I want to prevent what happened to her from happening to others.

As an experienced business analyst, I want to highlight one critical point today: there is a great deal of money in the vaccine business. Last year, four companies—Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Pfizer- generated $26B in vaccine revenue, with profits just under $10B. That’s after deducting marketing, lobbying and R&D expenses. That many billions of dollars go a long way. They pay for TV ads, for lobbyists, for PR campaigns and a great deal of influence, including (and especially) with medical organizations.  And back in 1986, they pushed for and passed federal legislation that exempts vaccine makers from any liability for vaccine injury.

Back them, no one saw what was coming. Now it’s more clear. It’s not enough for pharma to simply protect DTP, MMR and polio vaccines. Now they need the vaccine business to grow. For stock prices to rise. And for opposition to be squelched. But there’s a problem with their growth ambitions: as the program has multiplied, concerns have grown. And what’s the response? Certainly not what it should be, which is more and better science on vaccine safety.

Instead, there is a new PR strategy by vaccine promoters to weaponize measles outbreaks and to pursue a newly aggressive program of vaccine mandates. These mandates are bad policies based on false premises.

Think about how cynical this PR campaign is. If you were really worried about measles, you’d develop targeted health policies focused on measles and measles alone. Instead we’ve seen broad attacks on the basic human right of free, prior and informed consent. We are using fear to raise Merck’s stock price and force parents to accept the entire, liability-free vaccine program, not just measles vaccines. Measles outbreaks are the Trojan Horse the medical industry is using to sell the newly bloated vaccination schedule, an uncontrolled experiment performed on a generation of children.

By Kim Rossi

Our own Mark Blaxill was one of the speakers are yesterday's VIE event in Washington, DC. Allow me a stroll down  memory lane, if you will. In the Spring of 2006, my daughters were 10, 9 and 5 years old, and I was just beginning to write, blog and run a popular Yahoo group (RIP) called BioMedHeads. We'd left our home in Ohio and moved into my childhood home in Massachusetts with my Mom and Dad, having no where else to go. A scrubbed version of this story is in my memoir.

I attended an autism event in Waltham, Massachusetts that included a luncheon, where I sat next to a deep voiced, sharp coiffed autism father named Mark Blaxill.
We shared stories about our vaccine injured daughters and made a connection. I think he knew about my writing and I certainly knew who he was, as a leader in the autism vaccine nightmare community.

Fast forward a year. I had launched Rescue Post for JB Handley and was approached by none other than Dan Olmsted (THE Dan Olmsted from UPI!!!) and Mark Blaxill about joining forces to create a site called The Age of Autism, named after Dan's columns and a book Dan and Mark were writing about the genesis of autism. (Photo credit L Barli on FB) 

I won't go into all the ways Mark Blaxill has helped my career and family over the years. But I will tell you that there is no finer man to help us change the course of history and save childhood. And it's not the just speaking voice. LOL. Dramatic? Yes. Controversial? Some readers will think so. I do not.

Last night I watched VAXXED II, The People's Story. This movie should be required viewing for every single state and Federal politician in the United States, even if the only segment they watch is about Gardasil. The boys and girls, teens, young adults who have been maimed by Merck Gardasil and able to talk about it  is a shocking testament to the avarice and true mission of our vaccine program. Hint, health is not at the top, middle or bottom of the list. 

In 2010, almost a decade ago, Mark Blaxill wrote a scathing series here at Age of Autism that should have been front page news of every single newspaper in the USA. It was not. It's called "Gardasil: A License to Kill," and it chronicles the early days of this vaccine, when it was for women 16 to about mid twenties and promoted to stop cervical cancer. Now? States are pushing this farcical shot series for boys (under the guise of preventing cancer in their some day partners) and girls as young as KINDERGARTEN. Some states are eyeing it as part of the school mandates.  NY bill would require HPV vaccine for children to enter school, daycare  Here is the three part series below.

Gardasil: A License to Kill By Mark Blaxill
 
Part 1:  How A Public-Private Partnership Made the Government Merck’s Gardasil Partner

“Perhaps no other recent product on the market demonstrates successful health care technology transfer better than the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, produced by Merck & Co. and approved by the FDA in June 2006,” proclaimed a recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) newsletter. In a February 23, 2007 article entitled “From Lab to Market: The HPV Vaccine”, the NIH Record celebrated the pivotal role of government researchers in developing Merck’s Gardasil product. “Based largely on technology developed at NIH,” the newsletter reported, “the vaccine works to prevent four types of the sexually transmitted HPV that together cause 70 percent of all cervical cancer and 90 percent of genital warts (HERE).
 
The occasion motivating this celebratory article was the “Philip S. Chen, Jr. Distinguished Lecture on Innovation and Technology Transfer” given by Douglas T. Lowy, one of the NIH scientists involved in developing the HPV vaccine. In the ceremony pictured above, Lowy is receiving an honorary poster from the head of NIH at the time, Elias Zerhouni, who took advantage of the occasion to shower praise on his team’s work, one he viewed as a model for future efforts. “It’s a ‘heroic’ story about the effort to fight cervical cancer, the second most deadly cancer for women worldwide, said NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni,” in the NIH Record’s account. “He noted that he has talked about the vaccine’s creation to Congress and with the President on his recent visit to NIH. How researchers took the technology ‘from the lab to the marketplace is a journey we can learn from,’ Zerhouni said.”
 
While Zerhouni was bragging to anyone in Washington D.C. who would listen about the NIH team’s role in this historic accomplishment, the vaccine's developers were actively spreading the news of their achievement in scientific circles. It’s hard to blame them, because at the time Lowy and his colleague John T. Schiller, leaders of the team that had invented the technology for the “virus-like particles” (or VLPs) that made Gardasil possible, were in some pretty heady company. In 2008, Harald zur Hausen, the scientist who discovered the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) in cervical cancer during the 1980s, received one half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine; the two researchers at the Pasteur Institute who had discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) had to share the other half.

Note: Kim is taking a summer break and we're running our favorite "Best of" posts.

Please consider a donation to our "Stop the Summer of Censorship" campaign. Many mainstream platforms have censored articles that discuss health and vaccination choice, refusal, even safety. We've seen articles replaced by "404 Error" messages. Age of Autism is more important and valuable than ever. And we need your support to keep the rebel alliance, as our dear friend Dan called us, going strong. You can send a check to Autism Age, PO Box 110546 Trumbull CT 06611. THANK YOU.

Donate through Network For Good Here

By Mark Blaxill - 2016

The National Health Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released its latest prevalence rate for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in American children this Wednesday. Their “data brief”, which is based on information gathered in the National Health Information Survey (NHIS), reported an ASD rate for 2016 of 2.76%, or 1 in 36 American children (1).

This is the highest rate ever recorded in a national survey of children in the United States and was an increase from the rate of 1 in 45 children (or 2.24%) reported in the 2014 NHIS survey (2). The ASD information reported in these surveys includes children between the ages of 3 and 17 years of age and any diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder, including Asperger’s syndrome.

This startling new peak received virtually no media coverage and was downplayed by the NCHS, whose headline finding was that--despite setting a new American record with a 1 in 36 ASD rate: “There was not a statistically significant change in the prevalence of children ever diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder from 2014 to 2016.” (1)

Yet this new 2016 rate is a sharp increase from a highly similar 2007 report, the first year in which an NCHS survey included the question, “Has a doctor or health professional ever told you that [sample child] had Autism, Asperger’s disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, or autism spectrum disorder?” The 2007 report, also measuring the rate for 3-17 year-old children, reported an autism rate of 1.1%, or 1 in 91 American children (3).

The NCHS, like the CDC a department within the Department of Health and Human Services, follows a different methodology in the NHIS than the approach used by the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Network (ADDM), which last reported an autism rate of 1 in 68 American children for 8-year-olds born in 2004 (4). The ADDM network’s estimates likely include fewer children with Asperger’s (only about 10% of the ADDM cases have an Asperger’s diagnosis), which may explain why NHIS ASD rates have been generally higher than ADDM rates.

Note: Kim is taking a summer break and we're running our favorite "Best of" posts.

By Mark Blaxill - 2009

It’s official now, real autism rates have exploded to 1 in 100 American children. We’re facing a national public health emergency of historic proportions. Bigger than swine flu. Bigger than polio. Bigger than almost anything one can imagine except AIDS. No matter how hard some may try, it’s impossible to escape the inexorable upward march of the numbers.  Even Tom Insel, head of autism research at NIH and not exactly the autism world’s greatest forward thinker, has conceded the obvious: “There is no question that there has got to be an environmental component here.”

Following last week’s release of the latest CDC autism surveillance report, no amount of methodological obfuscation (“autism prevalence has clearly gone up but there are no real incidence studies”), epidemiological nihilism (“we simply can’t know without large scale, well-controlled, prospective studies”) or social deconstructionist nonsense (“autism is an intolerant invention of modern society”) should escape scorn . Anyone with brain, a conscience and an ounce of integrity must acknowledge that we face a crisis. Meanwhile, those who would accuse the autism parent community of “denialism”, unscientific reasoning and irresponsible irrationality need to explain how their own theories, so dependent on the evidence-free suggestion that rates are rising because of “better diagnosing”, deserve to be considered respectable scientific speech. There is no more unscientific position in public health today than the fiction that rising autism rates come from better diagnosing. Let’s be clear, the only evidence for better diagnosing is wishful thinking. Our public health institutions deserve no credit for a job done better; quite the contrary, they deserve an investigation into their negligence.

Note: Kim is taking a summer break and we're running our favorite "Best of" posts.

Please consider a donation to our "Stop the Summer of Censorship" campaign. Many mainstream platforms have censored articles that discuss health and vaccination choice, refusal, even safety. We've seen articles replaced by "404 Error" messages. Age of Autism is more important and valuable than ever. And we need your support to keep the rebel alliance, as our dear friend Dan called us, going strong. You can send a check to Autism Age, PO Box 110546 Trumbull CT 06611. And don't forget matching gifts! Especially if you work for a pharma company. Ha Ha! THANK YOU.

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By Mark Blaxill - Originally published in 2010. The full series follows below. Please share.
 
Part 1:  How A Public-Private Partnership Made the Government Merck’s Gardasil Partner

“Perhaps no other recent product on the market demonstrates successful health care technology transfer better than the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, produced by Merck & Co. and approved by the FDA in June 2006,” proclaimed a recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) newsletter. In a February 23, 2007 article entitled “From Lab to Market: The HPV Vaccine”, the NIH Record celebrated the pivotal role of government researchers in developing Merck’s Gardasil product. “Based largely on technology developed at NIH,” the newsletter reported, “the vaccine works to prevent four types of the sexually transmitted HPV that together cause 70 percent of all cervical cancer and 90 percent of genital warts (HERE).
 
The occasion motivating this celebratory article was the “Philip S. Chen, Jr. Distinguished Lecture on Innovation and Technology Transfer” given by Douglas T. Lowy, one of the NIH scientists involved in developing the HPV vaccine. In the ceremony pictured above, Lowy is receiving an honorary poster from the head of NIH at the time, Elias Zerhouni, who took advantage of the occasion to shower praise on his team’s work, one he viewed as a model for future efforts. “It’s a ‘heroic’ story about the effort to fight cervical cancer, the second most deadly cancer for women worldwide, said NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni,” in the NIH Record’s account. “He noted that he has talked about the vaccine’s creation to Congress and with the President on his recent visit to NIH. How researchers took the technology ‘from the lab to the marketplace is a journey we can learn from,’ Zerhouni said.”
 
While Zerhouni was bragging to anyone in Washington D.C. who would listen about the NIH team’s role in this historic accomplishment, the vaccine's developers were actively spreading the news of their achievement in scientific circles. It’s hard to blame them, because at the time Lowy and his colleague John T. Schiller, leaders of the team that had invented the technology for the “virus-like particles” (or VLPs) that made Gardasil possible, were in some pretty heady company. In 2008, Harald zur Hausen, the scientist who discovered the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) in cervical cancer during the 1980s, received one half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine; the two researchers at the Pasteur Institute who had discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) had to share the other half.
 
Perhaps campaigning for their own place in the pantheon of medical heroes, Lowy and Schiller described their VLP technology in several review articles on the history and development of the Merck vaccine. These treatments were studiously scientific in tone and at points openly critical of their commercial partner, as the authors commented with disapproval on the high price Merck was charging for Gardasil. But in one May 2006 review in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, the pair also made the following disclosure about their own commercial interests:
 
“Conflict of interest: The authors, as employees of the National Cancer Institute, NIH, are inventors of the HPV VLP vaccine technology described in this Review. The technology has been licensed by the NIH to the 2 companies, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, that are developing the commercial HPV vaccines described herein.”
 
Attached to an otherwise heroic narrative of the triumph of technology over cancer, this disclosure struck a discordant note. Conflict of interest? Inventors? Vaccine technology? Licenses? Pharmaceutical companies? Commercial vaccines? This isn’t scientific language, but rather the language of money and commerce. What was this unusual concession doing there in the fine print?

Note: Kim is taking a summer break and we're running our favorite "Best of" posts.

Please consider a donation to our "Stop the Summer of Censorship" campaign. Many mainstream platforms have censored articles that discuss health and vaccination choice, refusal, even safety. We've seen articles replaced by "404 Error" messages. Age of Autism is more important and valuable than ever. And we need your support to keep the rebel alliance, as our dear friend Dan called us, going strong. You can send a check to Autism Age, PO Box 110546 Trumbull CT 06611. And don't forget matching gifts! Especially if you work for a pharma compan y. Ha Ha! THANK YOU.

Donate through Network For Good Here

By Mark Blaxill

September 5, 2017

On May 8, The Boston Herald published an editorial calling for my execution. They didn’t know much about me, but had heard about an event in Minneapolis at which I spoke. I learned subsequently the piece was written by Rachelle Cohen, editor of the newspaper’s editorial page. Her brief essay didn’t refer to me by name, but cited a Washington Post article from May 5^th that did, describing me as “a Boston businessman” and “anti-vaccine activist.”

Cohen wrote that during "this latest outbreak [of measles in Minnesota], anti-vaccine groups have fanned the flames, making it hard for public health officials and doctors to be heard above the noise. These are the facts: Vaccines don’t cause autism. Measles can kill. And lying to vulnerable people about the health and safety of their children ought to be a hanging offense." [emphasis added]

Four months later, the much-hyped Minnesota measles outbreak has passed with little notice, but there are important lessons to be learned from the events surrounding it. What really happened? Why all the fuss? What are the salient facts about measles, vaccines and autism? What was my role in the process? Most importantly, what does this episode teach us about the state of public health policy and the ongoing concern for vaccine safety and parental rights. To explore those questions, let’s first take a look at the outbreak itself.

The Minnesota measles outbreak of 2017

On April 13, the first news report of three measles cases among “toddlers” in Minneapolis was published (see HERE). The next day, confirming five more cases, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) issued a press release with additional information. Of the then eight confirmed cases, all were unvaccinated children living in Hennepin County. Seven of the eight were “Somali Minnesotans.” Six of these children were hospitalized.

Over the next three months, as the count of confirmed cases rose to 79, the initial pattern continued. The outbreak was largely confined to children (73 were under 10 years old) who were Somali-American (64 of 79) residents of Hennepin County (70 of 79), most of whom (71 of 79) were unvaccinated. The case count rose quickly to reach 73 by the end of May and then leveled off sharply. Six additional cases were confirmed, until the last case report on July 13.

By late April, MDH was posting daily case updates on their web-site (see HERE). This was both a response to and a stimulus for widespread media coverage, first in local news outlets and then nationally. At the outset, these were brief, factual reports, but it didn’t take long for the MDH to start pointing fingers. On May 5, The Washington Post published the article that caught Rachelle Cohen’s attention, “Anti-vaccine activists spark a state’s worst measles outbreak in decades.” (see HERE). Health officials complained specifically that the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota (VSCM) “in the middle of their crisis” was informing Somali-Americans that they had the right according to Minnesota law to opt out of vaccination based on conscientiously held beliefs. Reminding parents of their rights was a message these officials felt was “exactly the opposite of what clinicians and public health officials are urging, which is to get vaccinated as soon as possible.”

On August 25, the MDH officially “declared an end to the measles outbreak of spring and summer 2017.” Their news release, which was not widely reported, described why they waited so long to announce something that had been clear for weeks.

Note: Kim is taking a summer break and we're running our favorite "Best of" posts.

Please consider a donation to our "Stop the Summer of Censorship" campaign. Many mainstream platforms have censored articles that discuss health and vaccination choice, refusal, even safety. We've seen articles replaced by "404 Error" messages. Age of Autism is more important and valuable than ever. And we need your support to keep the rebel alliance, as our dear friend Dan called us, going strong. You can send a check to Autism Age, PO Box 110546 Trumbull CT 06611. And don't forget matching gifts! Especially if you work for a pharma company. Ha Ha! THANK YOU.

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By Mark Blaxill - January 28, 2017

Dan Olmsted’s “Weekly Wrap,” his regular Saturday column, was one of my favorite weekend pleasures. Dan’s death last weekend makes his January 21^st version his last. So in his honor, I spent much of this week connecting with a few folks who knew him well in order to write a tribute to him in this space. A final wrap.

Dan was born and raised in Danville Illinois, started his career there and maintained close ties to friends and family in the region. His sister Sallie died last year but his other sister Rosie still lives in Wilmette. She has long been a fierce supporter of Dan’s work. Rosie knew from an early age that Dan was a uniquely brilliant and talented journalist. She was a great advocate for the books we wrote together and especially pleased—Dan told me-- that in The Age of Autism, I insisted that we put Dan’s name first on the marquee! (Dan and I actually competed to be the second author and eventually decided to take turns).

Dan was a journalist from very early in life. While in high school he wrote a column, High Times (the “high” stands for high school, nothing illegal!), for Danville’s local newspaper The Commercial News. His talent was apparent early.

“Dan and I were classmates at Danville High School,” wrote Bina Connelly on the comments section underneath his obituary. “Even then, we knew he would leave a mark, make a difference. He was kind, thoughtful, intelligent, passionate. I am humbled to have known him.” Dan’s friend of 40 years, Melissa Merli, tells me he is still in touch with his high school English teacher, who plans to attend his memorial service.

A career in journalism was on Dan’s radar from the very beginning. An English degree at Yale (class of 1974) separated his stints at The Commercial News, a Gannett paper. From there he went to The Democrat and Chronicle, Gannett’s flagship paper in Rochester, New York. On the Gannett fast track, Dan went on to be a founding editor of USA Today in 1982 and its 1984 spinoff, USA Weekend, where he worked for 15 years. Following a brief and abortive stint at an internet start-up in 1999, Dan moved over to United Press International in 2000. Laid off in 2007 after a series of cutbacks at UPI, he moved on to launch the Age of Autism, “the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic.”

As mumps or "mumps like illness" is in the news, we're re-running this post from Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill from 2012. Here we are, 7 years later - 9 years after Krahling and Wlochowski originally launched the suit. Merck is more powerful than ever and vaccine mandates are racing across the nation like wildfires.

From June, 2012.

By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

At its core, the 55-page whistleblower lawsuit unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia makes one stunning allegation – that pharmaceutical giant Merck traded children’s health to protect monopoly profits, and engaged in a systematic, elaborate, and ongoing fraud to do so.

If the charges – which Merck denies – are true, a 12-month-old child getting a recommended shot containing the mumps vaccine at their pediatrician’s office this morning would not be adequately protected from the disease, and could face serious health complications down the road as a result.

The alleged fraud: a multi-year effort to hide the fact that the mumps vaccine is no longer anywhere near as effective as Merck claims. The project was widely known and approved within the company’s vaccine division and even had a name, Protocol 007, according to the two former Merck scientists who filed the suit more than two years ago under the federal whistleblower statute. Virologists Stephen A. Krahling and Joan A. Wlochowski claim they witnessed the fraud firsthand when they worked at the Merck vaccine laboratory in West Point, Pennsylvania, between 1999 and 2002, and were pressured to participate.

They describe a supervisor manually changing test results that showed the vaccine wasn’t working; hurriedly destroying garbage-bags full of evidence to keep the fraud from being exposed; and lying to FDA regulators who came to the lab after being alerted by the whistleblowers. A top Merck vaccine official told Krahling the matter was a “business decision,” the suit says, and he was twice told the company would make sure he went to jail if he told federal regulators the truth.

The alleged fraud occurred because, in order to maintain its license for the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine, known as the MMRII, Merck needed to show that the mumps vaccine was still as potent as when originally approved in 1967 as a single vaccine, able to induce immunity in 95 percent of those vaccinated. That number, according to vaccine authorities, is crucial because it leads to “herd immunity,” protective against outbreaks even among unvaccinated people. The problem with the mumps vaccine lay in the fact that by the late 1990s, after decades of producing it with the original strain of mumps virus, the vaccine’s effectiveness had steadily declined, the suit says.

Merck is the only company licensed in the United States to produce the individual mumps vaccine, as well as the MMRII and a newer shot called the MMRV or ProQuad, which also contains the chickenpox vaccine. That gives Merck an effective monopoly on the product line, which by our estimate has brought the company as much as $10 billion in business since 2000. The complaint conservatively estimates MMRII purchases by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at $750 million.

If tests showed the mumps vaccine is ineffective -- or far less so than promised -- the door would be opened to any number of adverse events for Merck, from federal regulators pulling the licenses for all of its mumps-vaccine-containing products, to intensified competition from other manufacturers if they became aware of the problem.

What’s more, weak efficacy could be triggering real-time, real-world health problems here and abroad, where a version of the MMRII is also used. Mumps outbreaks unexpectedly occurred in the United States in 2006 and in 2009-10, reflecting the three-year cycle in which younger children become exposed. A total of 6,500 cases were reported in a highly vaccinated population in the Midwest in 2006, according to the suit, and another 5,000 cases in 2009; in the years leading up to the first outbreak, the annual average had been 265 cases.

If that pattern holds true, another outbreak might be due as early as this summer.

Additionally, poor vaccine efficacy has the effect of pushing some cases of mumps to a later age, when mumps is a more dangerous disease that can induce sterility in males. One intriguing implication is that no vaccine at all might have been better than the one Merck currently produces.

The suit claims that as a result of the fraud, the U.S. government has been cheated out of millions of dollars paid by the CDC to buy the vaccine for its immunization program. It says the agency, and other government bodies, were wrongly deprived of the knowledge they needed to make proper use of taxpayer money and sound medical decisions. (The CDC predicted several years ago that mumps would be eradicated in the United States by 2010, an outcome predicated on the idea that the vaccine worked.)

The suit describes Merck’s allegedly no-holds-barred effort to protect its market position. “Merck set out to conduct testing of its mumps vaccine that would support its original efficacy finding. In performing this testing, Merck’s objective was to report efficacy of 95 percent or higher regardless of the vaccine’s true efficacy. The only way Merck could accomplish this was through manipulating its testing procedures and falsifying the test results. … Krahling and Wlochowski participated on the Merck team that conducted this testing and witnessed firsthand the fraud in which Merck engaged to reach its desired results. Merck internally referred to the testing as Protocol 007.”

On Sunday, January 6, 2019, Sharyl Attkisson devoted her program Full Measure to the Vaccine Debate. During Attkisson's interview with Rolf Hazlehurst, he spoke of  2013 hearings that had been scheduled to analyze and review the controversial, and broken (or some  might sight purposefully design flawed) National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) - and then abruptly cancelled. Attkisson's report attributed the cancellation to likely pressure from the pharmaceutical industry and showed interviews supporting that point with current and former members of Congress who are concerned about the NVICP.

We wrote about the "delayed" hearings back in November of 2013, OGR Chairman Issa "Delays" Hearings on Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Affected Families Stunned.OGR Chairman Issa "Delays" Hearings on Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Affected Families Stunned.

We're now some 6 years behind on a review of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. SIX YEARS. In that time, chronic illness and maladaptive behaviors are crushing school districts from coast to coast and families are reeling under the burden of caring for sick children who, if injured by any other product in the United States, would have been justly compensated.

From the Canary Party YouTube Channel: On November 7th, 2013, members of the vaccine injury community held a briefing for congressional staffers to present many of the problems in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in preparation for hearings in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Professor Mary Holland, Head of Graduate Legal Studies at NYU, and Rolf Hazelhurst Father in one of the test cases In the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, and Assistant District Attorney General, State of Tennessee, present the case against the VICP and call for reform.



The hearings did not take place. Below is a letter sent in 2014 from Canary Party's Mark Blaxill and Jennifer Larson to then Oversight and government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa. Issa did not seek reelection last year. 

Chairman Darrell Issa
Oversight and Government Reform Committee
2157 Rayburn Building
Washington DC

Dear Chairman Issa,

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss recent developments with your staffers. On behalf of the many dedicated advocates who have been working so hard on the VICP hearing, we must express our great disappointment over your decision to defer hearings into the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).

Thriving with a Tic Disorder

If you have a tic disorder (or are the parent of a child who does), you may feel like the disorder controls your life. You don’t want to miss the Thriving with a Tic Disorder Summit.

It’s a free online video interview series designed to help you better understand tic disorders, manage them naturally AND navigate any social situation with confidence.

Attend this online event with power-packed conversations for FREE using this link: Thriving with a Tic Disorder

You’ll hear from people living with a tic disorder, doctors who are uncovering potential causes of tic disorders, coaches and experts who can help you live with confidence, in addition to other specialists who are finding ways to completely manage and perhaps, even heal tic disorders.

The series goes live on Wednesday, January 16th, so sign up now to make sure you don’t miss out!

Wednesday, January 16: Sheila Rogers Demare
Thursday, January 17: Hayley Gripp
Friday, January 18: Dr. William Walsh
Saturday, January 19: Shula Edelkind
Sunday, January 20: Jane Hersey
Monday, January 21: Dr. Robert Melillo
Tuesday, January 22: Billie Smith
Wednesday, January 23: Sam Farmer
Thursday, January 24: Ramona Jennex
Friday, January 25: Tamara Lechner
Saturday, January 26: Kathy Giordano
Sunday, January 27: Dr. Alice Lee
Monday, January 28: Anke Zimmermann
Tuesday, January 29: Amy Johnson, PhD
Wednesday, January 30: Janet Rumsey
Thursday, January 31: Dr. Paul Sandor
Friday, February 1: Dr. Victoria Dunckley
Saturday, February 2: Mark Blaxill
Sunday, February 3: Elisabeth Van Every
Monday, February 4: Ricki Light
Tuesday, February 5: Dr. Jan Rowe and Dr. Heather Simpson

You simply must listen to or watch this episode of The High Wire with Del Bigtree featuring Mark Blaxill, JB Handley, Robert Kennedy Jr  and Dr. Brian Hooker. The damn has a crack. And while American children become sicker and less able to accomplish neurotypical development, the pharma/govt cabal is jamming as many fingers into the dike e as possible. The truth, like water, wears away even rock. Thank you to everyone who fights for our kids' health. Our adult kids. Our teens. Our toddlers and babies. And the unborn. This epidemic can not continue unabated without responsibility and yes - reparations.

From Mark Blaxill:

CA autism data has been consistent for years, goes back a long time and has gone from basically zero to over 1%. Generally speaking the CA cases have excluded mild and high functioning diagnoses. 

1. There’s no evidence that CA is unusual. Other states have higher numbers. Including Asperger cases some have much higher rates. 
2. As we know, the major inflection point is around 1990. But the earlier, lower rates began kicking up around 1980 and then the high rates accelerated again around 2007.

One fascinating observation is that as of yesterday, California Autism Prevalence Trends from 1931 to 2014 and Comparison to National ASD Data from IDEA and ADDM has had 25,000 downloads of the article since last week.

JB Handley has written a fantastic new book that debuts this Fall from Chelsea Green Publishing titled How to End the Autism Epidemic.  We ask you to buy a pre-order copy to support JB's tireless work for our children. Thanks. 

California autism prevalence trends from 1931-2014 and comparison to national ASD data from IDEA and ADDM  authored by Mark Blaxill, Cindy Nevison and Walter Zahorodny was published last night in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (JADD).  The paper is Open Access and can be found at this link. Congratulations and thank you to Mark, Cindy and Walter.

California autism prevalence trends from 1931-2014 and comparison to national ASD data from IDEA and ADDM

ABSTRACT:

Time trends in U.S. autism prevalence from three ongoing datasets [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, and California Department of Developmental Services (CDDS)] are calculated using two different methods: (1) constant-age tracking of 8 year-olds and (2) age-resolved snapshots. The data are consistent across methods in showing a strong upward trend over time. The prevalence of autism in the CDDS dataset, the longest of the three data records, increased from 0.001% in the cohort born in 1931 to 1.2% among 5 year-olds born in 2012. This increase began around ~ 1940 at a rate that has gradually accelerated over time, including notable change points around birth years 1980, 1990 and, most recently, 2007.

Because of the deeply concerning issues with our world's health, nutrition, and environment, our own Mark Blaxill recently spoke at The Real Truth About Health Conference. It was completely free to the public, and the videos from the conference are free too.

We encourage you to share this video with your family, friends and as many people as you can to help raise awareness and make a difference.  You can purchase Mark and Dan's final collaborative book Denial here.

Click Here To View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHVwOLDe1B4&feature=youtu.be

We'd like to express our gratitude to Tony Lyons, Publisher at Skyhorse Publishing in New York City. Skyhorse is one of the fastest growing independent publishers in America and one of the few to tackle the toughest, most controversial topics in health and autism. For the next 12 days, we'll be creating a list of books that we hope will interest you. Some will be very familiar, like those from Dan, Mark and me (Kim) and others we hope will be new sources of information and stories to help you navigate your family's autism journey.

Today is day 12 of 12 and I thought it only fitting to feature the book that shares the name with our site. Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill drew an exquisite map of the autism epidemic. Sadly, much of the world is unwilling to acknowledge the man made epidemic that threatens to change the fabric of our nation as boys are affected in such numbers that our socio-economic systems will feel a seismic shift. But this is America. So carry on friends. Buy your holiday gifts. Think about which TV show to binge watch next. Wait for the next Apple phone. There's nothing to see after all. In the AGE OF AUTISM.....

Day 12: The Age of Autism by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill

Day 11: The Setup by Martin Walker

By Mark Blaxill

The National Health Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released its latest prevalence rate for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in American children this Wednesday. Their “data brief”, which is based on information gathered in the National Health Information Survey (NHIS), reported an ASD rate for 2016 of 2.76%, or 1 in 36 American children (1).

This is the highest rate ever recorded in a national survey of children in the United States and was an increase from the rate of 1 in 45 children (or 2.24%) reported in the 2014 NHIS survey (2). The ASD information reported in these surveys includes children between the ages of 3 and 17 years of age and any diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder, including Asperger’s syndrome.

This startling new peak received virtually no media coverage and was downplayed by the NCHS, whose headline finding was that--despite setting a new American record with a 1 in 36 ASD rate: “There was not a statistically significant change in the prevalence of children ever diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder from 2014 to 2016.” (1)

Yet this new 2016 rate is a sharp increase from a highly similar 2007 report, the first year in which an NCHS survey included the question, “Has a doctor or health professional ever told you that [sample child] had Autism, Asperger’s disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, or autism spectrum disorder?” The 2007 report, also measuring the rate for 3-17 year-old children, reported an autism rate of 1.1%, or 1 in 91 American children (3).

The NCHS, like the CDC a department within the Department of Health and Human Services, follows a different methodology in the NHIS than the approach used by the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Network (ADDM), which last reported an autism rate of 1 in 68 American children for 8-year-olds born in 2004 (4). The ADDM network’s estimates likely include fewer children with Asperger’s (only about 10% of the ADDM cases have an Asperger’s diagnosis), which may explain why NHIS ASD rates have been generally higher than ADDM rates.

We invite you to listen to our Editor-At-Large Mark Blaxill talking to Don Imus yesterday about his new book, co-authored with Dan Olmsted, titled Denial: How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future.

CLICK HERE to listen to the audio clip.

Please tune into Imus in the Morning at 7:35am (EDT) on Thursday, September 7 (tomorrow) to hear our own Editor-At-Large Mark Blaxill talk about the new book he co-wrote with Dan Olmsted. 

To find your listing click HERE.

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

By Mark Blaxill

September 5, 2017

On May 8, The Boston Herald published an editorial calling for my execution. They didn’t know much about me, but had heard about an event in Minneapolis at which I spoke. I learned subsequently the piece was written by Rachelle Cohen, editor of the newspaper’s editorial page. Her brief essay didn’t refer to me by name, but cited a Washington Post article from May 5^th that did, describing me as “a Boston businessman” and “anti-vaccine activist.”

Cohen wrote that during "this latest outbreak [of measles in Minnesota], anti-vaccine groups have fanned the flames, making it hard for public health officials and doctors to be heard above the noise. These are the facts: Vaccines don’t cause autism. Measles can kill. And lying to vulnerable people about the health and safety of their children ought to be a hanging offense." [emphasis added]

Four months later, the much-hyped Minnesota measles outbreak has passed with little notice, but there are important lessons to be learned from the events surrounding it. What really happened? Why all the fuss? What are the salient facts about measles, vaccines and autism? What was my role in the process? Most importantly, what does this episode teach us about the state of public health policy and the ongoing concern for vaccine safety and parental rights. To explore those questions, let’s first take a look at the outbreak itself.

The Minnesota measles outbreak of 2017

On April 13, the first news report of three measles cases among “toddlers” in Minneapolis was published (see HERE). The next day, confirming five more cases, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) issued a press release with additional information. Of the then eight confirmed cases, all were unvaccinated children living in Hennepin County. Seven of the eight were “Somali Minnesotans.” Six of these children were hospitalized.

Over the next three months, as the count of confirmed cases rose to 79, the initial pattern continued. The outbreak was largely confined to children (73 were under 10 years old) who were Somali-American (64 of 79) residents of Hennepin County (70 of 79), most of whom (71 of 79) were unvaccinated. The case count rose quickly to reach 73 by the end of May and then leveled off sharply. Six additional cases were confirmed, until the last case report on July 13.

By late April, MDH was posting daily case updates on their web-site (see HERE). This was both a response to and a stimulus for widespread media coverage, first in local news outlets and then nationally. At the outset, these were brief, factual reports, but it didn’t take long for the MDH to start pointing fingers. On May 5, The Washington Post published the article that caught Rachelle Cohen’s attention, “Anti-vaccine activists spark a state’s worst measles outbreak in decades.” (see HERE). Health officials complained specifically that the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota (VSCM) “in the middle of their crisis” was informing Somali-Americans that they had the right according to Minnesota law to opt out of vaccination based on conscientiously held beliefs. Reminding parents of their rights was a message these officials felt was “exactly the opposite of what clinicians and public health officials are urging, which is to get vaccinated as soon as possible.”

On August 25, the MDH officially “declared an end to the measles outbreak of spring and summer 2017.” Their news release, which was not widely reported, described why they waited so long to announce something that had been clear for weeks.

“The outbreak that eventually sickened 79 people, mostly children under 10 years of age, began when the first case was identified April 11. The last case was identified on July 13. Under standard public health practice, the outbreak can be declared over if there are no new cases identified for 42 days. The incubation period for measles is 21 days, meaning that’s how long it can take for someone who has been infected with measles to show symptoms. Health officials wait two incubation periods (42 days) out of an abundance of caution.”

Despite the often-hysterical treatment the outbreak received from the press, it was a relatively modest event. Although measles no longer circulates freely in the U.S., minor outbreaks like this one remain common. Since 2000, measles cases in the U.S. have averaged close to 130 per year, typically sparked by infected travelers entering the country. When larger outbreaks take place, they often occur in communities that have low vaccination rates: an Amish community in Ohio saw nearly 400 cases in 2014; the year before saw two smaller outbreaks, one in an orthodox Jewish community in New York, another in a church community from Texas.  Most notorious among recent outbreaks is the one that began in Disneyland in December 2014. By the time it subsided in mid-February, the Disneyland outbreak totaled 147 cases.

By comparison, the Minnesota measles outbreak was a small one. It also appears to have had no lasting health consequences for those infected. According to MDH, 22 of the 79 cases were hospitalized, at first blush a large number. But according to Patti Carroll, a board member of the VSCM, none of these cases were ever in intensive care and all recovered with no known lasting health effects. The hospitalization rate appears to reflect an aggressive response to the initial problem since 6 of the first 8 confirmed cases were taken to the hospital. Of the subsequent 71 cases, MDH data suggest only 16 were hospitalized.

The Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota event

NOTE: JB Handley ran the excerpt below from Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill's new book, Denial on his Facebook page.  Me?  I've never been much of a math lover, but I sure agree with JB. Autism has NOT always been with us in these dramatic, traumatic numbers. To think it has is to accept an astounding level of disability as normal.  Like JB's page at Facebook here.

We're happy to report strong sales for this book - please remember to leave a review at Amazon, that really helps  authors.  Thanks.

#19 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Children's Health > Autism & Asperger's Syndrome
#21 in Books > Parenting & Relationships > Special Needs > Disabilities
#30 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Medicine

###

"I love deliciously simple math and logic that shatters the myth that autism "has always been with us." You?

"Epidemic denial doesn't add up. Take the US population of 124 million in 1931--the year the oldest child in that first report on autism was born. Divide that number by the current autism prevalence of one in sixty-eight children. There should have been 1.8 million Americans with autism in 1931.

There weren't. We have scoured the medical literature for cases before then, and there are essentially none to be found. This may seem counterintuitive--surely such children have always been around, misdiagnosed by a less sophisticated medical establishment or simply missed because they were hidden away in the attic or mental institution--but it's the simple truth.

Note:  We've asked readers to let us know their own stories of how the denial of the autism epidemic and the constant push to make autism "the new normal" has negatively affected their own families, or themselves if they are on the spectrum. 

Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted (RIP) have a new book out called Denial: How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future.

The title speaks for itself.  Please order a copy and leave a review at Amazon.

Thanks to C for sharing this story of her sons' autism.  Please send your stories to me [email protected]. Thank you.

Hi. I have 2 sons (A, 22, ASD and B, 21, PDD-NOS). 

My son, A (22) is very smart.  Got straight-A’s in high school, and even scored in the superior range in his Social Studies Texas TAKS test (high school assessment).  Basically, the following is an example of why, even though he is “high functioning”, he’ll never function normally (hold a job, drive, marry….):

One weekend, his favorite YouTube video game player was having a “video-thon” to raise money for a children’s cancer research fund.  By Saturday night, he was furious and yelling how their constant asking for money, and the dollar amounts scrolling on the bottom was “RUINING EVERYTHING” of his video enjoyment.  He said it was just making everyone feel bad about not even contributing $5.  I said that we could contribute $5, thinking it would make him feel better; it made him happy.   About 5 minutes later, I heard screams from his room.  “They’re still asking for money!” he yelled at me, fists raised, when I entered the room.

Also, just an observation.  Twenty years ago, I had never heard of Autism.  At first, when I told people about Autism, they had never heard of it either.  As the years have gone by, when I mention that my sons are on the spectrum, they not only know what it is, but always have a kid next door, niece, nephew, grandchild, or child of their own on the spectrum.  The funny part is, no one mentions knowing someone on the spectrum who is an older neighbor, aunt, uncle, dad, mom, brother, or sister.  If diagnosis have gotten so much better, where are the 2-3% of adults on the spectrum?

Mark Blaxill, our Editor-At-Large, has a new book coming out from Skyhorse Publishing called Denial How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future.  He co-wrote this book with Dan Olmsted, our founding editor who passed away early this year.   Please order the book today, and leave a review at Amazon when you've read the book.

As a campaign to bring home the reality of this book, we'd like to share reader stories of how autism has been anything other than normal to offset the  media juggernaut of disinformation.  We all love our kids with autism, from toddlers to teens to twenty-somethings and beyond. And none of us wants to paint our lives as bleak and grim, except when life is bleak... and grim, because of autism.  Every day we run into "Oh, I can't - because of autism" and that stings. These small examples can add up. The big ones, like wandering and drowning speak for themselves. Share big and small.

From vaccine injury to camp exclusion to school expulsion to employment refusals to even just a routine shopping trip that turns into difficulty, share your story with us and we'll publish it.  Just a few sentences will do - or a paragraph - or more - your call. We won't publish names. Send me your story at [email protected].  About the book:

Even as the autism rate soars and the cost to our nation climbs well into the billions, a dangerous new idea is taking hold: There simply is no autism epidemic.

The question is stark: Is autism ancient, a genetic variation that demands acceptance and celebration? Or is it new and disabling, triggered by something in the environment that is damaging more children every day?

Authors Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted believe autism is new, that the real rate is rising dramatically, and that those affected are injured and disabled, not merely “neurodiverse.” They call the refusal to acknowledge this reality Autism Epidemic Denial. This epidemic denial blocks the urgent need to confront and stop the epidemic and endangers our kids, our country, and our future.

The key to stopping the epidemic, they say, is to stop lying about its history and start asking "who profits?" People who deny that autism is new have self-interested motives, such as ending research that might pinpoint responsibility—and, most threateningly, liability for this man-made epidemic.

Using ground-breaking research, the authors definitively debunk best-selling claims that autism is nothing new—and nothing to worry about.

Important note from the editors. The vax/unvax study is now-officially published in a peer reviewed journal. The full text is available on line HERE at the Journal of Translational Science.

The .pdf is HERE: Mawson et al 2017 vax-unvax Jnl Translational Science

By Mark Blaxill

In a development that autism parents have long anticipated, the first-ever, peer-reviewed study comparing total health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children was released on line yesterday. According to sources close to the project, the study had been reviewed and accepted by two different journals, both of which pulled back on their approval once the political implications of the findings became clear. That’s largely because, as parents have long expected, the rate of autism is significantly higher in the vaccinated group, a finding that could shake vaccine safety claims just as the first president who has ever stated a belief in a link between vaccines and autism has taken office.

Working in partnership with the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), Dr. Anthony Mawson led a research team that investigated the relationship between vaccination exposures and a range of over 40 acute and chronic illnesses in home schooled children, a population chosen for its high proportion of unvaccinated children. Surveying families in four states--Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon—the study (officially titled Vaccination and Health Outcomes: A Survey of 6- to 12-year-old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children based on Mothers’ Reports), reported a number of startling findings.

Vaccinated children were significantly more likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder: most notably, the risk of being affected by an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was 4.7 fold higher in vaccinated children; as well, ADHD risk was 4.7 fold higher and learning disability risk was 3.7 fold higher. Overall, the vaccinated children in the study were 3.7 times more likely to have been diagnosed with some kind of neurodevelopmental disorder.

Vaccinated children were also significantly more likely to be diagnosed with an immune-related disorder. The risk of allergic rhinitis (commonly known as hay fever) was over 30 times higher in vaccinated children, while the risk of other allergies was increased 3.9 fold and the eczema risk was increased 2.4 fold.

With respect to acute illness and infectious disease the outcomes were in some respects surprising.  As might be expected, unvaccinated children were significantly (4-10 times) more likely to have come down with chicken pox, rubella or pertussis. Perhaps unexpectedly, the unvaccinated children were less likely to suffer from otitis media and pneumonia: vaccinated children had 3.8 times greater odds of a middle ear infection and 5.9 times greater odds of a bout with pneumonia.

The study was based on a survey with participants recruited in a process led by NHERI and coordinated through 84 state and local homeschool groups. The survey itself was, according to the authors, “nonbiased and neutrally worded.”

These findings in a study population of 666 children, 261 of whom (39%) were unvaccinated, are sure to stir controversy, in part because it is the first of its kind. The scientific literature on the long-term effects of the vaccination program is virtually silent. Most studies on the safety of vaccines only consider immediate or short-term effects. There was no obvious explanation for the differences in health outcomes observed between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups of children other than vaccination itself.

By Nancy Hokkanen

Age of Autism Editor-at-Large Mark Blaxill spoke at a Minnesota community meeting April 30 about that state’s measles outbreak, vaccines, vaccine injury and exemption rights. About 90 members of the Twin Cities’ Somali community attended the event.

The meeting was hosted by the Organic Consumers Association, Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, and National Health Freedom Action. Blaxill, other speakers and advocates wanted Somali families to know that Minnesota law gives them “the right to fully informed consent or to opt out of any or all vaccines and still attend daycare, school and receive benefits.”

The free community resource meeting was held at Safari Restaurant & Event Center in Minneapolis. Initially the event was booked at the Brian Coyle Center, but pressure from the Minnesota Department of Health forced it to move (MDH had held its own Somali forum at BCC the previous week).

Despite MDH’s collaboration with local pro-vaccination groups and medical students to influence local media and reduce attendance, the event received TV and newspaper coverage:

Nonprofit Aims to Advise Somali-Americans on Vaccination Rights

Speaker challenges vaccinations amid Twin Cities measles outbreak

The Minneapolis Star Tribune spotlighted Somali parent Ikram Mohamed, who at one point addressed one doctor in the audience: “Measles is a curable disease... but autism is not a curable disease -- it goes on for the rest of their life.”

By Mark Blaxill

A study published earlier this month (see HERE ) examining the effect of vaccination on mortality in 3-5 month old infants in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau showed a fivefold higher death rates in infants who received diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio (OPV) vaccines compared to unvaccinated infants. The study, published in the journal EBioMedicine by Danish researchers from the Statens Serum Institut (SSI), was based on infants born between 1980 and 1983 and used data collected by the SSI’s Bandim Health Project (BHP). The study of vaccinated and unvaccinated African infants represents a rare, albeit limited, example of the kind of “vaxxed/unvaxxed’ study that many critics of American vaccination policy have long called for.

In their prospective study of over 1,000 infants, the SSI authors examined the effects on infant mortality of a new vaccination program that included both OPV and DTP vaccines. They reserved their harshest assessment for the newly introduced DTP vaccine, observing pointedly that “DTP was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DTP.”

In a broader criticism of global vaccine policy, the authors continued, “Unfortunately, DTP is the most widely used vaccine, and the proportion who receives DTP3 [three doses of the DTP vaccine] is used globally as an indicator of the performance of national vaccination programs.” In a further criticism of DTP vaccines, the analysis suggests that the OPV, which was typically administered together with DTP vaccine, had a moderating effect on the death risk of DTP. When (due to logistical problems with OPV availability) infants were vaccinated with DTP only, the death rates were even worse: as much as ten times higher than unvaccinated infants.

Unlike the recently leaked “vax/unvaxxed” study on homeschool children (see HERE) and the more commonly understood usage today of the “vaxxed/unvaxxed” concept, this analysis was narrower. The study examined infants during a brief window of time—the period between 3 and 6 months of age--and measured a single outcome—death. Described by the authors as a “natural experiment,” the study was designed in order to address on ongoing debate over the efficacy in low-income countries of the Expanded Immunization Program (EPI) since its introduction in the 1970s. At the time, the EPI targeted countries like Guinea-Bissau that had high infant mortality rates--under-five mortality rates were close to 50% there in 1978-9—and included four vaccines for seven diseases. Since individual vaccines included in the EPI might have different effects, the authors decried the absence of “individually randomized studies,” noting that “surprisingly few studies examined the introduction of vaccines and their impact on child survival.”

Due to its specific focus, the study design has little to say about the vaccine schedule debate in high-income countries and has several key limitations. Most notably, the “unvaccinated” children in the BHP study group only remained unvaccinated for a period of less than 14 weeks between 3 and 6 months of age until they attended the “quarterly weighing sessions” when OPV and DTP vaccines were administered. Even this briefly unvaccinated group wasn’t fully unvaccinated. The authors noted that “of the 651 unvaccinated children, 219 received DTP and/or OPV before their first weighing examination. These children counted as ‘unvaccinated’ until their first weighing examination.” Even though the death rate in the unvaccinated group was lower than in the vaccinated group, death rates were high on both sides. Five of the eighteen deaths covered in the study period occurred in the unvaccinated group and the authors don’t disclose whether any of these deaths had received a vaccination before the official examination “landmarks” used to define vaccination events in the database.

Note from the Editor-at-Large. The editors at Age of Autism want to clarify the record on the leak of the vaxxed/unvaxxed paper. We were in possession of an embargoed draft of the paper when it was set to be published on line in late November by the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics. Dan Olmsted and I had written a news story on the study, a revised version of which we have now published below. We respected the embargo at every stage and have never published anything about the study or its findings until today. Via different channels, a draft copy of the paper was published on a different web-site and has now become widely available. That makes the study and its leaked contents news that is highly relevant to our readers, so we are obligated to cover the story. We do so with sadness, since we share the concerns of many that this leak jeopardizes subsequent publication of the study, thereby impairing its scientific impact.

By Mark Blaxill

In a development that autism parents have long anticipated, the first-ever, peer-reviewed study comparing total health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children was released on line yesterday. According to sources close to the project, the study had been reviewed and accepted by two different journals, both of which pulled back on their approval once the political implications of the findings became clear. That’s largely because, as parents have long expected, the rate of autism is significantly higher in the vaccinated group, a finding that could shake vaccine safety claims just as the first president who has ever stated a belief in a link between vaccines and autism has taken office.

Working in partnership with the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), Dr. Anthony Mawson led a research team that investigated the relationship between vaccination exposures and a range of over 40 acute and chronic illnesses in home schooled children, a population chosen for its high proportion of unvaccinated children. Surveying families in four states--Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon—the study (officially titled Vaccination and Health Outcomes: A Survey of 6- to 12-year-old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children based on Mothers’ Reports), reported a number of startling findings.

Vaccinated children were significantly more likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder: most notably, the risk of being affected by an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was 4.7 fold higher in vaccinated children; as well, ADHD risk was 4.7 fold higher and learning disability risk was 3.7 fold higher. Overall, the vaccinated children in the study were 3.7 times more likely to have been diagnosed with some kind of neurodevelopmental disorder.

Vaccinated children were also significantly more likely to be diagnosed with an immune-related disorder. The risk of allergic rhinitis (commonly known as hay fever) was over 30 times higher in vaccinated children, while the risk of other allergies was increased 3.9 fold and the eczema risk was increased 2.4 fold.

With respect to acute illness and infectious disease the outcomes were in some respects surprising.  As might be expected, unvaccinated children were significantly (4-10 times) more likely to have come down with chicken pox, rubella or pertussis. Perhaps unexpectedly, the unvaccinated children were less likely to suffer from otitis media and pneumonia: vaccinated children had 3.8 times greater odds of a middle ear infection and 5.9 times greater odds of a bout with pneumonia.

The study was based on a survey with participants recruited in a process led by NHERI and coordinated through 84 state and local homeschool groups. The survey itself was, according to the authors, “nonbiased and neutrally worded.”

These findings in a study population of 666 children, 261 of whom (39%) were unvaccinated, are sure to stir controversy, in part because it is the first of its kind. The scientific literature on the long-term effects of the vaccination program is virtually silent. Most studies on the safety of vaccines only consider immediate or short-term effects. There was no obvious explanation for the differences in health outcomes observed between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups of children other than vaccination itself.

By Mark Blaxill

Dan Olmsted’s “Weekly Wrap,” his regular Saturday column, was one of my favorite weekend pleasures. Dan’s death last weekend makes his January 21^st version his last. So in his honor, I spent much of this week connecting with a few folks who knew him well in order to write a tribute to him in this space. A final wrap.

Dan was born and raised in Danville Illinois, started his career there and maintained close ties to friends and family in the region. His sister Sallie died last year but his other sister Rosie still lives in Wilmette. She has long been a fierce supporter of Dan’s work. Rosie knew from an early age that Dan was a uniquely brilliant and talented journalist. She was a great advocate for the books we wrote together and especially pleased—Dan told me-- that in The Age of Autism, I insisted that we put Dan’s name first on the marquee! (Dan and I actually competed to be the second author and eventually decided to take turns).

Dan was a journalist from very early in life. While in high school he wrote a column, High Times (the “high” stands for high school, nothing illegal!), for Danville’s local newspaper The Commercial News. His talent was apparent early.

“Dan and I were classmates at Danville High School,” wrote Bina Connelly on the comments section underneath his obituary. “Even then, we knew he would leave a mark, make a difference. He was kind, thoughtful, intelligent, passionate. I am humbled to have known him.” Dan’s friend of 40 years, Melissa Merli, tells me he is still in touch with his high school English teacher, who plans to attend his memorial service.

A career in journalism was on Dan’s radar from the very beginning. An English degree at Yale (class of 1974) separated his stints at The Commercial News, a Gannett paper. From there he went to The Democrat and Chronicle, Gannett’s flagship paper in Rochester, New York. On the Gannett fast track, Dan went on to be a founding editor of USA Today in 1982 and its 1984 spinoff, USA Weekend, where he worked for 15 years. Following a brief and abortive stint at an internet start-up in 1999, Dan moved over to United Press International in 2000. Laid off in 2007 after a series of cutbacks at UPI, he moved on to launch the Age of Autism, “the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic.”

In speaking with Dan’s colleagues during that 40-plus year journey, I’ve heard an amazing and consistent portrait of a man who was, as his longtime partner and husband Mark Millett puts it, “always passionate about journalism and his work.” Melissa Merli was a colleague in the 1970s at The Commercial News and remembers that Dan was widely liked and respected. “Everyone adored him at The Commercial News.” That adoration extended to a number of the female reporters there, including Melissa. “I had a crush on him,” confided Melissa, “and at one point, Dan took me aside and told me he was gay, but that we could still be good friends!” They’ve been close and constant friends ever since.

Melissa described Dan as a gifted investigative reporter from the outset. One investigation stood out: an exposé of corruption in the local police force, where a gang of police officers were running a drug store burglary operation. A grand jury was convened; Dan was sued for libel and won. Melissa later heard from a local official that “there’s one reporter there that everyone’s afraid of and that’s Dan Olmsted.”

Melissa describes a man that many came to know and love. “Dan had a finely tuned sense of justice and compassion for others. He’s one of the most honest people I know. I can honestly say that I have no negative memories of Dan. He was one of a kind.”

We can all thank the dot.com crash for reawakening Dan’s passion for investigative journalism. While at USA Today and USA Weekend, he focused on lighter fare. But after landing at the once proud UPI wire service --then owned by the Unification Church (aka “the Moonies”), a step down in prestige led to a step up in freedom and investigative autonomy. Dan teamed up there with a young reporter named Mark Benjamin and together they embarked on a project that hit the big time: an investigation of the negative side effects of an anti-malaria drug called mefloquine. Or, as it was marketed by Roche Pharmaceuticals, Lariam.

“The Lariam project was investigative reporting at its most pure,” Mark told me. “It was a case of Dan deciding that we were going to take really damaging, but solid information on a bad drug and go up against one of the most powerful and deep-pocketed companies in the world, Roche. And it was one that had the Army and the CDC, quite literally, in its pocket.”

Lariam was widely used at the time in the Army and the Peace Corp and although effective at preventing malaria, in a subset of recipients it was associated with cases of hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, psychoses and even homicide. According to an August 11, 2016 article in Military Times. “Mefloquine was implicated in a series of murder-suicides at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2002, and media reports also tied it to an uptick in military suicides in 2003.”

Dan and Mark were faced with sharp initial resistance, but their work eventually had a huge impact. According to Military Times, “Once the U.S. military's malaria prophylactic of choice, favored for its once-a-week dosage regimen, mefloquine was designated the drug of last resort in 2013 by the Defense Department after the Food and Drug Administration slapped a boxed warning on its label, noting it can cause permanent psychiatric and neurological side effects.” Prescriptions plummeted from 50,000 in 2003 to only 216 in 2015. That’s not low enough for some. Dr. Remington Nevin, another friend of Dan, argued that any distribution of Lariam is too much. “This new finding should motivate the U.S. military to consider further revising its mefloquine policy to ban use of the drug altogether.”

Their work had many positive and unexpected ripple effects. Mark and Dan were turned into a composite character, Sherm Hempell, on a Law and Order: SVU episode, which told a story of violence and murder in two Afghanistan war veterans that had taken an anti-malarial drug, Quinium. Happily, the good guys won and the Army cover-up was exposed. More notably, in a real life case that wasn’t “ripped from the headlines” Dan and Mark quite literally saved the life of the first soldier since the Vietnam War charged with cowardice, an offense that carries the death penalty. The Army soldier, Andrew Pogany, was put on trial but ultimately the Army dropped the case when it became clear that his “cowardice” was simply an adverse reaction to Lariam. Mark joked that Dan wrote one of the best headlines ever for their article, “Army Surrenders to Coward Soldier.”

“I’ve never seen anyone else like Dan Olmsted in our business, before or since,” Mark claimed. “You can hold him up against any of the all-time great investigative journalists and he deserves a place right alongside them. What made him so good? There were so many things. He was just smarter than anyone else. He worked harder and once he knew he was right, he just never gave up. He would just never stop.”

It was their glimpse into the inner workings of the CDC and its preferred programs that brought the UPI investigative pair to the vaccine issue, and in Dan’s case, into the Age of Autism. In the summer of 2003, Mark pursued (and Dan edited) a story about conflicts of interest in the CDC’s recommended vaccine program, with a special focus on a little known vaccine inventor, Dr. Paul Offit, and the conflict between his role on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and his commercial relationship with Merck, which made his rotavirus vaccine. It’s a story AoA readers know well!

Mark Benjamin is the man that brought Dan Olmsted and me together. The two Marks (who when added to Dan’s partner Mark Millett explain Dan’s dedication in The Age of Autism, “to Mark, Mark and Mark, in that order”) had been discussing the issues swirling around autism and vaccines. Mark Benjamin wanted Dan to meet me and he arranged a dinner between the three of us in Washington DC on October 7, 2003. That began a collaboration that would last for over 13 years.

As Mark Benjamin turned to issues with the military and the health of veterans, Dan turned his attention to autism. He and I began to have frequent conversations and email exchanges. In 2004, Dan had decided he wanted to launch an extended, deep dive. And he wanted to find a way into the issue that was unique. By year end, Dan and I were just beginning to share thoughts on the issues we would turn into a book 6 years later. Dan, as he so often did, was trying to find the critical question, one that could spark an investigation. On December 7, he prefaced an email list of questions this way: “I made a list of some odd ways in (some of which I have seen referred to elsewhere but not conclusively) if you have any thoughts…” The very first question was right on the mark: “Is there anywhere they don’t use vaccines and don’t have autism? Or any group, like Christian scientists?”

Bingo.

I wrote (as is my tendency) a lengthy answer. “We have long discussed the idea of using low and zero exposure groups, religious groups (Amish or others), anthroposophic schools, etc. to test the theory. Since autism surveillance stats are not routinely collected, this would require a specific study, one that has never been done (and epi studies are expensive).”

And so it began. Dan didn’t bother to wait for a bureaucratic funding process. He decided to cut to the chase and do the “study” himself. He drove from his home in Falls Church Virginia to Lancaster County Pennsylvania, and started asking real people about autism in the Amish. A bare four months later he launched his UPI Age of Autism series with his first article, The Amish Anomaly. As many of us know by now, Dan found very few autistic children there and all of these were in the relatively small subset of vaccinated Amish.

Starting with the Amish Anomaly, on April 19, 2005, Dan added dozens of articles to the series. He stopped writing only when he was laid off at UPI, ending on July 18, 2007 with “The Last Word.” Along the way, he found the first of Leo Kanner’s case series, Donald T., the first of eight eventual discoveries and the heart of our book, The Age of Autism. Following his departure from UPI, Dan and I reached out to JB Handley and Kim Stagliano who had started their own blog, Rescue Post. Our joint venture went on line just a few months later.

From the very beginning, Dan stayed close to the families and individuals affected by autism. Dan started out talking to doctors on the front line of the epidemic, free thinkers like the late Meyer Eisenstein and Elizabeth Mumper. In fact, the third column in the UPI series “Sick Children” took Dan’s readers to Liz Mumper’s pediatric practice in nearby Lynchburg Virginia. Dan wrote “Dr. Elizabeth Mumper is an unlikely contrarian. Mumper is a pediatrician in the southern Virginia city of Lynchburg. About a decade ago, Mumper said, she began noticing a change for the worse in the overall health of the children she was seeing, including a startling rise in cases of autism. Ultimately, Mumper came to suspect the increasing number of childhood vaccinations in the 1990s -- and particularly the mercury-based preservative called thimerosal in many of those vaccines -- was a big reason.”

Liz was a great source for Dan and me in our second book, Vaccines 2.0. When I reached out to her yesterday to get her reflections on Dan, she described those initial meetings. “Dan came to my office in 2005.  I was in the midst of running a practice in which many of the children had chronic illness and neurodevelopmental disorders. .Dan had such an inquisitive mind and asked such great questions.  I was surprised that a reporter who had not gone to medical school would understand and be able to synthesize complex medical information the way he could.”

Like many of us, Liz remarked on Dan’s tenacity and gift for words. “What a gift to passionately seek answers to the unprecedented tsunami of childhood chronic illness!  He wove the stories of children, families, medical institutions, government organizations and pharmaceutical industries into compelling prose.”

Dan’s subsequent career-- 10 years here at the “daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic” (he truly loved real printed newspapers!), two published books and a third on the way—is all available here at Age of Autism. Under Kim Stagliano’s leadership and with the help of our amazing group of contributing editors we are continuing the noble project Dan started. But we do so with a heavy heart. I heard the news about Dan from his sister Rosie, driving from Boston to Manhattan this Monday afternoon. When I got to the city I sat down for dinner and wept. I didn’t know quite what to do, so I typed out this FaceBook post, as tears smudged my iPhone .

To everyone who is sharing love for my great friend Dan Olmsted, please keep it up. Dan deserved so much and I hope will ultimately get the recognition he deserves. Dan was the consummate journalist. He had so much to teach us all about the ethics and discipline of how good reporters should respond to and treat evidence. But he was more than that. He was a deeply original and creative investigator. That combination was unique and compelling. Dan was brilliant and compassionate and persistent and uncompromising and balanced and impatient. All at once. And man! could he put words together in such a graceful and powerful way.

I was so fortunate to be his fellow traveler on the Age of Autism (his phrase and it was so powerful) journey. I will really miss him. I wish I had the words to say it as artfully as he could. I love you man. We'll all miss you. But you kicked some ass.

Later this week, I took my two daughters to dinner in Cambridge. Dan got to know both of them quite well in our years working together. My oldest, Sydney, traveled to Vienna with us as we researched the medical history of mercuric chloride treatments for syphilis and hysteria. My youngest, Michaela (now 21 years old and diagnosed with autistic disorder), spent a lot of time with Dan in recent months; he came to Cambridge a lot as we wrote our third book, Denial. Sydney knew the news already, but when I picked them up we told Michaela about Dan’s death. She often has difficulty processing emotions, especially sadness, in an appropriate way. But when I told her, “I have sad news, honey. Dan is dead,” I was pleased to see she was genuinely affected in the way Sydney and I were feeling. “Dan is dead,” she repeated to herself in a subdued tone. Trying, in her way, to process the news. She had grown up with Dan and knew how close our friendship was.

Later in the evening, as we were walking into dinner at Legal Seafoods, she asked me an amusingly autistic but poignant question. “Dad,” she asked, “are you going to get a replacement for Dan?”

“No, honey. There will never be a replacement for Dan.”

Mark Blaxill is Editor at Large for Age of Autism.

By Anne Dachel

I recently wrote about the Aug 17, 2016 coverage from NPR Boston which focused on special needs students in Massachusetts.

It was really hard to ignore the data, yet officials and educators in that state don't seem worried.

Additional reporting from NPR Boston included this interview of a special education expert from Lesley University about the soaring increase in autism.

WBUR's Morning Edition host Bob Oakes recently spoke with Elizabeth Keefe, an assistant professor at Lesley University who focuses on special education and autism spectrum disorders. We asked her if the number of special education students in the state is growing.

Keefe:

"The number of students that require special education services in the commonwealth has remained largely static over the last 10 years. There's no question that there have been specific groups, such as students with autism, who have experienced a significant number of students with particular disabilities in our schools. So I would say, the need for programming for students with very complex disabilities is certainly an issue in the commonwealth."

We are running the "License to Kill" series by Mark Blaxill as a reminder of the warning bells that have been pealing for many years while the media, pharma, government continue to push this vaccine on a wide group of "consumers" with each passing day.  We published this series in the Spring of 2010. You might recall that Gardasil was launched for teen girls to prevent a certain type of genital wart virus that can lead to cervical cancer. Now teen boys are being dosed with Gardasil.

By Mark Blaxill
 
Part 1:  How A Public-Private Partnership Made the Government Merck’s Gardasil Partner

“Perhaps no other recent product on the market demonstrates successful health care technology transfer better than the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, produced by Merck & Co. and approved by the FDA in June 2006,” proclaimed a recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) newsletter. In a February 23, 2007 article entitled “From Lab to Market: The HPV Vaccine”, the NIH Record celebrated the pivotal role of government researchers in developing Merck’s Gardasil product. “Based largely on technology developed at NIH,” the newsletter reported, “the vaccine works to prevent four types of the sexually transmitted HPV that together cause 70 percent of all cervical cancer and 90 percent of genital warts (HERE).
 
The occasion motivating this celebratory article was the “Philip S. Chen, Jr. Distinguished Lecture on Innovation and Technology Transfer” given by Douglas T. Lowy, one of the NIH scientists involved in developing the HPV vaccine. In the ceremony pictured above, Lowy is receiving an honorary poster from the head of NIH at the time, Elias Zerhouni, who took advantage of the occasion to shower praise on his team’s work, one he viewed as a model for future efforts. “It’s a ‘heroic’ story about the effort to fight cervical cancer, the second most deadly cancer for women worldwide, said NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni,” in the NIH Record’s account. “He noted that he has talked about the vaccine’s creation to Congress and with the President on his recent visit to NIH. How researchers took the technology ‘from the lab to the marketplace is a journey we can learn from,’ Zerhouni said.”
 
While Zerhouni was bragging to anyone in Washington D.C. who would listen about the NIH team’s role in this historic accomplishment, the vaccine's developers were actively spreading the news of their achievement in scientific circles. It’s hard to blame them, because at the time Lowy and his colleague John T. Schiller, leaders of the team that had invented the technology for the “virus-like particles” (or VLPs) that made Gardasil possible, were in some pretty heady company. In 2008, Harald zur Hausen, the scientist who discovered the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) in cervical cancer during the 1980s, received one half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine; the two researchers at the Pasteur Institute who had discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) had to share the other half.
 
Perhaps campaigning for their own place in the pantheon of medical heroes, Lowy and Schiller described their VLP technology in several review articles on the history and development of the Merck vaccine. These treatments were studiously scientific in tone and at points openly critical of their commercial partner, as the authors commented with disapproval on the high price Merck was charging for Gardasil. But in one May 2006 review in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, the pair also made the following disclosure about their own commercial interests:
 
“Conflict of interest: The authors, as employees of the National Cancer Institute, NIH, are inventors of the HPV VLP vaccine technology described in this Review. The technology has been licensed by the NIH to the 2 companies, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, that are developing the commercial HPV vaccines described herein.”
 
Attached to an otherwise heroic narrative of the triumph of technology over cancer, this disclosure struck a discordant note. Conflict of interest? Inventors? Vaccine technology? Licenses? Pharmaceutical companies? Commercial vaccines? This isn’t scientific language, but rather the language of money and commerce. What was this unusual concession doing there in the fine print?

By Mark Blaxill

In a development sure to put the integrity of the CDC’s autism surveillance estimates in the spotlight, a Federal District Court Judge for the District of Utah issued a ruling Friday that effectively guarantees a Utah autism whistleblower her day in court.  Judge Jill N. Parrish denied a majority of motions by Dr. William McMahon of the University of Utah to dismiss allegations by Dr. Judith Pinborough Zimmerman that McMahon and his colleagues acted improperly in retaliating against her for raising concerns over their research misconduct, violated university policies by terminating her contract without proper review, and impugned her reputation in the process.

Dr. Zimmerman filed her lawsuit against Dr. McMahon nearly two years ago, in a complaint that describes a heated dispute between the two scientists over the proper handling of confidential health and education records as well as the accuracy of the data records used in measuring Utah’s autism prevalence as part of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) autism surveillance project, the Autism and Development Disabilities (ADDM) Network. Since 2002, Zimmerman had been the Director of Utah’s ADDM Network site, the Utah Registry of Autism and Developmental Disabilities (URADD). She joined the University of Utah in 2005, bringing the URADD grant with her. She was removed from her URADD and university positions in 2013.

Zimmerman’s lawsuit alleges that McMahon and colleagues violated federal records privacy restrictions in efforts to carry out lucrative additional research projects; these were privacy restrictions that she had carefully negotiated with the Utah Departments of Health and Education in order to bring URADD into compliance with federal law and protect autism families from unwanted use of their personal and family information. When Zimmerman expressed her concerns over privacy and data quality issues to University authorities, McMahon summarily fired her, locked her out of her office and placed himself in charge of URADD. Since Zimmerman’s dismissal, McMahon has become the PI of the URADD and watches over Utah’s contributions to the CDC’s ADDM reports.

In addition to raising issues of research integrity and privacy, Zimmerman’s allegations have broad implications for the integrity of CDC’s autism surveillance estimates. Court documents reveal that Zimmerman was concerned that errors in Utah’s autism data were finding their way into CDC estimates beginning with the 2010 ADDM report, which provided estimates of autism rates among children born in 2002. If uncorrected, these errors might have continued in the 2012 report released earlier this year, measuring autism rates in children born in 2004.

Utah’s autism rates carry unusual importance in part because Utah’s reported autism rate in the 2008 ADDM report was the highest of all participating sites. In that report, Utah’s rate of 1 in 47 children born with autism in 2000 was the highest rate ever recorded in the United States; it was also an increase of 155% over Utah’s 1994 birth group, which at the time was the third highest rate in the country. Since reaching a peak in the 2000 birth group, Utah’s autism rates have plummeted while most other states have shown continued increases in the last two ADDM reports.

Mark Blaxill appeared on The Legal Edition.

By Mark Blaxill

Four weeks ago, on March 20^th, we reported (HERE) that the Disneyland measles outbreak was (unofficially) over based on the last new measles infection reported by The California Department of Public Health (CDPH). We predicted that the onset of that last measles rash was March 2^nd, based on a viral spread that probably occurred around February 20^th. CDPH subsequently confirmed that estimate. A week later, we reported on the last case from that outbreak (a case with an earlier onset but delayed detection) had entered the CDPH tallies.  

In their March 20^th report, CDPH made the following statement

“The outbreak will be considered over when 42 days have elapsed from the end of the infectious period of the last known B3 measles cases that was a not a new importation. As of today, that date will be April 17, 2015.”

 Today, April 17^th, no new measles cases have been found in California (the new measles case outside of California was reported on March 3^rd). CDPH has now made our unofficial prediction official.

The Disneyland measles outbreak is over.

In California, 40 individuals came down with measles based on a visit to the Disneyland theme park between December 17^th and 20^th. An additional 41 individuals were closely connected to those park visitors, either through household exposure or close personal exposure in a community setting. Not directly linked, but presumed linked were another 50. Everyone recovered. No one died. Some went to a hospital but as far as we know these individuals had no lasting effects.

Date/Time:     April 3, 7:00 – 7:15 PM Parent Support and Networking

7:15 PM  Introduction and Meeting Presentation.|
Location:     Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church

3625 Chapel Road
Newtown Square, PA 19073

Coordinators:     Contact Honey Rinicella and Pattie Moor

Vaccines – Ask the Experts

Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted will be spending the evening educating parents and professionals on all aspects of this controversial topic. The CDC’s bloated vaccine schedule has doubled since 1988, after the federal government gave pharmaceutical companies immunity from lawsuits. Autism and other childhood disorders like asthma, ADHD, juvenile diabetes and digestive ailments have skyrocketed. And parents are understandably nervous, desperate for objective guidance that takes those concerns seriously.

Vaccines 2.0 looks at the lengthy roster of today’s recommended injections, the documented risks that accompany them, and helps parents choose a schedule based on unbiased, uncensored, unconflicted science. Whether you’re wondering how to space out vaccines, which ones are really necessary, considering not vaccinating at all, or just looking for information, this event will give you the tools you need to make wise choices.

Dan Olmsted is co-author of “Age of Autism” and Editor of the blog of the same name. He was an original staff member of USA Today and Senior Editor for USA Weekend magazine and United Press International. He is a member of the National Press Club.

By Mark Blaxill

On Friday March 27^th, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued its latest
California Measles Surveillance Update  on “an outbreak of measles [that] started in Disneyland in Orange County, California, and spread to the community” and provided support for our proposal that the outbreak is now over. Last week (see HERE), based on the previous weeks’ surveillance update (March 20^th) Age of Autism made the first public prediction that the Disneyland measles outbreak was over. The reason for our prediction was because CDPH had for the first time given a future date when they would declare the outbreak officially over based on the length of time that had elapsed since the last confirmed infectious case. They also reported no new cases for the first time since they began publishing updates in early February.

In the March 27 update, CDPH confirmed that our prediction is holding. The predicted official end of the epidemic is still April 17^th. There was one additional “confirmed” case report that was “presumed to be linked to the outbreak,” but this new report was not a recent case.

CDPH also confirmed an analysis first offered by Age of Autism. Following last week’s update, we spoke to a CDPH spokesman and followed up with some questions in writing, including the following.  “For this last reported case, then, would it also be fair to estimate that the date of rash onset was approximately March 2nd, and the date of infection sometime in late February?” Despite receiving no response, in our report, Age of Autism speculated that March 2^nd was the date of onset of the rash. We still have not yet received a direct response to our query, but last Friday’s update confirmed that that our estimate was correct, with CDPH writing that “The latest confirmed measles case had rash onset on March 2nd, 2015.”

We’ll continue to track the rapid expiration of the Disneyland measles outbreak.

Mark Blaxill is Editor-At-Large for Age of Autism.