The paradox of autism causation studies

(Editor’s note: this is yet another look at autism causation studies. We’re in such a strange moment. The stakes could not be higher and yet, as I explain below, the available studies are flawed and unlikely to get better. I don’t believe that the presence of a few reformers inside the administration changes this calculus much at all. I think we are much better taking matters into our own hands.)

The paradox of autism causation studies is that we already know beyond a reasonable doubt what’s causing autism but mainstream science will never “know” in the conventional way because of economic and political factors surrounding the autism epidemic.

Let’s start with the first half of that sentence:

I. We already know

Eyewitness testimony is foundational to our criminal justice system and relied upon by judges and juries every day to administer justice. In Neil v. Biggers (1972) the U.S. Supreme Court outlined five factors for evaluating reliability of eyewitness testimony: opportunity to view, degree of attention, accuracy of description, level of certainty, and time between crime and identification. That testimony can then be corroborated by documentary evidence and additional witnesses.

Parental testimony about autistic regression is at the highest end of the range in every case. Parents are with the child 24/7, the degree of attention could not possibly be higher, the parents know more details about the child’s life than anyone, they are certain about what they saw, and they generally know right away when something is wrong. In a sane society, the following testimony would be sufficient:

Your honor, my baby was perfectly healthy and meeting all of his developmental milestones. We went to a child “well baby” visit, my child got 4 shots. Over the next several days my child was with me 24 hours a day. He had a high fever, seizures, vomited, and screamed at a high pitch. We went to the emergency room, they ran a bunch of tests, but they couldn’t help us. Since then the child no longer speaks, makes eye contact, or has any social skills. The child now has a diagnosis of autism.

The judge and jury can verify any of these facts by examining before and after video; reviewing medical records; and interviewing other family members, care givers, etc. These are relatively straightforward cases. A child was developing normally, they experienced an acute toxic exposure at a child “well baby” visit, and the child regressed. This happens in up to 88% of autism cases. When this testimony is then repeated tens of thousands of times by moms across the country, it’s clear that we are in the midst of a major crisis.

However, we live in a society where our economy is based on enslaving children through chronic illness to enrich the ruling class. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act combined with the wrongly decided Omnibus Autism Proceedings and the wrongly decided Supreme Court decision in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC turned off the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury for the vaccine injured. Wide swaths of society have been brainwashed by carrots (the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry and the soon to be trillion dollar autism industry), sticks (exile, banishment, and blacklisting for anyone who questions the narrative), and the most expensive and sustained propaganda campaign in history, to think that this is normal and okay.

Unfortunately, trying to achieve justice in connection with vaccine injury in the U.S. means going up against the medical mafia that runs all aspects of society — the courts, the political system, the regulatory system, the media, the medical system, the scientific system, Wall Street, academia, etc. And they tilt the playing field and the evidentiary standards to protect their interests.

However, as free, sovereign, and sane people we need not accept the edicts of an insane society. We can simply acknowledge that “I saw with my own eyes what happened” is sufficient to establish causation with regards to vaccine injury.

As I explained in my last article, we also have a FOIA document and a whistleblower at CDC, two vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies from Gallagher & Goodman (2008 & 2010), a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study from Hooker & Miller (2021), and three vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies from Anthony Mawson (2017A, 2017B, & 2025) all showing that vaccines cause autism.

The mainstream medical community will likely never accept any studies that don’t originate from within their own ranks. They engage in circular reasoning by refusing to study the question and then they claim that no valid studies exist. But again, as sane people we need not accept their excuses and instead can simply acknowledge that we have already proved beyond any reasonable doubt that vaccines cause autism.

Now let’s look at the second half of that introductory sentence:

II. Mainstream science will likely never “know” in the conventional way what causes autism

Any honest philosopher of science will tell you that establishing causation is a thorny epistemological problem. Many fine books are written on the problem of causation and the deeper you go, the less you know. We live in a universe with an infinite number of variables. One cannot control for them all so there is always the possibility of confounding. Quantum mechanics establishes (for now) that uncertainty is built into the fabric of the universe. In physics the “laws” thought to govern large objects do not align with the “laws” thought to govern subatomic particles so there is clearly something that we’re missing in our understanding of the properties of matter. And then even if one could figure out all that, we might still be missing additional dimensions of reality that we cannot see or measure.

Given that unsolvable epistemological problem, but also with the need to proceed with our lives nonetheless, scientists have developed proxy measures that get us somewhat closer to establishing our best guess at causation (even though we will never be 100% certain).

The Bradford Hill Criteria are probably the most famous steps for establishing causation. From Grok:

The Bradford Hill criteria are a set of nine principles used to assess whether an observed association between an exposure and an outcome is likely to be causal. Proposed by Sir Austin Bradford Hill in 1965, they are widely used in epidemiology to evaluate evidence for causation, particularly when randomized controlled trials are impractical or unethical. Below is a concise overview of each criterion:

Strength of association: A strong association (e.g., a high relative risk or odds ratio) between exposure and outcome is more likely to indicate causation.

Consistency: The association is observed repeatedly across different populations, settings, and studies.

Specificity: The exposure is linked to a specific outcome or disease, with minimal association to other outcomes.

Temporality: The exposure must precede the outcome.

Biological gradient (dose-response relationship): The risk of the outcome increases with higher levels or duration of exposure.

Plausibility: The association is biologically or mechanistically plausible, based on existing knowledge.

Coherence: The association aligns with broader knowledge about the disease, such as laboratory findings or historical trends.

Experiment: Experimental or quasi-experimental evidence, such as randomized trials or natural experiments, supports the association.

Analogy: Similar exposures causing similar outcomes provide supporting evidence.

The original 1965 article on which this is based is somewhat more chatty.

The Bradford Hill Criteria is just one of many causal criteria systems including:

1. U.S. Surgeon General’s Criteria (1964 and later)

U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (1964). Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.

3. Rothman’s Sufficient-Component Cause Model (1976)

Rothman, K. J. (1976). “Causes.” American Journal of Epidemiology, 104(6), 587–592.

3. Henle-Koch Postulates (adapted for epidemiology)

Evans, A. S. (1976). “Causation and Disease: The Henle-Koch Postulates Revisited.” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 49(2), 175–195.

4. Susser’s Causal Criteria (1986, 1991)

Susser, M. (1991). “What is a Cause and How Do We Know One? A Grammar for Pragmatic Epidemiology.” American Journal of Epidemiology, 133(7), 635–648.

5. International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Framework

IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans. General methodology described in the Preamble (2019).

6. Modern Causal Inference Methods

Directed Acyclic Graphs:
- Pearl, J. (2000). Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference. Cambridge University Press.
Propensity Score Matching:
- Rosenbaum, P. R., & Rubin, D. B. (1983). “The Central Role of the Propensity Score in Observational Studies for Causal Inference.” Biometrika, 70(1), 41–55.

7. Weight of Evidence Approach

EPA Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment:
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2005). Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment.

WHO Framework:
- WHO (2021) Human Health Risk Assessment Toolkit: Chemical Hazards, second edition.

I would add Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) as another causal criteria system. There are over one hundred EBM hierarchies and dozens of EBM services that one can subscribe to that will summarize the latest studies via an EBM framework.

The point being — if one wanted to establish scientific causation in the conventional way in connection with autism, one would need a very large data set that included upwards of 1,000 variables for each person: race, sex, gestational weight, birth weight, age of the mom, age of the dad, all underlying conditions, region, all pre-pregnancy exposures, all exposures in utero, all exposures in infancy, each vaccine would be its own variable, the timing and order of the vaccines would be another variable, you’d need dummy variables for things that you missed, and a placeholder variable for a natural error rate in the calculations. And then you’d run a series of regressions to control for each different factor to see the relative contribution of each.

And it’s pretty clear from the data that we already have that what you would see is a series of escalating risk tiers:

Lowest risk: No vaccines, no birth drugs, normal gestation period, and no infant formula (exclusively breastfed), and the lowest level of exposures to pollution, plastics, fire retardants, pesticides, and EMF (so perhaps Amish, Mennonite, or off-grid) — we should expect to see an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 children (consistent with the first autism prevalence study, Treffert, 1970).
Low risk: No vaccines but one is exposed to urban air pollution, plastics, fire retardants, pesticides, EMF, and other pharmaceuticals — we should expect to see an autism rate of about 1 in 715 (consistent with Thomas & Margulis, 2016).
Moderate risk: An alternative vaccine schedule, urban air pollution, plastics, fire retardants, pesticides, EMF, and other pharmaceuticals — we should expect to see an autism rate of about 1 in 440 (consistent with Thomas & Margulis, 2016).
High risk: CDC vaccine schedule, urban air pollution, plastics, fire retardants, pesticides, EMF, SSRIs, & Tylenol — we should expect to see an autism rate of about 1 in 31 (consistent with Thomas & Margulis, 2016).
Highest risk: CDC vaccine schedule, birth drugs, c-section, premature birth, infant formula, urban air pollution, plastics, fire retardants, pesticides, EMF, SSRIs, & Tylenol — we should expect to see an autism rate of about 1 in 21 or even as high as 1 in 10 (which is what we are already starting to see in Black and Hispanic boys in aggressive vaccine mandates states including California and New Jersey).

I’ll eat my hat if this isn’t right but from everything we can see right now, this appears to be what’s happening.

Genes only confer a slight risk of autism.
Pollution, plastics, and pesticides set a somewhat higher base rate.
Any vaccines at all increase autism risk.
The more vaccines the higher the autism risk.
And then all of the ubiquitous toxic chemicals + birth drugs + c-sections + premature birth + infant formula (no breastfeeding) + the CDC vaccine schedule, and the autism rate goes through the roof.

Now here’s where the story gets really weird. We basically had the comprehensive 1,000 variable study that I just described, but then-NIH Director Francis Collins killed it in 2014. From my thesis:

The failure of the National Children’s Study

As the autism rate increased dramatically in the United States in the 1990s, many leading public health figures called for comprehensive research into possible environmental causes. In 1998, the President’s [Clinton] Task Force on Environmental Health and Safety Risks to Children recommended a National Children’s Study (NCS) and authorizing legislation was included in the Children’s Health Act of 2000 (Landrigan et al., 2006).

The act called for a prospective cohort study that would track 100,000 children from shortly after conception through age 21 (Landrigan et al., 2006). The act called for “a complete assessment of the physical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial environmental influences on children’s well-being; data collection to evaluate “environmental influences and outcomes on diverse populations of children, which may include the consideration of prenatal exposures;” and consideration of “health disparities among children, which may include the consideration of prenatal exposures” (H.R. 4365, 2000). In other words, Congress funded exactly the sort of comprehensive epidemiological study that would enable scientists to identify the possible environmental causes of autism.

But the study never got off the ground. The NCS spent from 2001 to 2007 consulting with a range of experts and advisory committees on questions of study design. In 2007, Congress appropriated funding for a pilot called the Vanguard Study (Kaiser, 2014). In 2009, the NIH began enrolling 5,000 mother-infant pairs in 40 academic centers across the United States (Kaiser, 2014).

The original director, Peter Scheidt was ousted in 2009 for “misleading Congress about the true cost of the study” (Tozzi & Wayne, 2014). In 2012, the NIH dropped the 40 academic centers and turned the study subjects over to private contractors (Kaiser, 2014). In 2014, after spending fourteen years and more than $1.3 billion on the study that was still in the pilot phase, Francis Collins, director of the NIH, killed the study altogether (Collins, 2014).

Following the cancellation of the project, Collins and others made statements about continuing the research in some form using less expensive methods (Collins, 2014), but such promises have not come to fruition. During the fourteen years that the NCS spent unsuccessfully trying to launch the study, the autism rate increased nearly five fold from 1 in 250 to 1 in 59 (CDC, 2018).

It would be easy to blame bureaucratic incompetence for the failure of this project. But Francis Collins, who led the NIH from 2009 to 2016 (and was reappointed as head of NIH in 2017 by President Trump), previously led the Human Genome Project — so he had experience shepherding complex multibillion dollar projects to completion.

Francis Collins and the autism industry took all of the money for the study, produced nothing, and then shut down the study altogether. If it had been successful (at identifying causes of autism) spending several billion dollars on the NCS would have been a bargain, given that autism already cost the U.S. $268 billion per year by 2015.

Presumably the reason Francis Collins shut down the study is that he knew what they would find and that threatened the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry and the growing autism industry.

Now, more than a decade later, the chances that HHS Secretary Kennedy will be able to push through a new conventional study and do it in the six months that he’s publicly promised are essentially zero. The pharmaceutical industry is stronger and richer than ever before, the autism industry is bigger and more powerful than ever before, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are complicit in the largest crime in human history who don’t want to go to jail.

We are living in a crime scene. Practically speaking, one could conduct a study to satisfy the Bradford Hill Criteria or any other system of causation to prove that vaccines cause autism and other intellectual disabilities (in fact, this has already been done, see Bjelogrlic, 2025). Politically speaking, the mainstream scientific community will never arrive at this answer themselves because of their own complicity and culpability.

III. The conundrum

All of the data we have on autism are flawed. The mainstream vaccine studies don’t have a control group. The gene studies are based entirely on spurious correlation. The mainstream environmental studies fail to control for vaccines lest the researchers get blacklisted. And the alternative studies are small and underpowered. Nearly every study published since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act has a financial conflict of interest. Quite literally we have conflicted, poorly-designed studies from the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry vs. testimony from moms and dads and alternative studies funded by a parents of vaccine injured children.

That’s the data we have to solve an epidemic so large and expensive that it will cause the collapse of the developed world in our lifetime. And the data will not get any better in our lifetime either because the pharmaceutical industry and the autism industry are so large, rich, and powerful that they can prevent any new research from being conducted (and if it is somehow conducted they can find ways to kill the study as they did with the National Children’s Study or manipulate the analysis or block the release of the findings).

But the reason I bring all of this up is that this realization sets us free. There’s a particular moment in soccer, often late in the game on a counterattack, when a striker has to make a split-second decision to press the attack or wait for additional midfielders to join the play. A teammate who has a better view of the playing field will sometimes yell out, “What you see!” It conveys a lot of information with just three words. It means that no additional help is coming and the best opportunity you have is to make the play with what you see in front of you. I think that’s what we have to do with autism as well.

We know what’s causing autism. We should not wait for a double blind RCT because a double blind RCT is never coming given the political economy of autism. Instead we should trust each other in community against the predatory forces of global monopoly capitalism that are trying to enslave and kill us. We must return to the wisdom of parents and trusting each other if we are to survive this toxic pharmacological assault on humanity.

So we avoid vaccines. Yep, all of them (unless you’re in the third world and want to take BCG to reduce the risk of tuberculosis). Of course we avoid other toxicants too. We warn others, one at a time. We slowly back away from the genocidal culture that did this to us and we build our own parallel society and our own self-sufficient communities. Mainstream society is dying and will collapse completely on its current trajectory. So we step off that path and chart our own better course. That’s the work of the next 50 years.

Blessings to the warriors. 🙌

Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏

Huzzah for everyone building the parallel society our hearts know is possible. ✊

In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.

As always, I welcome any corrections.