The Big Lie: Autism is Only About Genes
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, April 2, 2020
When the topic of autism and other neuro-developmental disorders arises, and when parents seek answers for why their child is a victim of these life-long debilitating conditions, the entire medical community speaks with one voice: it is genetic. It is a defective gene(s). Indeed, as discussed below, many cases of autism are hereditary. But for many others it is equally plausible that these neuropathologies are environmental and often due to vaccines. Not only does the media champion the theory of genetic determinism, it also disparages, ridicules and mocks those with a different perspective. In particular, their attacks target parents who experienced a normal child descending into autism’s abyss after being vaccinated.
Part of the problem is the enormous power the pharmaceutical and vaccine industry holds over our entire healthcare system. They control the national narrative. This cognitive disconnect manifests in the outright dismissal of personal testimonies and experiences from parents and even pediatricians and doctors with vaccine injured children. During the past thirty years, efforts to marginalize and silence mothers of autistic children have been remarkably successful. In effect, it is the old hierarchical order of medical patriarchy that has usurped the power and authority to be trusted. Parents are relegated to irrelevancy and their testimonies are judged as unworthy and anecdotal.
All we need to do is reflect back at the Reagan administration when in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was signed into the law. Immediately afterwards, a frenzy of new vaccine development commenced. More vaccines were added to the national vaccination schedule, profits soared and vaccine injuries and autism increased. Since then, all of the whistleblowers within the vaccine community, physicians, scientists and investigative journalists who have documented the relationship between vaccines and neuropathology have been dismissed entirely. The consequence has been the emergence of a new medical McCarthyism. And the dogma of the pro-vaccine establishment that controls the plot dictates that autism is only about genetics.
Today, large amounts of funding is going towards research to identify and isolate genetic causation of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While there is very sound and convincing research to indicate that many cases of autism are associated with certain genetic anomalies in parents, this view barely scratches the surface of the entire story. Studies investigating twins where autism has been indicated do confirm that this adverse neuro-developmental condition can be inherited. Nevertheless, even among identical twins, in only 77 percent do both show autism, which raises the question about the remaining 23 percent. Among fraternal twins, the rate is 31 percent. One convincing empirical example is the case of a New York sperm donor who fathered about 20 children and half had autism. This is a statistically significant case showing that a person can be a carrier of one of the potential 400 genes that have now been tied to autism. But what about the many cases where there is no history of autism in a family nor is there any parental genetic inheritance? This is a common obstacle in studies and analyses that attempt to determine autism’s genetic causation. Many genetic findings, in fact, point to de novo mutations (DNMs), which are mutations that frequently occur during gestation but are not coded nor inherited from either parent. Such mutations occur spontaneously. Professor Ivan Iossifov specializes in the role of spontaneous mutations as a cause for autism at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. According Dr. Iossifov, “every child has some spontaneous mutations… but in some unlucky children these mutations severely affect the functioning of a particular gene.” In fact, DNMs are associated with half of all cases in families where only one child is diagnosed with autism.
DNMs raise the issue of epigenetic or environmental factors in a significant cohort of autistic people. There can be numerous possible environmental causes that may contribute to these mutations, such as toxic chemicals in the mother, disturbances in the regulatory function of fetal gene expression, microRNA regulation, and gene splicing events. Other epigenetic factors might be viral infections, pharmaceutical drugs taken during pregnancy, vaccination, toxic particulate matter in the atmosphere – such as those living near coal burning power plants where autism rates are higher than the national average. Such fossil fuel plants emit mercury and other toxic heavy metals.
Humanity continues to evolve (or de-evolve if one prefers) and the rate of mutations through natural selection in the germ line seems to be accelerating according to many evolutionary biologists. Some genes and gene regions appear to be evolving notably faster than others. According Iossifov, rates of autism genes have increased to 1 in 200 children in a rather short period of time. Why is this happening? One explanation is inheritance of parental mutations perhaps due to environmental factors such as toxins and diet, which did not affect the parents, but were carried on to offspring where they eventually manifested. DNMs that occur during fetal development is another. We can therefore realize how complicated efforts might be to identify actual causation. We largely cannot determine what environmental factors are contributing to epigenetic changes that create DNMs because there is limited efforts being made to do so. The scientific community seems to be content on blaming the autism epidemic on genes in order to bring an end to the debate. In other words, blame the parents’ genetic code.
Consequently, we must be extremely cautious whenever we hear someone espouse absolute and determinist arguments that declare autism is all genetic and an inherited condition. Those that embrace this belief are in complete denial about the larger magnitude of the epidemic’s causes. The increase in autism from 1 in 10,000 40 years ago to 1 in 50 today cannot be explained by the theory of natural selection, which is a slow evolving process. Those who focus solely on hunting down autism genes are like engineers who only measure and chart the spread of radiation from a nuclear power plant leak. They investigate the expansion of contamination in water ways and soil without attempting to identify the source of the facility’s leak and then remedy the problem. For geneticists looking at autism genes, the solution is to discover new drugs to target the brain’s neuro-pathways. But this is like erecting fences to stop the spread of radioactive materials and it has become an institutional failure to make efforts to explore more thoroughly the causes behind epigenetic mutations.
Yet there is another huge cohort of children with ASD and related neurodevelopmental disorders that are outside of the geneticists’ research. These are the hundreds of thousands of children who are vaccine injured. To date, no major effort has been made to critically evaluate these children under the guidelines of medical research to determine causation.
Modern science completely disregards subjective human experience. Unless something can be quantified and measured, such as a gene, it is otherwise preordained as illusory. This attitude has been a gross failure in medical science and a significant reason why conventional medicine has failed to prevent and treat many diseases including autism. In the meantime, autism rates continue to skyrocket. It is similar to the famous Middle Eastern tale of a man who loses his keys one evening. The constable making his evening rounds sees the man probing around on the ground under a street lamp. When asked where he thought he lost his keys, the man points over to area in night’s darkness but says there was more light where he is. This reveals the underpinning problem of medical reductionism that is not only espoused by geneticists investigating autism but also by the entire science-based medicine community. Consequently the testimonies of numerous parents who observed their completely healthy and normal developing children rapidly turning despondent, non-communicative, and exhibiting abnormal behavior shortly after receiving one or more vaccines, is dismissed outright as anecdotal.
One of the leading proponents of the school of genetic determinism is pediatrician and geneticist Wendy Chung , currently the chief of the Division of Clinical Genetics at Columbia University. During a TED presentation, Chung repeated the standard myth from medical orthodoxy that emphatically rejects the evidence that vaccines can in some cases cause neuro-developmental disorders that fall within the autism spectrum disorder. “Let me be very clear,” she barked, “vaccines do not cause autism!….. there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism.” Relying on an incorrect chart, Chung also told the audience that the mercury preservative thimerosal was removed from vaccines in 1992, when in fact it was removed in 2001 — a year after the scandalous Simpsonwood Conference, when the CDC, FDA, WHO and executive representatives from the vaccine makers met secretively to deliberate over the CDC’s own research showing thimerosal was likely contributing to the dramatic increase in autism. During that conference, it was decided to move forward to remove thimerosal in order to be on the safe side. Today, the CDC still recommends that pregnant women receive the flu vaccine, despite it containing 25 mcg of thimerosal mercury. In fact, Chung’s repositioning the year thimerosal was removed actually draws attention away from the remarkable decrease in autism cases starting in 2000 when the preservative was starting to be removed. As a result, in our opinion, her presentation was very misleading.
What epigenetic role might vaccine ingredients have on the incidence of DNMs to the fetus? The late Dr. Paul Patterson at Caltech is highly acknowledged as a leading researcher into the interactions between the nervous and immune systems. Patterson noted that viral and bacterial infections during pregnancy increased the risks of a child developing a neurological disorder such as autism. It is therefore outrageous that pregnant women should be vaccinated thereby increasing the likelihood of viral flare-ups from the vaccine.
But the autism-vaccine debate was never solely about thimerosal nor about Andrew Wakefield’s paper in The Lancet drawing attention to the MMR vaccine and gastrointestinal inflammation in autistic children. DNA contamination, genetically engineered viral vectors, aluminum adjuvant and other toxic ingredients found in vaccines have also been implicated with the rise in childhood neurological disorders.
At present, growing attention is being directed towards the adverse role of aluminum adjuvants. Aluminum under certain conditions can pass the blood brain barrier and accumulate in certain brain regions. There is absolutely no safe level of aluminum in the brain. Professor Christopher Exley at Keele University in the UK is one of the world’s leading scientists investigating aluminum’s toxicity. He has already established that the heavy metal is a primary etiological factor in Alzheimer’s Disease. Exley also measured high levels of aluminum content in brain tissue of autistic patients. In his paper “Aluminum in brain tissue in autism,” he notes that “these are some of the highest values for aluminum in human brain tissue yet recorded.” The metal was especially prominent in inflammatory cells in the brain that may account for the common event of encephalitis observed in vaccine-injured children.
Other research confirms Exley’s findings. Dr. Romain Kroum Gherardi at the University of Paris has mapped the translocation of vaccine aluminum in the brain of individuals susceptible to autism. Gherardi and his colleagues describe alum particles as being linked to infectious viral components such as HIV and HCV similar to a Trojan horse that makes their way into the brain. Research conducted at Chaim Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University in Israel, the University of Arkansas, and the University of British Columbia has also provided further evidence of aluminum’s role in the development of chronic neuropathy. The role of environmental aluminum in triggering de novo mutations needs to be examined.
Unfortunately this research is being completely ignored and worse denied by our federal health agencies and the medical establishment. Consequently, when a whistleblower at the CDC, Dr William Thompson, produced irrefutable evidence that the agency’s own research confirmed that the MMR vaccine contributed to a sharp rise of 324 percent in autism among African American boys under 3 years of age, he was institutionally ostracized. Thompson eventually drifted back into the corridors at the CDC, likely under a code of silence, and has never been heard from again. But to our knowledge he has never denounced nor retracted the thousands of pages of documents he submitted to Congressman Bill Posey and biology professor Brian Hooker that proved the CDC covered up vaccines’ adverse effects, their association with autism, and destroyed the evidence.
The current atmosphere of scientific denialism exhibited by the CDC and autism researchers such as Wendy Chung about autism’s etiology pervades medicine today. In such a climate, the autism rate will continue to rise as enormous amounts of funding is wasted on chasing red herrings, such as adding more genes to the national database without investigating the environmental factors that may cause these mutations. Furthermore, the testimonies of countless parents with vaccine-injured children must be given greater respect. These parents represent an enormous body of evidence that is categorically being swept under the rug in order for draconian vaccine mandates to proceed as if there are no consequences. And since the nation’s vaccine injury compensation is a rigged scam, and as the cost of healthcare increases while quality services decrease, families with autistic children that will demand a lifetime of care, are being forced into destitution. In short, autism in America is an egregious national scandal.