Can Vaccines Cause Autism? We Deserve the Truth.

By Louis Conte, Medical Freedom Reporter, The Kennedy Beacon

As the country and the world start another Autism Acceptance Month, I offer a simple story that most of you can relate to, whether or not you know someone with autism.

In a city near you, a young mother brings her baby boy in for a ‘well-baby’ visit at her pediatrician’s office. The child cries as the doctor gives him his vaccines.

The mother winces as the shots are administered. The nurse comforts her and the child. A few minutes later, the mother and her child are on their way home.

Later that night, the child runs a high fever, is crying, and is inconsolable. The mother cradles the child and calls the doctor’s office. The night nurse answers.

“Fever isn’t unusual after vaccinations,” the nurse says. “Do you have children’ s fever reducer around?”

“I’ve never seen him this way. I’m really scared,” the mother says.

“If the fever doesn’t break, you can bring him in in the morning. The doctor will see you.”

The child lets out a haunting scream.

Before the night nurse can hang up the phone, the mother cries out, “Oh my God, he’s shaking! He’s having a seizure.”

The child survives the seizure. But in the days and weeks that follow, the mother notices that the child is not the same. He has lost words he began to speak. He seems disinterested in his toys. He no longer makes eye contact. He often cries or screams for no reason. He no longer plays with his toys and sits on the floor, perseverating over the ceiling fan.

Scenarios like this have been documented as vaccine injuries, which lead to encephalopathy (brain injury), in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). Here’s one such case:

“Bailey’s ADEM [acute disseminated encephalomyelitis] was severe enough to cause lasting, residual damage, and retarded his developmental progress, which fits under the generalized heading of Pervasive Developmental Delay, or PDD. Additionally, this chain of causation was not too remote, but was rather a proximate sequence of cause and effect leading inexorably from vaccination to Pervasive Developmental Delay.” (Banks v. Sec’y of Health & Human Servs.)

Here’s another:

“Wes Ian Kleinert suffered complications for more than six months after the administration of the DPT vaccine, and he continues to suffer from these complications, which have developed into a residual seizure disorder and autistic tendencies.” (Kleinert v. Sec’y of Health & Human Servs.)

As the media continues to deny any possible, casual link between vaccines and autism, above are just two of many cases the media and the government don’t want you to know about.

These children were compensated by past HHS Secretaries in vaccine court (a small special court in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims) because the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 prohibited claims against vaccine manufacturers. The cases came to light in an investigation I led that resulted in the publication of Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine Induced Brain Injury, compiled by Mary Holland, Robert Krakow, Lisa Colin and me. You can read the entire paper here.

During the course of the investigation, we accessed 194 cases through publicly available records. As we documented, 83 of the cases featured autism diagnosis.

There are hundreds of other cases that we were denied access to by the HHS.

The upshot is that the government understood – because they compensated the victims – that autism was often a sequela of vaccine induced brain injury but kept this information out of public view. The government then ran a series of hearings in the vaccine court called the Omnibus Autism Proceedings (OAP), aware that HHS knew autism was a result of vaccine injury.

The government did not disclose information about these cases to the 5,000 petitioners in those proceedings – just one of the deceptions that the Department of Justice’s Civil Tort Branch, which represented HHS, perpetrated on the families in the OAP.

What was done during the OAP will be addressed in future articles but the point to make today is that the autism community has good reasons for not trusting the federal government’s claims that ‘vaccines do not cause autism.’

Given the history of deception and the lack of gold standard science, the increase in autism continues to be unexplained by the government. Estimates vary, but some reports estimate there are 2.8 million adults living with autism in the U.S. and 61.8 million worldwide. The increase in autism is documented in this chart, from 1 in 150 children two decades ago to 1 in 36 today.

But back to my fiction based on the upsetting reality: I have heard stories like the one above from hundreds of parents and seen regression into autism with my own sons. My wife and I have spent our lives trying to give them everything we can to restore their health and improve their lives.

Nothing else has really mattered.

And all through the last twenty-three years I have wondered, “Was it the vaccines?”

Although thousands of parents have reported events like these over the years, legacy media outlets rarely cover these experiences. I wish I could say that we were alone with the experience of regressive autism.

Unfortunately, we are legion.

As I type these words, my hands shake, and I worry that this is too raw, too personal, too honest. I don’t want to upset our readers or awaken painful memories for those who know, unfortunately, exactly what I am talking about.

But I’ve decided that the only way to convey what we in the autism community have been through is to tell you this truth.

What is then unleashed on families after an autism diagnosis is an endless series of appointments with developmental pediatricians, psychologists, speech therapists and countless others. The meetings with the Committee on Special Education can be torturous. There are Applied Behavior Analysis sessions, appointments with physical therapists, and the doctors who specialize in treating seizures.

Nothing is as awful as the helpless horror of watching your child have a seizure.

Except for one other thing – the haunting dread those of us have experienced when a loved one with autism wanders away.

“He was just in the back yard! Now he’s gone.”

“Call the police!”

Driving like maniacs around town, in panic, searching, praying.

Then the call comes in.

“One of his teachers found him on Bedford Road. She’s bringing him home.”

The authorities will have questions, of course.

I want you to be aware that this is not about pretty blue lights or cute little puzzle pieces. Many of the people with autism die from their seizures. Many who wander away are not returned safely.

It is time to recognize that millions of people will be dealing with autism for the rest of their lives. Millions of people that our government has ignored.

That ignorance is getting expensive.

The cost of autism to our society is incalculable, as this study shows. The paper details an Autism Tsunami.

Autism already costs millions in elevated costs for special education. That is just for the kids with autism in our schools – paid for by your property taxes. The taxpayers are on the hook for the cost of the autism catastrophe but are not being told the truths about the issue. Instead, we are constantly told that the epidemic is a result of better diagnosis and that the increase only appears real.

No problem here. It isn’t a real concern like bird flu. Don’t bring up the vaccine thing.

We are not being told that we are all paying an autism tax.

But this is more than just about dollars. It is about figuring out what happened and getting some answers to end the autism epidemic.

For those of us who have asked what caused our children’s autism, watching a United States Senator say “People will lose faith in vaccines if we study any connection to autism” can make your blood boil.

If there is no connection, real science will show that. Then we can all go home.

As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler writes in a recent article on vaccines and autism, the science on the possible link is NOT settled. The science has never been settled, despite what the public health establishment, Big Pharma and the legacy media have told you.

But the time has come to get that science done – and to get it right.

Please remember that people with autism are your family, your students, and your neighbors. They deserve your acceptance and respect.

I am endlessly proud of my sons. They have taken what life has thrown at them and overcome obstacles I couldn’t begin to explain. They are good, loving young men. They are loved by everyone who knows them. I could not imagine my life without them.

The vaccine-autism issue will never go away until we get satisfactory, science-based answers.

In a democracy, there is no question we should be afraid to ask.

“Can vaccines cause autism?”

We deserve the truth. However bitter it may be.