Paul Offit (2010) has a new book out: Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (New York: Basic Books).
He flatly denies that vaccines have anything to do with autism and he does not believe in an autism epidemic. At 1 minute and 55 seconds into the video embedded here, see Offit say why he thinks that “vaccines don’t cause autism.” He says in that interview, “It’s been asked and answered. Vaccines don’t cause autism.”
So why is it that we see so many children having seizures, perhaps experiencing anaphylactic shock immediately upon receiving one or more injections? Or perhaps having seizures repeatedly within a few hours, days, or even within a couple of weeks? Why is it that 92.5% of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) reports going to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) occur within two weeks of a vaccination and 45.5% occur the day of the vaccination? Why is it that half the adverse events resulting in death end up being reported as SIDS—a category with no explanation?
Braun, M. M., & Ellenberg, S. S. (1997). Descriptive epidemiology of adverse events after immunization: Reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1991–1994. Journal of Pediatrics, 131(4), 529–535.
The CDC says that the temporal association between vaccinations and infant deaths is coincidental, but Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) accounts for nearly half the deaths reported under VAERS according to Silvers, Varricchio, Ellenberg, Krueger, Wise, & Salive (2002).
Silvers, L. E., Varricchio, F. E., Ellenberg, S. S., Krueger, C. L., Wise, R. P., & Salive, M. E. (2002). Pediatric deaths reported after vaccination: The utility of information obtained from parents. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 22(3), 170–176.
So how does Offit handle statistics like this?
Can 45.5% of adverse events on the day of vaccination and 92.5% within two weeks of a vaccination be explained as mere chance associations with vaccines, just a coincidence? Are all these facts unrelated to the autism epidemic? Is it plausible to suppose that vaccinations can cause all (or many) of the adverse reactions that are reported to CDC, including encephalopathies, and yet cannot cause autism?
In his own words to Sanjay Gupta, Offit says, “About 20% of children with autism will regress [actually the percentage is much higher than Offit says here], often between the first and second birthdays, so statistically it has to happen, where some children will get a vaccine, who’ve been fine, they get the vaccine, and they’re not fine anymore.”
Does it also happen by chance that sick kids can get a vaccine and suddenly recover from an illness, disease, or disorder? Does autism sometimes just disappear after a course of vaccinations? If Offit were correct about the chance association of autism with vaccinations, recoveries from autism (seizures, etc., including whatever is causing SIDS) ought to occur just as often as sudden “regressions” into disease, disorder, seizures, and so on.
The current statistics on “regression” show that Offit’s statistical explanation fails. As many as about 80% of children currently being diagnosed with autism, right after being vaccinated, suddenly seem to forget all of the words and skills acquired as their former self seems to disappear into the strange private world of nonverbal, socially disconnected, painful gut disease and intermittently self-injurious autism, seizures, etc.
Are these events dissociated from vaccinations?
Offit says it is just statistical. It is just characteristic autism ”regression,” he suggests. The term “regression” suggests something like backing down a series of steps to an earlier place on the stairway. But that is not what happens. The change is often precipitous and is a lot more like falling from a cliff and landing broken but often still alive at the bottom in the strange world of autism.
Here is my question for Offit and the CDC:
If the association with vaccinations is purely coincidental, can they show an equal number of cases of children who went in for a vaccination or series of them who were sick, disordered, or diseased and who came out fine?
If the statistical (chance) explanation were correct, vaccines being perfectly safe and unrelated to health problems, there should be a number of sick children getting perfectly well after a vaccination approximately equal to the number of well children getting sick.
But Offit does not carry his own explanation to its logical limits. Nor does he explain why, under CDC guidelines, vaccination is not supposed to take place if the child is already sick, say, with a runny nose and fever. Why? Because vaccination places an additional load on the already burdened immune system of the sick child. On the contrary, Offit insists that there is no harm in adding many more challenges to the immature immune system of an unborn baby, a newborn infant, or a pregnant mother. He says that even a newborn should be able to handle up to 10,000 disease agents in a single shot on the same day:
Offit, P. A. (2008). Autism’s false prophets: Bad science, risky medicine, and the search for a cure. New York: Columbia University Press. Reviewed by himself retrieved August 3, 2009, from
Offit, P. A., Quarles, J., Gerber, M. A., Hackett, C. J., Marcuse, E. K., Kollman, T. R., et al. (2002). Addressing parents’ concerns: Do multiple vaccines overwhelm or weaken the infant’s immune system? Pediatrics, 109(1), 124–129.
He also agrees with the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP, 2006) which claims that the neurotoxic and genotoxic preservative thimerosal in many flu shots and in shots being used around the world as sanctioned by the World Health Organization in agreement with the current CDC policy is perfectly safe for infants and the unborn babies of pregnant women.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. (2006). Thimerosal in vaccines. Retrieved June 10, 2009, from http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm#pres
After all, the CDC sanctioned the use of thimerosal in American vaccines for more than half a century, why not send it abroad? Imagine the backlash if the CDC now admitted the harm done by all that thimerosal usage in the past, not to mention its present use in flu shots and other vaccines, especially ones being exported all over the world.
Actually, Olmsted & Blaxill (2010) is a better buy, and for the 157 year history of mandatory vaccine use, see Oller & Oller (2010).
Olmsted, D. & Blaxill, M. (2010). The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Oller, J. W., Jr., & Oller, S. D. (2010). Autism: The Diagnosis, Treatment, & Etiology of the Undeniable Epidemic. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
The germ theory, which provides part of the underlying framework for vaccination theory, is a fine idea as far as it goes, but it is seriously incomplete. We have to look to the interactions between biological control systems.
When we do that we discover a lot of reasons why vaccines are a lot like blood-letting in reverse. Olmsted & Blaxill (2010) show that the same sort of thinkers who dosed people with Calomel and other mercury derivatives and who relieved depression, disease, and battle wounds by bleeding their patients to death by the thousands (for instance, in the American Civil War), and who supposed that all mental anguish and gut disease must be related to sublimated sexual desires or suppressed past sexual abuse, those same kinds of thinkers came up with the idea of injecting mercury to cure syphilis, filling teeth and bones with it, and they regularly increased the dosage of mercury to treat the mercury induced diarrhea and dementias that they attributed to everything but mercury. They supposed the mental disorders and losses were owed to anything but toxicity and preferred theories about repressed sexual desires and bad sexual experiences (Freud) to bad genes (as Offit and colleagues are inclined to do with the present-day autism epidemic and many related disorders and disease conditions).
Offit, however, is helping to erode the former confidence of the general public that medical “science” on the whole is worthy of the name. For more than 150 years the same bleed-them, inject-them, and psychoanalyze-them medically trained thinkers, now being led into the vaccinate-them before and after birth and throughout their lives with Paul Offit at the helm, are predicting the end of the world if we don’t vaccinate the living daylights out of everyone on the planet starting at or before birth.
The entire history of vaccination consists of the grandest and least informed human experiments ever carried out. Middle of the road medical professionals, walking down a wide well-traveled path, have been insisting all along that it’s all for the best…. However, in the background there have been researchers who looked to the facts, the outcomes of vaccination, and who took a different position. Some doctors and many intelligent individuals in the general public realized that putting poisons and disease agents directly into your bodily tissues seems inimical to staying healthy.
All the while, however, the mainstream practitioners have ignored the toxicology, the historical record of vast vaccination programs, and have relied on the often-told story about milk-maids and one eight-year-old boy who was exposed first to cow pus and then to the scrapings and fluid from a smallpox victim by the much revered, doctor Edward Jenner.
Experimental science? Not at its best. Jenner’s one-subject design would be rejected by any Institutional Review Board in the USA today and his results are questionable from every conceivable angle. Imagine a researcher today asking to inject one child with pus from a smallpox victim to see if the child might survive the experiment. Consider the merits of the single-participant design. Or how about the problem of reasonable informed-consent from an underage minor?
Yet, on the basis of Jenner’s “experiment” with one helpless eight-year-old victim, doctors have used toxins, disease agents, foreign biological components, and biochemical interactions, etc., on human beings now for many decades. What is interesting is that these experiments have been done on human beings with the full knowledge and consent of participating governments. Unfortunately, as we look back on the 157 year history of “mandatory” vaccination programs, those same governments during the part or all of the same historical time frame condoned slavery, used abortion as a birth-control method, and flirted with, or in the case of the 100 million Germans and friends, precipitated two world wars and practiced eugenics and euthanasia by genocide on millions of human victims. The Nazis started the holocaust purges by killing off nearly 300 thousand persons with diseases, disorders, and disabilities.
There is, like it or not, a dark side to the vaccine industries leading into the secret laboratories of the bioweapons research and so-called “peaceful” uses of engineered biochemical weapons in the production and use of pesticides.
Does it not trouble us to discover through the research of Olmsted & Blaxill the connection between Morris Kharasch’s invention of thimerosal along with the mercury pesticides that came out of the chemical weapons research labs of World War II? In writing our book on the diagnosis, treatment, and etiology of the autism epidemic (Oller & Oller, 2010), we suspected the possibility of some deeper link between Kharasch’s ethyl mercury in vaccines and the ethyl and methyl mercury killing agents in the pesticides that caused the poisonings in Iraq and elsewhere, but it was Olmsted & Blaxill (2010) who showed the direct historical link in the work of Morris Selig Kharasch himself.
Everyone who had studied thimerosal already knew Kharasch was the inventor of that ethyl mercury killing agent but it was revealing to see him personally linked also to the killing agents in the mercury based (ethyl and methyl) pesticides of the mass poisoning incidents.
The path leads back still further to the “Chemists’ War” (World War I) and some very interesting associations between Nazi death tools applied later in the holocaust (check out the link between the invention of DDT and the polio epidemics documented in Oller & Oller, 2010).
The protection of the vaccine industry is undoubtedly deeply connected to fears (mostly exaggerated if we look to the history of “outbreaks” of Soviet weaponized smallpox in 1971 and anthrax in 2001) about bioweapons and also, no doubt, to a lot of what appears to be disinformation encouraging a kind of vaccine mania (e.g., stockpiling 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine). When we look to the dark side of vaccine research, we find connections leading to doctors like Josef Mengele who had no heart for peace, love, or truth. Yet, the whole vaccine establishment supposedly is protecting us from people like him, and the bioweapons programs of “rogue” governments.
Meanwhile, our own CDC and Paul Offit represent themselves as the champions of the “truth” about vaccines, diseases, autism, and wellness. But the evidence shows that Paul Offit is a middle of the road vaccinologist who seems to have gotten caught up in his own financial success. Was RotaTeq worth the billion dollars we spent on it, as recommended by Paul Offit himself in behalf of his own invention while he served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices?
What will the use of RotaTeq actually cost in the long-run? The research already available shows that the RotaTeq “vaccine,” and others of similar ilk, are worse than a serious round of vomiting and diarrhea. Those vaccines not only do not prevent potential bouts with diarrhea, but cause consequences that no thinking person would prefer over an upset stomach. Taking the vaccine is a little like jumping out of an airplane with a faulty parachute because you are afraid you might otherwise fall and skin your knee.
The grandiose positive claims made on behalf of vaccines in general are contradicted by well-documented historical outcomes with smallpox and polio vaccines (see Oller & Oller, 2010 and references there) which are often pointed to by the CDC as the most striking success stories.
As intelligent thinkers have been pointing out from near the beginning of the mandatory use of smallpox vaccine (from about 1853), the whole theory of vaccines is analogous to deliberately sipping sewage to prevent an accidental exposure to a contaminated liquid that might result in dyssentery.
The vaccine paradigm needs to be re-examined. Meanwhile, the risk in discontinuing existing programs is probably just about as dangerous to the general public as it is turning out to be to the Amish people, home-schoolers, and those among the larger population who have looked at the autism epidemic thoughtfully and are saying, “I don’t think so. No thanks.” A lot of thoughtful individuals are coming to the conclusion that the CDC can’t find the causes of the autism epidemic even when they hold it in their own hands. It is already abundantly clear that toxins, disease agents, and their interactions are implicated. How are they impacting younger and younger babies? Does the word “vaccines” ring any bells?
It is not just thimerosal and the measles virus that need to be reconsidered. What we are finding out is that the vaccine industry rests on an unexamined history. When we look to the outcomes of the huge experiments on tens of millions of human beings the valid conclusions are that vaccines, e.g., smallpox and polio to pick the best studied exemplars, actually increased the risk of smallpox and polio along with other infectious diseases, as well as paralysis, cancers, needless exposures to adventitious disease agents (SV40 to choose just one), allergens, and so on.
Defenders of the CDC policies, however, will point to the theory of “herd immunity”—the idea that vaccinating a high percentage of persons prevents epidemics for everyone. It’s a plausible sounding idea, but there are huge counter evidences.
What happens to the herd immunity theory when we look to examples like the Philippines where the worst smallpox epidemic in the history of the world occurred several years after the American military administered 25 million doses of smallpox vaccine to 10 million inhabitants? The people in those islands, after every person on the average got 2.5 doses of smallpox vaccine, experienced the worst recorded smallpox epidemic in the history of the world in 1918. It infected tens of thousands and killed a higher percentage than ever in unvaccinated populations. In Leicester, England the worst epidemics occurred when over 80% of the population was accepting vaccinations for smallpox while death from smallpox and all other infectious diseases dropped precipitously when people in that sizable community started refusing vaccinations. These and many other historical cases and much additional data is cited in our book (Oller & Oller, 2010).
Vaccines have been over-rated with respect to their touted benefits and they have been under-rated with respect to their often lethal and destructive short-term and long-term consequences.
By contrast there is no danger in recommending a healthy diet, plenty of rest, and wholesome regular exercise. There is no harm in also recommending avoidance of toxic exposures and personal hygiene to prevent contamination with disease agents. Eating well, getting rest, exercising regularly, and staying clean make a lot more sense than shooting up tiny infants, pregnant moms, and unborn babies with disease agents, toxins, and adventitious biochemical leftovers from the lab animals used in producing vaccines.
The good news is that Offit’s latest title is correct in suggesting that the public still, for the moment, has choices to make. Let’s make them wisely in the coming New Year and decade. Offit’s title, of course, is an answer to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s seminal article titled “Deadly Immunity.”
Parents and intelligent persons everywhere are called upon to read the research for themselves. The doctors such as Paul Offit, for example, who rely more and more on newspaper clippings and policy statements (read his books) and presumptuous past history, are begging the critical questions. We must examine the history of vaccine use and, from the research and data available, it is plain that sanitation and hygiene are better approaches to disease prevention than injections of poisons and adventitious disease agents along with extraneous animal disease agents, protein fragments, and so forth.
That popular story about Edward Jenner is false and the great success of smallpox vaccine is a myth. Paralytic polio is directly linked in the relevant research literature with DDT and related toxins, and only indirectly linked to polio viruses which seem to be only incidentally involved. If 95% or more of people today have one or more polio viruses, why is it that they do not experience polio-like paralysis? DDT and its derivatives seem to be necessary to explain the actual incidence of paralyzing cases of “polio.”
Given careful research on such facts, the whole vaccine paradigm needs to be critically examined piece by piece. No more slogans from ignorant medical practitioners should be tolerated by the public. Kennedy is correct in arguing for a better informed public and for critical examination of the vaccine paradigm.
It turns out that medical “science” in general is not all it is cracked up to be by middle of the road practitioners trained to do what other middle of the road clinicians have been doing for decades. Everyone needs to read Olmsted & Blaxill (2010) with that in mind. As for Offit’s book? It’s a nice synopsis of policy statements and newspaper clippings with an occasional sidewise glance at cherry-picked (uncriticized) research reports that support one of his favored positions. Offit does not consider the theoretical weakness of his own position.
We need to demand that doctors consult the relevant research. Many of them are more ignorant than the general public on autism, for example.
When Offit claims to know for a certainty that vaccines cannot cause autism because the CDC studies can’t find a link (according to published reports of searches that were carefully designed not to find anything), he reveals a level of ignorance of the positive findings of toxicology research that is astounding. He is mistaken and the data to refute his certainty about the safety of vaccines is already in hand. It’s even evident to independent researchers in the CDC’s own files and published reports. It’s in the published research on the autism epidemic and in books such as Olmsted & Blaxill (2010) as well as Oller & Oller (2010).
The interesting thing about empirical findings is that they can never prove a universal negative claim such as the one that Offit makes: “Vaccines don’t cause autism.” On the other hand, an empirical disproof of such a general claim is certainly possible, and we already have many toxicology studies showing that Offit’s universal affirmation of the safety of vaccines is both pretentious and known to be false.
It involves an absurd error for anyone claiming to be trained in the sciences. It is the sort of statistical blunder that students of elementary statistics learn to avoid in their first course on experimental research.
The fact that a widely published medical “expert” at Offit’s level thinks failed searches count for anything at all is noteworthy as an indictment of all his reasoning on behalf of vaccines, and, unfortunately, the indictment generalizes to many medical practitioners and their spokespersons, especially in newsclippings and sad to say in many professional journals. Failed searches don’t count for much at all. Successful positive findings of causal relationships, by contrast, count for much more.
It only takes one toxicology study showing that a vaccine ingredient causes encephalopathy, genetic damage, and/or autism, to provide sufficient empirical evidence to reject Offit’s bold universal claim about the safety of vaccines. If thimerosal disrupts biochemical communication systems and causes mitochondrial damage in parts per billion, and is lethal in parts per million, how can CDC failed searches show it to be universally safe in any medicines or vaccines? There are many positive research findings utterly destroying any credibility for the CDC claims in behalf of their own failed searches. Their argument on behalf of failure to find evidence that vaccines cause harm are exactly like pointing to failed efforts to launch satellites as proof that it hasn’t already been done. Failure to produce or find statistically significant outcomes count for next to nothing in the face of even one successful demonstration of a predicted and theoretically understood causal relation. Can thimerosal cause autism and all its symptoms? It can. Other toxins, disease agents, and interactions are also implicated, but none of that is any sort of vindication for the position taken by Offit. He’s recommending the deadly choices.
As always, comments are welcomed along with questions about relevant research. No concern will be ignored and questions about the research, if not already addressed, certainly will be.
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Excellent article on the "Autism Epidemic" and a review of the book by Paul Offit who wrote a book called, "Deadly Choices." Offit indicates that he feels that vaccines don't cause autism. From our perspective, scientifically, he is correct. However, it is most certainly, and again scientifically, a contributing factor. The cause lies more in the Genetic Miasms triggered by the Mercury/Thimerasal in the vaccines. The author of this article, Dr. John W. Oller, does a great job proving Offit wrong.
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