“Autism Spectrum Disorder”: An Obscurantist “Diagnosis”

The DSM-5 “diagnosis” is meant to conceal reality instead of elucidating it.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the philosophical shallowness and mendacity of most of the literature on autism. Notable exceptions include the seminal 1998 Wakefield et al. paper “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children,” as well as our McCullough Foundation paper “The Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder” of which Andrew Wakefield was an author.

Regarding Wakefield’s seminal 1998 paper: as we note in our book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality:

A few years later [after publishing the seminal Lancet paper] Wakefield was subjected to the most vicious smear campaign in medical history since Professor Ignaz Semmelweis was committed to a Vienna insane asylum in 1865 for proposing that medical students wash their hands with chlorinated lime after handling corpses in anatomy class and before examining the reproductive tracts of pregnant women in the general hospital maternity ward. The comparison of these two outrageous, calumnious, and stupid smear campaigns is apt when one considers that Wakefield did not claim in his paper that MMR vaccines cause autism. All he did in the paper was document the testimony of the children’s parents and recommend that the apparent association be further investigated. To quote the paper’s abstract:

Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children, with measles infection in one child, and otitis media in another. All 12 children had intestinal abnormalities, ranging from lymphoid nodular hyperplasia to aphthoid ulceration.

Other key passages from the paper are as follows:

In eight children, the onset of behavioural problems had been linked, either by the parents or by the child’s physician, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination. Five had had an early adverse reaction to immunisation (rash, fever, delirium; and, in three cases, convulsions). In these eight children the average interval from exposure to first behavioural symptoms was 6,3 days (range 1–14).

We describe a pattern of colitis and ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia in children with developmental disorders. Intestinal and behavioural pathologies may have occurred together by chance, reflecting a selection bias in a self-referred group; however, the uniformity of the intestinal pathological changes and the fact that previous studies have found intestinal dysfunction in children with autistic-spectrum disorders, suggests that the connection is real and reflects a unique disease process.

We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.

If there is a causal link between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and this syndrome, a rising incidence might be anticipated after the introduction of this vaccine in the UK in 1988. Published evidence is inadequate to show whether there is a change in incidence or a link with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

Reviewing this paper, it’s easy to spot the sentence that terrified the Vaccine Cartel—namely, “If there is a causal link between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and this syndrome, a rising incidence might be anticipated after the introduction of this vaccine in the UK in 1988.” Even though Wakefield did not claim there is a causal link, the mere thought that there might be one was sure to create a massive headache for fervent advocates of the MMR vaccine.

The smear campaign against Wakefield began six years after his paper was published, in 2004, just before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims commenced a massive proceeding to evaluate the claims of thousands of parents who believed their children had regressed into autism shortly after receiving multiple vaccines all at once. The initial hearings of this process—called the Omnibus Autism Proceeding—were scheduled for March 2004. In February, Brian Deer, a columnist for the Sunday Times—a major British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation—penned a report in which he asserted that Dr. Andrew Wakefield had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest and was therefore not an impartial investigator of the possible link between MMR vaccines and autism.^[i] The timing indicates that this opening salvo against Wakefield was part of the broader campaign to discredit the claims of petitioners in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, which we will discuss in the following chapter.

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^[i] Brian Deer. “Revealed: MMR research scandal”. The Sunday Times, 22 February 2004.

As the reader can see, Wakefield et al. were precise and cautious in their presentation. The subsequent, vicious attack is a perfect expression of the humbug that passes for scholarship among the vaccine cartel’s “scientific” mercenaries.

The DSM-5 diagnosis “Autism Spectrum Disorder” is a species of obscurantism—that is, a term intended to conceal reality instead of elucidating it. As I wrote in my contribution to the paper—the section titled Summary Remarks Concerning Risk Factors in our McCullough Foundation paper, “The Determinants of Autism Spectrum Disorder”:

Impartial and diligent investigation of the causes of autism has been hindered and complicated by many commercial, ideological, and political influences that have been brought to bear on inquiry and discussion. Moreover, as we noted in the introduction, trying to ascertain the causes of ASD is greatly complicated by the metaphorical use of the term “spectrum” to describe a broad range and severity of symptoms. All these symptoms may arise from related neurological pathologies that are aggravated by multiple genetic and environmental factors. However, seeking the causes for the entire spectrum of disorders is not likely to yield practical and actionable insights for any particular case. The entire literature on autism recalls Wittgenstein’s famous observation that confusion often arises when we think things are connected by one essential common feature, when in fact they may be connected by a series of overlapping similarities where no one feature is common to all the things. Seeking a common feature is therefore doomed to fail.

Many advances in our understanding of cancer have been made not by seeking common causes of all kinds of cancer, but by seeking the specific causes of specific kinds of cancer, just as Bradford-Hill and Doll did in their investigation of smoking and lung cancer. We believe that this same method should be applied to autism research. The most rational investigative approach—the one with the highest probability of yielding an actionable insight—is to identify cases of severe autism in which marked regression quickly followed from an identifiable insult that caused brain inflammation. Such as insult could be an acute infection or a severe reaction to a chemical or medicine. Childhood vaccines have long been an obvious suspect—a proverbial “elephant in the room”—because they combine attenuated infectious disease pathogens or toxoids with chemical adjuvants and preservatives, are injected directly into small, still- developing children, and are known to cause acute, adverse reactions in some children. On top of these established facts (largely confirmed by vaccine package inserts) we have the witness testimony of thousands of parents who have observed the same pattern. All tell a similar story of their children quickly developing a high fever and or seizures after receiving vaccines and then regressing into autism immediately following this initial illness. Such cases are exceptionally distressing because they result in the parents watching their healthy baby slip away into a withdrawn, irritable, and uncommunicative state. For impartial autism researchers, such cases present the greatest opportunity to gain insight into what is causing this terrible disorder with lifelong sequelae.