Status Updates From The Autism Vaccine

When aluminum began being added to the diphtheria shot in 1932, the epidemic appearance of autism was not far behind—materializing out of nowhere in the very two countries running nationwide immunization campaigns for the vaccine.

Things that make you go "hmm"...

As the lore of the retracted paper is repeated ad nauseam amongst those who have never bothered to read it, science has moved on and affirmed what the parents of the twelve children and the thirteen doctors who saw them suspected.

I wish Goodreads allowed for more characters in updates. The part about Dr. Wakefield and the Lancet paper just makes you shake your head.

Did you know that an American paper published in Pediatrics months earlier came to the conclusion that the measles vaccine can cause encephalopathy? We never hear about that; everybody's too busy accusing Wakefield of fraud. (He was never charged.)

Although the arrival and subsequent rise in autoimmune disorders is officially unexplained, its association with aluminum is increasingly being accepted as a possible cause. The role of the aluminum adjuvant used in vaccines has also received particular interest, a correlation that has unsurprisingly been met with mockery and derision by those whose careers have recommended its use.

Just got through a couple of very interesting chapters. The amount of research the author would've had to do to find all the sources boggles the mind.

The eugenics and forced sterilizations of previous decades had fallen out of favor, but the assumption that mental illness was inherited from one’s parents remained. Autism was something different. It had appeared seemingly from nowhere, and the parents of those affected were remarkably healthy, mentally stable, and showed no signs of anything amiss they might pass on to their children.

Manufacturers were doing all they could to limit the number of pediatric injections to three, a number which appeared to be the psychological limit for parents.

Three. LOL...

Psychological limits have sure changed since 1942!

I knew the Dionne quintuplets had been exploited, but I didn't realize they had also been used for what was, essentially, medical experimentation.

By the end of 1932, and for the first time in recorded history, hundreds of thousands of infants and toddlers were going to be injected with a metallic substance.

And so it begins...

After what had been great fanfare, the public’s faith in the [diphtheria] shot began to waver. Its effectiveness wasn’t being openly questioned, but the stories of children stricken down from serum sickness made parents terrified to allow their children to be injected.

This was in the 1920s. Vaccine skepticism is nothing new. Nor are side effects.

Really interesting so far. Learning about the development of diphtheria antitoxin, "de-horsing", and the introduction of aluminum to the serum mixture. I can already guess where this is going...

I really wish the author had called this something else. It's definitely provocative, but the title probably had something to do with Amazon dragging its heels for the release.

I hope I get my Kindle copy read before they change their mind and suck it back out of my app...

(So far, it's reading much like The Moth in the Iron Lung, which is basically a history book.)