Sara Reardon’s article invites readers to infer a hidden vaccine agenda, then cites evidence that supports the plan’s call for prospective regression research and contradicts its own account of when r
"We hope NIH funds vaccine studies to the hilt" is the author announcing the outcome he wants from the plan he just certified as vaccine-free.
"Bona fide, good-faith studies of the role of vaccines in autism etiology are long overdue" dismisses the Danish cohorts, the VSD analyses, the Japanese natural experiment, and the meta-analyses covering over a million children as not good-faith, without engaging a single one - the same unfalsifiable move he attacks Reardon for, since any study finding nothing is retroactively defined as not bona fide.
The ACIP aside ("speak-no-harm") is a grievance, not an argument.
This essay is best read as two documents stapled together: a legitimate media-criticism memo identifying two or three checkable errors in a Science article, and an advocacy piece that uses those errors to launder the conclusion that vaccine-causation research is overdue and suppressed.
The first deserves a correction from Science if the quotes hold. The second is refuted by the evidence record it never engages, and by its own closing line.
And yet autism basically doesn't exist in the unvaccinated Amish despite these studies. Studies, which may be in good faith, often fail to include considerations that lead to a wrong conclusion or, as we learn more about the body, issues such as methylation that could play a part along with vaccination need consideration.
That there were prior studies doesn't mean science isn't expanding and the issue is settled. The observation of parents seeing the sudden change in their child after a vaccination, or after multiple vaccinations, is too powerful to dismiss.
There aren't enough studies into the causes and correlations of autism with vaccinations. And I, for one, am happy my taxes will fund them. The howling about hidden agendas smacks more of the ongoing defensive measures by the vaccination industry and its adherents to stop changes that could affect the bottom line. In fact, had they done an honest job with the mRNA genetic treatments posing as vaccines, this issue would have stayed below the radar for most of the public.
The Amish premise is false on both ends: Holmes County surveys show about 85 percent of Amish parents vaccinate at least partially, and screening studies in Ohio and Indiana settlements found autism at roughly 1 in 270, including in unvaccinated children, plus a documented founder mutation (CNTNAP2) that produces autism specifically in Old Order Amish. "Basically doesn't exist" describes their rate of diagnosis-seeking, not their rate of autism.
Methylation is not a neglected frontier being suppressed; MTHFR variants, folate metabolism, and one-carbon pathways have been studied in autism for two decades with weak and inconsistent results, and the new IACC plan funds exactly this, so the example chosen to show science isn't settled is one where the expanding science has been running the whole time.
"Science is expanding" is true but does no work: expansion is a reason to test specified hypotheses, and the vaccine hypothesis was specified, tested in cohorts totaling millions of children, and failed, so keeping it alive requires new evidence, not the observation that knowledge grows.
Parental observation is not dismissed; it's precisely what the studies investigated, and the finding was that the same regressions occur at the same rates in unvaccinated children and that retrospective onset-dating migrates toward memorable events, which Ozonoff demonstrated by comparing parents' reports at age two against their own reports at age six.
Your bottom-line argument runs backward: pediatric vaccines are a low-margin commodity - a few percent of pharmaceutical revenue, while a vaccine-caused, screenable, treatable form of autism would be a liability engine for plaintiffs and a product line for competitors, so the industry's financial incentive points toward finding a subgroup, not hiding one.
The mRNA closing is sociologically correct but it cuts the other way: COVID-era trust damage explains why this vaxx>autism belief is spreading now, in 2026, about a hypothesis whose evidence base has not changed, and infants in the regression window were not receiving mRNA vaccines, so whatever one thinks of that episode, it transfers exactly zero evidence to the childhood schedule.
If you fund the studies with your taxes; they'll be the fourth generation and you'll be funding a design that has not once returned the answer you seek.
This is interesting, but to say that the expansion of knowledge is no reason to revisit the hypothesis is an argument to continue accepting alzheimers is due solely to amyloid. So I picked a bad example: it doesn't erase the point I made. There are stats showing the rise is autism correlated with vaccination. If that is true, it needs to be examined and any contributing factor found or debunked. From what I have read, it has not. As far as pediatric vaccines being a low commodity, Woolworth had something to say about that.
The Alzheimer's analogy is worth taking seriously because it fails in an instructive way. Amyloid was revisited not because knowledge generally expanded but because the hypothesis kept failing its own predictions: two decades of anti-amyloid drugs cleared plaques and patients did not improve, and then the Lesné image-fraud scandal knocked out a foundational paper. Failed predictions plus specific new evidence is exactly the trigger that legitimately reopens a question.
The vaccine hypothesis has the opposite record: its predictions were tested and the null results came back, and no anomaly since has pointed back at it - thimerosal was removed and rates rose, Japan withdrew MMR and rates rose, whole-cell DTP became acellular DTaP and rates rose. Note also who corrected amyloid: neuroscientists, journal editors, and Science magazine itself, through the ordinary machinery of the field, which is evidence against the claim that this machinery cannot correct entrenched errors.
So the analogy licenses revisiting vaccines only if someone produces the equivalent of the failed drug trials or the doctored western blots, and the correlation offered is not that: autism prevalence over time correlates with the schedule's growth, but it correlates equally with diagnostic criteria widening in 1994 and 2013, autism becoming a special-education category, screening at 18 months becoming universal, parental age rising, and organic food sales, because almost everything trends upward over thirty years; that is why the field moved past ecological correlation to designs with real denominators, and "from what I have read, it has not been examined" is a statement about a reading list, since the examinations exist by name - the Danish MMR cohorts of 537,000 and 657,000 children, the VSD antigen-exposure studies, the 2014 meta-analysis covering 1.2 million, the 2025 Danish aluminum cohort of 1.2 million - and any one of them can be pulled up and criticized on its methods, which is the honest version of the exercise.
On Woolworth: granted, volume makes low-margin goods profitable, but the incentive argument was about asymmetry, not poverty. The 1986 Act moved injury claims into a no-fault fund, so the industry's exposure is capped either way; meanwhile a demonstrated vaccine-caused subtype would be a patentable screening test, a competitor's marketing weapon, and a career-making paper for any of the thousands of independent researchers across dozens of countries, most with national health systems and no stake in Pfizer's margins, who have had the registries needed to find it for twenty-five years. A conspiracy of silence requires the silence; the field has instead been loudly publishing the searches.
Saying I want objective science that includes all exposures to toxicants, including immunotoxins, does not mean I am announcing the outcome of the research studies. Because policy should come from science, not the other way around. By refusing to include vaccines for policy reasons, doctors are left "baffled" as to causality... what % of the population has to suffer before we agree to study all potential causes ... and DO something about it? I have engaged with the studies done so far more than nearly anyone else- nearly all are underpowered, and only a few vaccines have been studied, so "VaccineS Do Not Cause Autism" has no empirical basis.
In a non-statistical sense, regression in epidemiology means the physical shrinking, reduction, or complete reversal of a disease's signs, symptoms, or lesions in a patient.
Let me say in plain English. I don't give a flying fuck what Alison Singer has to say.
"We hope NIH funds vaccine studies to the hilt" is the author announcing the outcome he wants from the plan he just certified as vaccine-free.
"Bona fide, good-faith studies of the role of vaccines in autism etiology are long overdue" dismisses the Danish cohorts, the VSD analyses, the Japanese natural experiment, and the meta-analyses covering over a million children as not good-faith, without engaging a single one - the same unfalsifiable move he attacks Reardon for, since any study finding nothing is retroactively defined as not bona fide.
The ACIP aside ("speak-no-harm") is a grievance, not an argument.
This essay is best read as two documents stapled together: a legitimate media-criticism memo identifying two or three checkable errors in a Science article, and an advocacy piece that uses those errors to launder the conclusion that vaccine-causation research is overdue and suppressed.
The first deserves a correction from Science if the quotes hold. The second is refuted by the evidence record it never engages, and by its own closing line.
And yet autism basically doesn't exist in the unvaccinated Amish despite these studies. Studies, which may be in good faith, often fail to include considerations that lead to a wrong conclusion or, as we learn more about the body, issues such as methylation that could play a part along with vaccination need consideration.
That there were prior studies doesn't mean science isn't expanding and the issue is settled. The observation of parents seeing the sudden change in their child after a vaccination, or after multiple vaccinations, is too powerful to dismiss.
There aren't enough studies into the causes and correlations of autism with vaccinations. And I, for one, am happy my taxes will fund them. The howling about hidden agendas smacks more of the ongoing defensive measures by the vaccination industry and its adherents to stop changes that could affect the bottom line. In fact, had they done an honest job with the mRNA genetic treatments posing as vaccines, this issue would have stayed below the radar for most of the public.
Each claim here has already been examined.
The Amish premise is false on both ends: Holmes County surveys show about 85 percent of Amish parents vaccinate at least partially, and screening studies in Ohio and Indiana settlements found autism at roughly 1 in 270, including in unvaccinated children, plus a documented founder mutation (CNTNAP2) that produces autism specifically in Old Order Amish. "Basically doesn't exist" describes their rate of diagnosis-seeking, not their rate of autism.
Methylation is not a neglected frontier being suppressed; MTHFR variants, folate metabolism, and one-carbon pathways have been studied in autism for two decades with weak and inconsistent results, and the new IACC plan funds exactly this, so the example chosen to show science isn't settled is one where the expanding science has been running the whole time.
"Science is expanding" is true but does no work: expansion is a reason to test specified hypotheses, and the vaccine hypothesis was specified, tested in cohorts totaling millions of children, and failed, so keeping it alive requires new evidence, not the observation that knowledge grows.
Parental observation is not dismissed; it's precisely what the studies investigated, and the finding was that the same regressions occur at the same rates in unvaccinated children and that retrospective onset-dating migrates toward memorable events, which Ozonoff demonstrated by comparing parents' reports at age two against their own reports at age six.
Your bottom-line argument runs backward: pediatric vaccines are a low-margin commodity - a few percent of pharmaceutical revenue, while a vaccine-caused, screenable, treatable form of autism would be a liability engine for plaintiffs and a product line for competitors, so the industry's financial incentive points toward finding a subgroup, not hiding one.
The mRNA closing is sociologically correct but it cuts the other way: COVID-era trust damage explains why this vaxx>autism belief is spreading now, in 2026, about a hypothesis whose evidence base has not changed, and infants in the regression window were not receiving mRNA vaccines, so whatever one thinks of that episode, it transfers exactly zero evidence to the childhood schedule.
If you fund the studies with your taxes; they'll be the fourth generation and you'll be funding a design that has not once returned the answer you seek.
This is interesting, but to say that the expansion of knowledge is no reason to revisit the hypothesis is an argument to continue accepting alzheimers is due solely to amyloid. So I picked a bad example: it doesn't erase the point I made. There are stats showing the rise is autism correlated with vaccination. If that is true, it needs to be examined and any contributing factor found or debunked. From what I have read, it has not. As far as pediatric vaccines being a low commodity, Woolworth had something to say about that.
The Alzheimer's analogy is worth taking seriously because it fails in an instructive way. Amyloid was revisited not because knowledge generally expanded but because the hypothesis kept failing its own predictions: two decades of anti-amyloid drugs cleared plaques and patients did not improve, and then the Lesné image-fraud scandal knocked out a foundational paper. Failed predictions plus specific new evidence is exactly the trigger that legitimately reopens a question.
The vaccine hypothesis has the opposite record: its predictions were tested and the null results came back, and no anomaly since has pointed back at it - thimerosal was removed and rates rose, Japan withdrew MMR and rates rose, whole-cell DTP became acellular DTaP and rates rose. Note also who corrected amyloid: neuroscientists, journal editors, and Science magazine itself, through the ordinary machinery of the field, which is evidence against the claim that this machinery cannot correct entrenched errors.
So the analogy licenses revisiting vaccines only if someone produces the equivalent of the failed drug trials or the doctored western blots, and the correlation offered is not that: autism prevalence over time correlates with the schedule's growth, but it correlates equally with diagnostic criteria widening in 1994 and 2013, autism becoming a special-education category, screening at 18 months becoming universal, parental age rising, and organic food sales, because almost everything trends upward over thirty years; that is why the field moved past ecological correlation to designs with real denominators, and "from what I have read, it has not been examined" is a statement about a reading list, since the examinations exist by name - the Danish MMR cohorts of 537,000 and 657,000 children, the VSD antigen-exposure studies, the 2014 meta-analysis covering 1.2 million, the 2025 Danish aluminum cohort of 1.2 million - and any one of them can be pulled up and criticized on its methods, which is the honest version of the exercise.
On Woolworth: granted, volume makes low-margin goods profitable, but the incentive argument was about asymmetry, not poverty. The 1986 Act moved injury claims into a no-fault fund, so the industry's exposure is capped either way; meanwhile a demonstrated vaccine-caused subtype would be a patentable screening test, a competitor's marketing weapon, and a career-making paper for any of the thousands of independent researchers across dozens of countries, most with national health systems and no stake in Pfizer's margins, who have had the registries needed to find it for twenty-five years. A conspiracy of silence requires the silence; the field has instead been loudly publishing the searches.
Saying I want objective science that includes all exposures to toxicants, including immunotoxins, does not mean I am announcing the outcome of the research studies. Because policy should come from science, not the other way around. By refusing to include vaccines for policy reasons, doctors are left "baffled" as to causality... what % of the population has to suffer before we agree to study all potential causes ... and DO something about it? I have engaged with the studies done so far more than nearly anyone else- nearly all are underpowered, and only a few vaccines have been studied, so "VaccineS Do Not Cause Autism" has no empirical basis.
But we're not at all surprised by this backtracking doubletalking face-saving effort to somehow damn it all with faint praise. Are we?
Huh? Regression is a statisticalmethod to determine how one variable affect another. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regression.asp Confusing!
In a non-statistical sense, regression in epidemiology means the physical shrinking, reduction, or complete reversal of a disease's signs, symptoms, or lesions in a patient.
This is not the time for word games. See https://www.upandupaba.com/faqs-resources/what-does-autism-regression-look-like and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22regressive+autism%22&sort=date&size=100