5 Scientific Findings Explain Link Between Vaccines and Autism

Written by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. on September 8, 2024. Posted in Current News

Five major scientific findings, taken together, explain how vaccines trigger autism, author J.B. Handley wrote on his Substack.

The cause is rooted in the body’s response to the aluminum adjuvant used in six vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule.

Federal public health agencies continue to ignore these scientific advances — made largely by prominent scientists working outside of the U.S. in the last decade — despite the scientists’ appeals to agencies to investigate the link and to stop telling the American public the aluminum in vaccines is safe.

The trigger for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, according to Handley, is immune system activation that can alter the developing brain when the activation occurs either in a pregnant mother or a young child.

This happens because the neurotoxic aluminum in vaccines travels easily to the brain. There, it can cause inflammation in vulnerable people by triggering the production of a key cytokine — interleukin 6 or IL-6 — a protein that affects the immune system. IL-6 has been linked to autism.

Handley, author of the best-selling book, “How to End the Autism Epidemic,” co-founder of the Age of Autism website and father of a son with autism, draws heavily on the Vaccine Papers website, which collects and analyzes relevant science, to outline the key scientific findings that make this case.

This important research largely happens outside of the U.S. because autism research that is “even remotely controversial” is impossible to get funded or approved, he wrote.

The research Handley cites began to emerge in 2004, and much of it came out after 2009 — after the Vaccine Court dismissed the autism-vaccine hypothesis and denied compensation for their vaccine injuries to thousands of families.

Quoting Vaccine Papers, Handley wrote that vaccines must be subjected to an objective risk-benefit analysis and should be considered as a medical treatment only if they do more good than harm:

“The problem with vaccines is that risks have been underestimated, and the benefits overestimated. In particular, the risk of brain injury from vaccines is much higher than commonly believed.

“Brain injury can be devastating to the life of a child, and the child’s family. The personal and financial costs of vaccine injury are often enormous. Therefore, even a small risk of brain injury must be considered seriously. And the science strongly suggests that the risk is not small.”

Aluminum adjuvant: the data missing from an ‘airtight explanation’ of vaccine-induced autism

Handley began the story with the discovery that he said ties together the research on vaccines and autism: a 2018 paper by Christopher Exley, Ph.D., and colleagues showing “shockingly high” levels of aluminum in 10 autism brain specimens.

According to Exley, the location of the aluminum suggested it was entering the brain through pro-inflammatory cells that had become loaded with the neurotoxin. Exley’s finding is similar to previous research showing what happens with monocytes — a type of white blood cell — at vaccine injection sites.

This is significant, Handley wrote, because it would become clear that macrophages (a type of monocyte) were moving aluminum from the injection site to the brain.

Exley’s study “provided the only data missing from an airtight explanation” of what happened to the countless families whose children developed autism following vaccination, according to Handley.

Aluminum adjuvant is an additive that “serves to wake up” the immune system so it recognizes the antigen for whatever the vaccine is meant to protect against, he explained.

The amount of aluminum children are exposed to has skyrocketed since the 1990s, according to a 2016 study — because vaccination rates for all children rose substantially and more vaccines were added to the childhood schedule.

“A child in the mid-1980s would have received 1,250 micrograms of aluminum from their vaccines by their 18-month birthday if they were fully vaccinated,” he wrote. “Today, that number is 4,925 micrograms, a near-quadrupling of total aluminum.”

Yet, aluminum has never been tested for safety in vaccines for babies. It is a demonstrated neurotoxin that carries a risk for autoimmunity, according to Canadian scientists Chris Shaw, Ph.D., and Lucija Tomljenovic, Ph.D., Canadian scientists.

Aluminum is the most common vaccine adjuvant, even though the mechanisms through which it works as an adjuvant remain unknown.

Despite the lack of data on its toxicology, “the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted,” Shaw and Tomljenovic wrote.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have admitted they have no data to show repeated injections with an aluminum adjuvant is safe, Handley wrote.

Now a growing volume of scientific literature shows that those repeated injections are unsafe. The literature shows that “five clear, replicable, and related discoveries explaining how autism is triggered have formed an undeniably clear picture of autism’s causation,” Handley wrote.

Five key discoveries: 

1. There is a permanent immune system activation in the brains of people with autism.

Research by the late Caltech scientist Dr. Paul Patterson, author of “Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism” demonstrated that the immune system interacts with the brain in ways that can affect neurodevelopment.

Patterson and colleagues found that if a pregnant mother’s immune system is subject to high activation — for example, from severe viral or bacterial infection during pregnancy — it can affect her child’s neurodevelopment, leading to neurological problems later.

Patterson noted that the brains of people with autism show that such immune system activation occurred, citing doctors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who found “neural inflammation” in a postmortem examination of the brains of patients with autism. That finding has since been replicated several times, Handly wrote, including by researchers in Japan.

Patterson and his colleagues hypothesized that chronic neural inflammation resulted from cytokines, produced by white blood cells at higher rates when an infection is present, that interact with the fetal brain. Specifically, one cytokine, IL-6, has a particularly powerful effect, they argued.

They triggered this neural inflammation in an experiment that involved injecting mice with IL-6 and saw changes in the neurology of the mice’s offspring. They later also linked maternal immune activation specifically to autism symptoms in mice and in monkeys. Other scientists replicated their studies.

In 2006, Patterson connected maternal vaccination to possible immune activation. He said current research begged the question, “Should we really be promoting universal maternal vaccination?”

2. Aluminum adjuvant is highly neurotoxic and causes immune activation. 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CDC base their recommendations for aluminum use in vaccines on a 2011 study that concluded aluminum accumulates in the skeletal system rather than soft tissue, and is safe.

However, Handley wrote that the “guess work” on aluminum is based on studies of dissolved aluminum — not of the aluminum hydroxide used in vaccines.

More recent research has shown aluminum hydroxide is a nanoparticle that is absorbed by the body’s macrophage, which can easily transport it to the brain.

A 2007 paper by Shaw demonstrated a link between aluminum adjuvant and motor neuron death. Shaw and colleagues published several papers showing that aluminum hydroxide is neurotoxic, particularly in pediatric populations.

They called for an “urgent” reevaluation of the safety profile of vaccines containing aluminum adjuvant.

Several studies in France also showed that the aluminum adjuvant injected into the body often ends up in the brain, causing neurotoxicity.

A 2017 French study published in Toxicology found the adjuvant had “long-lasting biopersistence” — meaning the body couldn’t get rid of it — and was linked to several illnesses including “chronic fatigue syndrome, cognitive dysfunction, myalgia, dysautonomia and autoimmune/inflammatory features.”

The authors of the French study also found that low, consistent doses were more neurotoxic than a single high dose and raised concerns that the “massive development of vaccine-based strategies worldwide” requires a safety reevaluation of the adjuvant.

3. The immune activation that triggers autism can happen in utero or after a child is born, while its brain is still developing. 

Researchers from the Middle East and Europe who used aluminum to induce Alzheimer’s in live rats showed that aluminum caused a four-fold increase in IL-6, and also increased other cytokines.

While researchers may accept that there is disorganization in the brains of people with autism, there is disagreement about whether that disorganization happens in utero or after birth.

Many who refuse the autism-vaccine hypothesis, like Dr. Peter Hotez, deny that postnatal brain reorganization is possible.

However, evidence for post-natal triggers of autism is strong, Handley wrote. He quoted Vaccine Papers to explain that every immune activation event in a susceptible child renders the immune system more sensitive and reactive to immune stimuli. This can happen both in utero and postnatally while a child’s brain is in key developmental stages.

Studies have shown that mice injected with IL-6 after birth later display impaired cognitive abilities. And case studies among children have shown autism onset following infection and inflammation of the brain.

4. Hepatitis B vaccine-induced IL-6 in postnatal rats.

Researchers in China tested the effects of vaccine-induced immune activation on brain development in rats. The hepatitis B vaccine, which had an aluminum adjuvant, increased IL-6 in the hippocampus. Significantly, the effects didn’t appear until the rats were 8 weeks old — when rats are almost fully adults. Most vaccine safety studies look at shorter-term outcomes.

According to Handley that could help explain the appearance of mental illness much later in life among humans, and support the hypothesis that vaccines are contributing to the rise in mental illness in the U.S. over the last 25 years.

“This is biological proof of the link between a vaccine  —  given to a post-natal animal  —  inducing an immune activation event, including the cytokine marker for autism, IL-6. A scientific first,” Handley wrote.

5. Several analyses found high levels of aluminum in the brains of people with autism. 

As previously discussed, studies like Exley’s later revealed very high levels of aluminum in brain samples from people with autism. This finding was key to understanding a key cause of inflammation in the brains of people with autism, Handley wrote.

The most current and comprehensive explanation of the role of aluminum-containing vaccines, inflammation and the immune system in autism can be found in a 2022 paper in the journal Toxics.

The study, by French researchers, showed the pathways through which a susceptible child might acquire autism when exposed to aluminum adjuvants.

What about the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine? 

According to Handley, aluminum adjuvants may also induce other autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, including gastrointestinal issues experienced by many children with autism.

Also, many families of children with autism saw their children regress after the MMR vaccine, which doesn’t contain an aluminum adjuvant.

More research is needed to fully explain why that could happen, Handley wrote. But research indicates that the effects of the MMR may be related to the fact that it is the first live vaccine children receive, around age 12-18 months, after they have had many vaccines that do contain aluminum adjuvants.

An “immune system bathed in aluminum adjuvant and possibly already simmering with activation events,” might be pushed over the edge by encountering the live virus. It may even trigger aluminum in the body to move into the brain, he wrote.

Handley lamented that public health agencies continue to refuse to study the issue.

“What’s been true throughout the autism epidemic remains true today: an overwhelming (tens of thousands) number of parental reports of regression of their children into autism after vaccination.”

Those parents observed the changes in their children but didn’t have a scientific explanation for what was happening, Handley wrote.

Enough scientific evidence has now been produced to put together a more rigorous theory for how vaccines, and the aluminum adjuvants in them, trigger autism and other illnesses.

“It’s time for the CDC, FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], Autism Speaks, and the American Academy of Pediatrics to face the biological evidence staring us all in the face!” he wrote.

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