Vaccines and welfare fraud? Autism spike culprits widen with CDC about-face, Minnesota prosecutions

"Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD). No links have been found between any vaccine ingredients and ASD."

For the first 10 months of the Trump administration, these "key points" based on government research opened the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's autism page in its vaccine safety portal, a holdover from prior administrations.

That changed Wednesday, when the CDC quietly updated the page with a loud message: The evidence isn't anywhere near settled.

"The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism," the key points now begin, claiming the CDC and other Department of Health and Human Services components violated the Data Quality Act by promoting unfounded claims to "prevent vaccine hesitancy."

"Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities. HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links," the key points say.

The CDC's revisions recall the semantic talking points by pro-masking advocates against the idea that "masks don't work" against the spread of COVID-19, obscuring that rigorous mask research has consistently found low-quality evidence of their efficacy.

The Cochrane research collaborative put a scarlet letter on its own systematic review of mask research for 15 months because the study had been "widely misinterpreted" as "masks don't work," but eventually cleared the study without requiring the authors to update the "plain language summary and abstract," which said masks make "little to no difference."

Vaccine skeptics cheered the CDC change and jostled to take credit for it. 

"This is the culmination of more than 6 years of work" by the Informed Consent Action Network, its CEO Del Bigtree's The Highwire wrote on X, referring to ICAN's 2021 lawsuit to compel HHS to remove the autism claims due to "the lack of scientific studies supporting any such assertion," an alleged violation of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.

"This represents vindication for the 40-70% of Autism Parents in America who have been marginalized because of that unsupported claim," The Highwire said.

The Children's Health Defense, founded by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote on X: "This is the biggest public health reversal of our lifetime. And it confirms what parents have been shouting for decades," 

 Epidemiologist and McCullough Foundation administrator Nicolas Hulscher wrote on X: "They are correct. 107 studies linking vaccines to autism and neurodevelopmental disorders have been ignored."

Foundation president and cardiologist Peter McCullough told Just the News, No Noise, in an episode to air next week, that the timing was "very, very consistent with the CDC reading the McCullough Foundation report" published a month ago, which he said has racked up "over 200,000 downloads and reads from the European Commission preprint server."

He described the CDC change on X as "capitulation." 

"Stonewalling of parents ended thanks to our reach and the great work of many activists and organizations.  It took evidence and a report to drive this change," McCullough also wrote.

"BOMBSHELL," exulted vaccine injury lawyer Aaron Siri, whose Vaccines, Amen book launch featured Saturday Night Live legend Rob Schneider. The changes confirm "the CDC has simply been lying to you."

Welfare fraud may partly explain autism spike

Another possible explanation for the spike in autism rates emerged Wednesday in a City Journal investigation of rampant welfare fraud in Minnesota, which in "many cases" was allegedly perpetrated by Somali immigrants. The headline, quoting a confidential source: "The Largest Funder of [terrorist group] Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer."

The U.S. attorney's office for Minnesota on Sept. 24 issued the first charges in an "autism fraud scheme" that targeted the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention benefit, a "publicly funded Minnesota Health Care Program that offers medically necessary services to people under the age of 21 with autism spectrum disorder." 

Asha Farhan Hassan "and her partners needed children who had an autism diagnosis and an individual treatment plan," so they "approached parents in the Somali community to recruit their children into Smart Therapy," a company with secret ownership stakes that Hassan claimed to solely own, USAO said.

"EIDBI treatment services must be delivered under the supervision of a Qualified Supervising Professional (or “QSP”) that is employed by the EIDBI provider," and Smart Therapy worked with a QSP to get every child they tried qualified for autism services, USAO said.

Autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota shot up from $3 million in 2018 to $399 million in 2023, while autism providers in the state jumped from 41 to 328, many established in the Somali community in the name of "culturally appropriate programming," City Journal reported. The diagnosis rate for Somali 4-year-olds is reportedly "more than triple the state average."

From 5 to 25 doses by age one since 1986

The CDC updates aren't a surprise, given Kennedy's decades-long vaccine skepticism and specifically his assertion of a connection between autism and thimerosal in vaccines, the subject of his 2005 since-retracted essay for Rolling Stone. He told Fox News as a 2024 presidential candidate "I do believe that autism does come from vaccines."

Kennedy pledged to find the root causes of autism by this fall, and HHS subsequently approved removal of the mercury-based compound from vaccines and advised pregnant women to limit Tylenol use based on research correlating its active ingredient with autism. The Food and Drug Administration also approved a previously off-label autism treatment, leucovorin.

What's unexpected is neither the CDC nor HHS announced the Wednesday evening change, spotted by The Hill, given that both often share major updates including the final version of the youth gender medicine report commissioned by HHS and the CDC's pivot to "individual-based decision-making" on COVID-19 vaccination.

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told The Hill the page was updated "to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science," noting the department's "comprehensive assessment."

The updated page still includes the prior version's heading "Vaccines do not cause Autism," but an asterisk notes this was "due to an agreement with the chairman of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website," as a condition of Kennedy's confirmation.

Chairman Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and a doctor, is a major recipient of pharma campaign donations who fervently rejects there is a link between vaccines and autism. He has gone so far as to demand that Jay Bhattacharya, at his confirmation hearing for National Institutes of Health director, refuse to study a potential connection between measles-mumps-rubella vaccination and increasing autism rates.

The updated autism page emphasizes the CDC childhood immunization has ballooned from "five total doses" of two vaccines for infants in 1986, to three doses each of six vaccines by 6 months, two flu doses by 7 months and single doses of five more vaccines at 12 months.

"The rise in autism prevalence since the 1980s correlates with the rise in the number of vaccines given to infants," and while the cause is likely "multi-factorial," vaccines can't be ruled out as "one potential contributor," it says.

The page cites an Environmental Health study that found "aluminum adjuvants in vaccines had the highest statistical correlation with the rise in autism prevalence among numerous suspected environmental causes," which does not prove causation but "does merit further study."

Multiple reviews of the autism-vaccine link by HHS and the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine "have consistently concluded that there are still no studies that support the specific claim that the infant vaccines, DTaP, HepB, Hib, IPV, and PCV, do not cause autism," the page says, giving a timeline of reviews required by the 1986 law.

A 2021 review by HHS's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality "identified no new studies" to change 2012 IOM and 2014 AHRQ reports that found "insufficient evidence … to support or reject a causal relationship between those vaccines and autism," it says.

The CDC is still peddling oddly confident pronouncements about flu vaccines, however. 

The first image on its homepage says "Prevent Seasonal Flu," linking to a "prevention" page that recommends everyone 6 months and older "get a flu vaccine every season" but doesn't actually claim the vaccine can prevent the flu, just reduce the "risk of flu and its potentially serious outcomes" and "reduce the burden" on the healthcare system.

The page does not tell readers flu vaccine efficacy can swing wildly year to year, reaching just 16% in the 2021-2022 flu season, or that vaccination may increase the risk of flu infection, as the Cleveland Clinic's study of its own employees concluded this spring, several months before the Trump administration's CDC updated the flu prevention page.

HHS did not respond to queries on why its flu vaccine page claims they can prevent infection, omits that they may increase the risk of infection, and makes one-size-fits-all recommendations at odds with its COVID-19 approach.