International scientists have found autism's cause. What will Americans do?

Five clear, replicable, and related discoveries explaining how autism is triggered have formed an undeniably clear picture of autism’s causation.

Etienne Note: A great documentary covering the harm of aluminum in vaccines is the award-winning: The Greater Good which we include in our Flash Drive O’ Freedom: The Liberator and which can be found at: https://greatergoodmovie.org/

by J.B. Handley

STAFFORDSHIRE, England —Dr. Chris Exley of Keele University in England and his colleagues published a paper that for the first time ever looked at the brain tissue of subjects with autism to determine the level of aluminum (note: they spell “aluminum” as “aluminium” in the United Kingdom) found within their brain tissue. For anyone trying to convince the world that “the science is settled and vaccines don’t cause autism,” the study’s findings are deeply contradictory to that statement. In a blog post written by Professor Exley on the day his study was published, he explained the groundbreaking results:

Dr. Chris Exley

“…while the aluminium content of each of the 5 brains [of people with autism] was shockingly high it was the location of the aluminium in the brain tissue which served as the standout observation…The new evidence strongly suggests that aluminium is entering the brain in ASD [autism spectrum disorders] via pro-inflammatory cells which have become loaded up with aluminium in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminium adjuvants.”

Dr. Exley’s quote includes a reference to “monocytes at injection sites” and the fact that the interaction between these monocytes and aluminum has been demonstrated in previous published science. I know, that sounds pretty technical, but bear with me. A “monocyte” is a type of white blood cell, of which one form of monocyte is a “macrophage.” A macrophage can be thought of as the garbage man of the immune system, eating up foreign substances, cell debris, etc. As you will see in a moment, macrophages appear to be playing a critical and devastating role in triggering autism, serving to escort man-made aluminum injected from a vaccine directly into the brain, where it can disrupt brain development and trigger autism.

Dr. Exley’s study — “Aluminium in brain tissue and autism” — is arguably the final piece of a puzzle that first started to come together in 2004, and picked up steam after 2010, that has dramatically furthered the scientific understanding of exactly how a vaccine can trigger autism. This timeline is critical to recognize, because the Vaccine Court in the United States dismissed the vaccine-autism hypothesis in 2009, long before most of what I’m about to explain even existed. Science is a continuum, an emergence of truth through many different studies that often have to be pieced together before the picture becomes clear. And, scientific progress can sometimes move slowly until that moment when an emerging truth presents itself in such a way that it can no longer be denied. In my opinion, Dr. Exley’s study provided the only data missing from an airtight explanation of what happened to my son and so many other children, and provided all the doubters with the “biological plausibility” of how, exactly, a vaccine injected into a baby’s shoulder can trigger autism.

For Americans, the race to discover what’s causing all this autism will likely be won on foreign shores. As you’ll soon see, ALL of the science explaining how autism can be caused has come from other countries, even though a Caltech scientist pushed the first domino way back in 2006.

Why is aluminum in vaccines at all?

Aluminum is a critical component of most vaccines given to children. It serves as an “adjuvant” meaning the aluminum serves to “wake up” the immune system, provoking the immune system to recognize the “antigen” within the vaccine for whatever disease the vaccine serves to protect against. The amount of aluminum in vaccines given to children skyrocketed beginning in the early 1990s for two reasons: 1), more vaccines were added to the children’s vaccine schedule and, 2), the vaccination rate for all vaccines given to children rose (from 50–60% of children vaccinated in the mid-1980s to over 90% today). 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. Today, that number is 4,925 micrograms, a near-quadrupling of total aluminum. You can read more about this in an excellent study published by Neil Miller, here’s an image from the study:

Mystifyingly, aluminum has never experienced biological testing to consider its safety for being injected into babies, having been “grandfathered” into our modern safety standards. Canadian scientists Dr. Chris Shaw and Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic addressed this omission in a critical study they published in 2011 in Current Medicinal Chemistry titled, “Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are they Safe?” They wrote:

“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor. There is also a concerning scarcity of data on toxicology and pharmacokinetics of these compounds. In spite of this, the notion that aluminum in vaccines is safe appears to be widely accepted. Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications and may thus have profound and widespread adverse health consequences.”

ICAN decided to test the CDC and NIH’s ability to produce any studies to show the safety of vaccine adjuvant through a FOIA lawsuit, by now I’m guessing you know how that ended…read the whole article.

“CDC and NIH’s responses to ICAN’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding aluminum adjuvant reveal a stunning admission: they do not have a single study to support the safety of recommending repeated injection of this cyto- and-neuro toxic substance as part of the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule.”

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Ground zero at Caltech

When Caltech scientist Dr. Paul Patterson passed away in 2014, I had little appreciation that he had triggered a chain of events over the course of his career that may now provide a clear and unambiguous explanation of how and why my son developed autism back in 2004. Knowing exactly how my son’s autism was caused is incredibly important to my wife and I, because the more information we have about causation, the more chance we have to do something about it, and perhaps recover my son from an affliction now impacting 1 in 32 American kids.

What you’re about to read is the product of more than two dozen very recent peer-reviewed published scientific studies, with really no original thought by me. I’m a businessman and a father, but what follows is a “grand theory of autism” so complete and well-supported that I think it deserves the attention of every member of the autism community. When the totality of this explanation became clear to me, not only did my jaw hit the floor, but I was immediately consumed with thoughts about how this clear explanation might impact the way we treat our son’s autism, and I hope it does the same for you and perhaps your doctor as well. What I’m certain of is that this “grand theory” needs to be heavily debated, and I hope by putting it in the public realm I help move it along that path.

(I’m indebted to an anonymous scientist who runs a website called Vaccine Papers, where many of these insights came from. I will quote VP throughout this piece, referring to VP as “VP.” I highly recommend you read the totality of his website, where the explanations are far more scientific than what you will read here.)

It shouldn’t be a surprise that all of this science has been published outside the United States. I’ve listened closely to the stories of American scientists wanting to study autism and complaining that any studies that are even remotely controversial are nearly impossible to fund or get approved.

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Discovery #1: “Maternal Immune Activation” can cause autism

While Dr. Patterson’s passing wasn’t something I was aware of at the time, it was certainly recognized by the scientific community, of which his obituary from Caltech explains in great detail.

Dr. Paul Patterson

Dr. Patterson’s “research focused on interactions between the nervous and immune systems — a connection that was not universally acknowledged in the early days of neuroscience”explains his obituary, “he became intrigued by epidemiological studies that had linked a severe viral or bacterial infection during pregnancy with the increased risk of a woman giving birth to a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder such as schizophrenia or autism. Patterson and his coworkers reproduced this human effect in mice using a viral mimic that triggers an infection-like immune response in the mother, producing in the offspring the core behavioral symptoms associated with autism and schizophrenia.”

In 2006, Dr. Patterson introduced his complex understanding of the interaction between the immune system and neurodevelopment through an excellent article in the Engineering & Science journal, titled Pregnancy, Immunity, Schizophrenia, and Autism. I hope you’ll take the time to read this for yourself, Dr. Patterson does a great job of explaining his discovery to the uninitiated, it’s really a seminal work. Here’s a quote":

“As we learn more about the connections between the brain and the immune system, we find that these seemingly independent networks of cells are, in fact, continually talking to each other. As an adult, the activation of your immune system causes many striking changes in your behavior — increased sleep, loss of appetite, less social interaction — and, of course, headaches. Conversely, stress in your life (as perceived by your brain) can influence immune function — the brain regulates immune organs, such as the spleen, via the autonomic nervous system. Recent evidence shows that this brain-immune conversation actually starts during the development of the embryo, where the state of the mother’s immune system can alter the growth of cells in the fetal brain. As we shall see, such alterations can lead to an increased risk of schizophrenia or autism in the offspring.”

Are you with me so far? Basically, what Dr. Patterson is saying is that if a pregnant mother gets sick (virus, bacteria) while pregnant — an event that “activates” her immune system — that activation can impact the neurodevelopment (how exactly the brain is constructed) of her fetus, potentially leading to neurological problems after birth. Dr. Patterson took this explanation a step further, explaining that the brains of people with autism reflect the immune system activation that took place, even decades later, as he cites valuable work being done at Johns Hopkins:

“There is also very striking evidence of immune dysregulation in the brain itself. Just last year, a group led by Carlos Pardo at Johns Hopkins found what they’re calling a “neural inflammation” in postmortem examination of brains of patients with autism who died between the ages of eight and 44 years. But these people weren’t infected — they died of such things as drowning or heart attacks. The study found that the microglial cells, which act as the brain’s own immune system, were activated. The study also found amazing increases of certain cytokines in the brain, and of others in the cerebro- spinal fluid. This is is a landmark paper, in my opinion. It presents the first evidence that there’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people. It’s a subclinical state, because there’s no overt infection. But it’s there.”

While Dr. Pardo and colleagues were the first to find this “microglial activation” in the brain of children with autism, this finding has now been replicated many times, here’s a study from Japan in 2013 finding the same thing:

“In conclusion, the present PET measurements revealed marked activation of microglia in multiple brain regions of young adults with ASD. The results strongly support the contention that immune abnormalities contribute to the etiology of ASD.”

If you’re going to take one thing away from this section, I’d recommend an excerpt from Dr. Patterson’s quote worth memorizing:

“there’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.”

Is that what happened (and still is happening) to my son?

Further Refinement of Discovery #1: Immune Activation from the Cytokine Interleukin-6

If you’re an autism parent, you’ve probably heard the expression “cytokine storm” and half-understood what that might mean (anything with “storm” at the end of it can’t be good — what this really means is a chronic, slow burn inflammation in the brain). In 2006, Dr. Patterson and his colleagues were speculating that the immune system’s cytokines might be responsible for altering the brain development of the fetus during gestation:

“Cytokines are produced by the white blood cells, and their levels in the blood increase when we get an infection…We think that maternal immune activation alters brain circuits…there’s that permanent, subclinical, altered immune state in the autistic brain — those increased cytokine levels…are they [cytokines] actually interacting with the brain in an ongoing fashion, with consequences visible in the patients’ behavior? I favor [the cytokine] hypothesis.”

Study Link HERE

Just a year after Dr. Patterson’s excellent article about Maternal Immune Activation (“MIA”), he and his colleagues produced the first study that took their understanding of cytokines to a more detailed level. Knowing that MIA was producing offspring with neurological disorders (in their mouse model), they wanted to find out what — exactly WHAT — was causing the altered brain development. They figured it was a cytokine (of which there are many), but which one? As the Patterson and his colleagues noted, “however, the mechanism by which MIA causes long-term behavioral deficits in the offspring is unknown.” That is until they discovered it:

“Here we show that the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) is critical for mediating the behavioral and transcriptional changes in the offspring. A single maternal injection of IL-6 on day 12.5 of mouse pregnancy causes prepulse inhibition (PPI) and latent inhibition (LI) deficits in the adult offspring.”

In the case of the 2007 experiment, Patterson and his colleagues injected pregnant mice with a specific cytokine — interleukin-6 (“IL-6”) — and saw changes in the neurology of their offspring.

Replication of Dr. Patterson’s discovery about MIA and IL-6

Dr. Patterson’s work was groundbreaking. He tied the immune system and brain together in ways previously not recognized. Like all great new discoveries in science, Dr. Patterson’s theories have since been replicated many times. In 2012, Dr. Patterson and his colleagues produced this paper,which was more autism-specific and reached a similar conclusion:

“These results indicate that MIA yields male offspring with deficient social and communicative behavior, as well as high levels of repetitive behaviors, all of which are hallmarks of autism.”

In 2014, the M.I.N.D. Institute at UC-Davis published an important study that took Dr. Patterson’s work in mice and replicated it in monkeys. Why do monkeys matter? The study authors explained:

“Maternal infection during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia and autism in the offspring. Supporting this correlation, experimentally activating the maternal immune system during pregnancy in rodents produces offspring with abnormal brain and behavioral development. We have developed a nonhuman primate model to bridge the gap between clinical populations and rodent models of maternal immune activation (MIA).”

And, the M.I.N.D. Institute scientists saw similar results to what had been found in mice:

“In this rhesus monkey model, MIA yields offspring with abnormal repetitive behaviors, communication, and social interactions. These results extended the findings in rodent MIA models to more human-like behaviors resembling those in both autism and schizophrenia.”

There are many additional studies that support Dr. Patterson’s findings, here’s one more to make the point from Neuroscience — Brain IL-6 elevation causes neuronal circuitry imbalances and mediates autism-like behaviors — published in 2012:

“In summary, our study supports a critical role of IL-6 elevation in modulating autism-like behaviors through impairments on synapse formation, dendritic spine development, as well as on neuronal circuit balance. These findings suggest that manipulation of IL-6 may be a promising avenue for therapeutic interventions.”

Dr. Patterson helped establish as scientific fact that an MIA during pregnancy can cause autism. As a parent, I’m haunted by Dr. Patterson’s words that “there’s an ongoing, permanent immune-system activation in the brains of autistic people.” If that’s really what’s happening to my son, it creates an obvious question: What can we do about it? It’s why understanding exactly what happened to my son is so important…

…And why there’s something else Dr. Patterson mentioned in his 2006 magazine article, something that today might get him run out of Caltech but was still allowed in the scientific discourse back then, he said this:

Finally, I want to ask a question that’s come up in the literature in the last few years — should we really be promoting universal maternal vaccination? The flu vaccine has been recommended routinely to pregnant women in the United States since 1957. The official policy of the Centers for Disease Control states that “administration of vaccines to women seeking prenatal care is an opportunity for preventative intervention that should not be wasted.” Now you might say, “Well, of course, you don’t want to get the flu if you’re pregnant!” But remember that double-stranded RNA experiment — we activated the immune system, and it caused all these downstream effects on the fetus. And what does a vaccination do? It activates the immune system. That’s the point of vaccination. In practice, not all pregnant women receive flu shots, and I think that universal vaccination of pregnant women could get us into a whole new set of problems.

Dr. Patterson said it, so I don’t have to be the first to bring it up. He said a vaccination “activates the immune system” and he also told us that “immune activation” can cause autism. How exactly does a vaccine activate the immune system?

Answer: Aluminum hydroxide, aka “aluminum adjuvant”.

Discovery #2: Aluminum Adjuvant causes immune activation and is far more neurotoxic than previously thought

Aluminum compounds (Al hydroxide and Al phospate) are the most common adjuvants used in vaccines. They are currently used in the hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis(DTaP, Tdap), Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), human papillomavirus (HPV) and pneumococcus (PCV) vaccines. Aluminum adjuvant “activates” the immune system, which induces long term immunity to antigens in the vaccine. The scientific understanding of aluminum adjuvant toxicity has changed and deepened dramatically in recent years.

In fact, the published research on aluminum adjuvant is so new it has not even been considered by our FDA or CDC, who are still basing their recommendations about aluminum use in vaccines on a study published in 2011 that erroneously concluded that aluminum from a vaccine likely ends up in the body’s skeletal system:

“While the contribution of vaccines to an infant’s aluminum body burden can be slightly higher than that of the dietary contribution in our model, the fact that the primary pool where the aluminum is residing, as a long-term storage depot, is likely to be skeletal and not a more sensitive soft organ system is reassuring.”

Most of the guess work about aluminum is based on dissolved aluminum, not aluminum hydroxide, which is the type of aluminum used in vaccines. We’re now learning that aluminum hydroxide is a nanoparticle, absorbed by our body’s macrophage (the immune system’s garbage man) where the macrophage can then easily transport the aluminum hydroxide to the brain (the macrophage passes easily through the blood-brain barrier). If you’d like to see a complete takedown of the “safe level” of aluminum argument still made by the FDA and CDC, see VP’s excellent work, here’s a short excerpt:

“It is not reasonable or scientific to use studies of ingested, water-soluble aluminum salts (like AlCl3 or Al-lactate) to establish a safe dose of injected aluminum adjuvant (comprising aluminum hydroxide/phosphate nanoparticles). The chemical forms and route of administration are different. It is well-established today that nanoparticles can have higher toxicity than bulk orsoluble forms of the same material…It’s the vaccine promoters that created this inherently-invalid approach to aluminum adjuvant safety. Vaccine critics including me argue that the safety of injected aluminum adjuvant can only be tested using injected aluminum adjuvant, not ingested aluminum salts like AlCl3 or Al lactate. This should be common sense. So, leaving aside the important issues of nanoparticle toxicity and administration route, I want to address the question: is it really true that animals (mice or rats) are not harmed by ingesting 62mg/kg/day or 26 mg/kg/day aluminum? After all, this is the fundamental basis for aluminum adjuvant safety. Vaccine promoters rely on Keith and Mitkus to make the case that aluminum adjuvant is safe, and Keith and Mitkus depend on the claim that these dosages are safe for animals to ingest. If the 26 mg/kg/day dosage is in fact harmful to animals, then the analyses by Keith and Mitkus are wrong and unsalvageable. Several studies clearly demonstrate that dosages much lower than 26 mg/kg/day are harmful, and they are presented below.”

The first time I personally woke up to the the idea that the aluminum adjuvant used in vaccines might be far more toxic and dangerous than I knew was when I started reading about the incredible work of Dr. Chris Shaw at the University of British Columbia in Canada. In 2007, Dr. Shaw published the first study looking at injected aluminum adjuvant in this paper, Aluminum Adjuvant Linked to Gulf War Illness Induces Motor Neuron Death in Mice and sounded a worldwide alarm about the dangers of aluminum adjuvant:

“In addition, the continued use of aluminum adjuvants in various vaccines (i.e., Hepatitis A and B, DPT, and so on) for the general public may have even more widespread health implications. Until vaccine safety can be comprehensively demonstrated by controlled long-term studies that examine the impact on the nervous system in detail, many of those already vaccinated as well as those currently receiving injections may be at risk in the future. Whether the risk of protection from a dreaded disease outweighs the risk of toxicity is a question that demands urgent attention.”

In 2009, Dr. Shaw’s and his colleagues in British Columbia published another study looking at injected aluminum hydroxide, and the results were deeply disturbing:

“Overall, the results reported here mirror previous work that has clearly demonstrated that aluminum, in both oral and injected forms, can be neurotoxic. Potential toxic mechanisms of action for aluminum may include enhancement of inflammation (i.e., microgliosis)…”

2012: Mechanisms of aluminum adjuvant toxicity and autoimmunity in pediatric populations

Three years after his groundbreaking study, Dr. Shaw and his colleague, Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic, published this paper in 2012, expressing grave concerns about the limited understanding of aluminum adjuvant’s toxicity:

“…it is somewhat surprising to find that in spite of over 80 years of use, the safety of Al adjuvants continues to rest on assumptions rather than scientific evidence.For example, nothing is known about the toxicology and pharmacokinetics of Al adjuvants in infants and children…Yet, in spite of these observations children continue regularly to be exposed to much higher levels of Al adjuvants than adults, via routine childhood vaccination programmes.”

The two scientists called for an urgent reevaluation of the safety profile of aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines:

“However, the existing data (or lack thereof) raise questions on whether the current vaccines aimed at pediatric populations can be accepted as having adequate safety profiles. Because infants and children represent those who may be most at risk for complications following vaccination, a more rigorous evaluation of potential vaccine-related adverse health impacts in pediatric populations than what has been provided to date is urgently needed.”

2013: Slow CCL2-dependent translocation of biopersistent particles from muscle to brain

In 2013, French scientists demonstrated that aluminum adjuvant, when injected into the body of a mouse, ended up in the brain 1 year later. The study authors expressed serious concerns about this very new discovery:

“However, continuously escalating doses of this poorly biodegradable adjuvant in the population may become insidiously unsafe, especially in the case of overimmunization or immature/altered blood brain barrier…”

The authors chose their words carefully, recognizing the ubiquity of aluminum adjuvant’s use in pediatric vaccines all over the world, which is why their choice to call aluminum adjuvant “insidiously unsafe” should cause any parent worry. Unfortunately, the very thing they express real concern about — escalating doses — is exactly what has been happening to children since the early 1990s, when the immunization schedule in the U.S. and all over the world more than tripled, largely due to new vaccines being introduced that contain aluminum adjuvant.

2015: Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines

In 2015, another study from Université Paris Est Créteil (UPEC) in France further supported this new view of aluminum adjuvant as a dangerous, biopersistent, and ultimately brain-injuring toxin. (The study confirmed that aluminum adjuvant slowly makes its way to the brain, where it then stays, possibly forever.)

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