The Truth About Vaccines and Autism

You are listening to Spot on, a nutrition and health podcast that breaks through the latest headlines to provide you with accurate and usable information that is, well, Spot on! Spot on to meet your needs. I am your host, Dr. Joan Salgy Blake, a dietitian and nutrition professor at Boston University, and the author of the book Nutrition in You. Can you kindly subscribe to Spot on, and follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at Joan Salgy Blake? You can also find Spot on on my YouTube channel, Spot on with Dr. Joan Salgy Blake. Hello Spot on, listeners and viewers! We are going to be launching right now, as season 16 of Spot on, I'm so excited about this. We have over 220,000 downloads, so I'm so proud of that and excited and glad that you're listening. A backstory, you know, I started Spot on because of all of the misinformation about nutrition and health on social media, and here I am in my 16th season, still going strong about this. I am launching this season with something that is really, really fascinating. I finally found out and learned more about how vaccines got associated with autism and where did this come from and where did this misinformation get loose and get published? Well, wait until you hear this. This is an unbelievable story that started in 1998 and, unfortunately, is still going strong even though the science doesn't support it. So I hope that you listen to this first episode of season 16 to find the truth behind the no connection between the vaccines and autism, stay tuned. Okay, we're back and I have my special guest, Dr. Jessie Seiler. She has a PhD, is a senior associate at the Center for Science and the Public Interest. In fact, this is where I got this idea. She wrote this article for their newsletter, which we will post on the Spot on Facebook page. She's also a affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health. And I just want to tell you all the cat lovers out there. If you're watching us on YouTube, her gorgeous cat is going to make an entrance quite often during this little interview. So, you know, we're very inclusive here. We love everybody. All right. I'm sorry for those who don't like cats. I did try to distract her, but it is because it's not worked. This one is adorable. It's like it's like a stuffed animal. All right. Let's get to the bottom of this because this is, this is the whole thing. This is so fascinating to me of how this all came about, this connection with, you know, the MMR vaccine and autism. So let's start the beginning. So Jessie, can you go back to the article that was published? This is published in 1998 in Lancet. And Lancet for those is a well-established medical journal. And it presented this small sample of 12 children. And let's go back, my dear, why were these children admitted to this hospital? What's going on here? Yeah. It's a great place to start. It's called Ilyl lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, nonspecific colitis and pervasive developmental disorder in children. And if you look it up now, which everyone should, especially if you're taking any sort of methods course in public health, you will see a big red retracted splash right across it. Every section, every page has this big red retracted all over it. And you know, for your question about how did these kids end up in this study, they were admitted to a specific gastroenterology ward at the Royal Free Hospital in London. And they got these tests, including spinal tabs, MRIs, skins and tissues of their gut lining. So pretty invasive, some of these. And there was no comparison group. So you know, if you have any epi methods background or biostatosis background, you're always thinking about the comparison group. Here there wasn't one. These were just 12 kids, so a case series who were admitted and examined and their symptoms were presented in this paper. And who admitted them and what was this person's, you know, why was he doing this? Yeah. So Dr. Andrew Wakefield was the sort of main author on this paper. He was a gastroenterologist at the time and he had surgical training as well. So importantly for our topic, not likely to have had advanced training in immunology or autism or really anything beyond is very important special to use. And he admitted these kids because his idea was that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine. His idea was that the vaccine induces inflammation in the intestines and somehow that causes autism. So of course, you know, they're very careful in the discussion section of the retrafted paper to say that they didn't prove that the vaccine causes autism. But when it came out, Wakefield actually held a press conference pushing people to choose separate vaccines rather than the combined measles, Mumps, Rubella, MMR vaccine. And conveniently enough, he had just filed a patent for such a vaccine a year before this paper came out. So it's, you know, there's, there's a paper trail already by the time the paper is published in the Lancet about what Wakefield's, you know, potential interests were here. I just want to tell you when I'm reading this, I'm like, what, like what went, I never knew this. What? And so I want to tell everybody, first of all, that this article that Jesse Road is going to be up on the spot on Facebook page, but also a copy of the original article in Lancet with this word retracted on every page is going up because I want you to see exactly where it stands and where it stands then and where it stands now. So it doesn't, yes, after the publication, this investigated report of Brian Deere and gosh, what a hard worker. He started to question these findings and so what did he uncover during his investigation? It took years for him to bring this to the service. It did. Yeah, Brian Deere and, you know, all of your listeners should also read his original work in BMJ and what used to be called the British Medical Journal as well. And I hope you'll link to those articles too because they're, they're fascinating. What Brian Deere did was he got the medical records for these kids as much as possible he got as much of the paperwork associated with the 1990 article as possible and he actually went around to these families and said like, Hey, here's how your kid is described. Here's what their medical records say and what he found was that in a lot of these cases there were serious discrepancies between what parents remembered and the paper or between the kids medical records that they had at the time of the paper data collection happening and the paper itself. So it seemed like there were just these gaps where their medical records at the time said one thing and then what wake field recorded for this paper said something completely different. So for example, and a lot of this came out, by the way, through Deere's reporting and also through general medical counsel hearings between 2007 and 2010, which he also reported on and that's the body that oversees UK physicians. So for example, one kid had a record of a diagnosis of aspers, which at the time was a distinct diagnosis from autism and you know, nothing in there about autism for that child. Another had a record saying he did not have autism in his discharge paperwork, but he was recorded as having an autism diagnosis in the Lancet paper. They just had the sort of order of operations wrong. For example, child 11 in the Lancet paper and you can go to the paper and see the table child 11 had his first behavioral symptoms of autism one week after receiving the MMR vaccine. According to the Lancet paper, according to that actual child's medical records, his symptoms began a month before receiving the MMR vaccine. So something, so Brian Deere really did the, and if you read the paper, it is confusing. You know, where are you pulling this? Brian Deere really put in the work on this and looking at the kids medical records and following through and finding, you know, these kids either don't have a diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorder, they don't, the timeline doesn't match up for this hypothesis that the vaccine causes gut issues, which causes autism. There's all sorts of just really basic data problems here and Brian Deere uncovered a lot of them. Right. Right. Right. Right. And I had read that Wakefield wrote the paper. Even though there's other names on the paper that he wrote it and the others just signed off on it. That's, I read that in one of the journals that Deere, the BMJ journal, just absolutely amazing. So, you know, why was Wakefield so determined to focus on this erroneous theory? You know, what, what was the, what was he after? Yeah. to that component of Wakefield's, you know, he was filing this patent for a vaccine that was not the combination measles month for months for Bella. So he was pushing this issue and pushing this vaccine as a solution. He also, and this was again something that Brian Deere had uncovered, he had also been putting together paperwork and trying to attract investors for a company that would test children for these gut issues and potentially even go on to treat them. So he's kind of doing that classic thing about like, oh, hello, I've identified a medical problem. I've also identified the treatment. So you can go ahead and pay me both to diagnose this problem and then to treat it. So there's a pretty significant financial issue there on top of which Andrew Wakefield had also been contacted by a lawyer who named Richard Barr, who had a history of attempting to sue pharmaceutical companies and makers of vaccines in order to, you know, for damages, he said were caused by vaccines to children. And it turned out that Richard Barr had asked Andrew Wakefield to find a connection between vaccines and autism. And Richard Barr, the lawyer was actually sending some of his clients to Andrew Wakefield to be included in the study, to be under Wakefield's care. So it was really, there were a lot of potential conflicts of interest here. So Richard Barr had some clients with these parents of children who said, gee, my child has autism and I think there's a cause or I want to sue somebody or have, you know, what happened here? Yeah, that's exactly it. Richard Barr, I think, was rather high profile at the time. And he, so he was able to find parents who suspected something was wrong with their kids and suspected that maybe the vaccine was the issue. And of course, you know, one of the reasons parents might think that is, kids received these vaccines in their second year of life, which is around the time when maybe you're going to start noticing some behavioral symptoms for autism or related, you know, diseases. And so, you know, a parent might have a suspicion and they find someone who immediately says, yeah, you're right to be suspicious. You should be involved. Like, come talk to these other parents, come talk to me, you know, we can get you justice on this, we can get you money for care for your kid, that type of thing. Wow. Yeah. Didn't the lawyer, Richard Barr, did he pay Wakefield? Some money? He did pay Wakefield. So for his research or supported it, and so it was getting paid by the lawyer to come up with this theory and validated that this vaccine caused autism. You know, I'm, you know, it's rare that I'm speechless, but I'm getting at whatever I, I think about this whole article and what this caused, it makes me just say, oh my goodness gracious. What I find interesting is that in the article in Lancet, you know, oftentimes there'll be an article like it's really like done research that's done so well and given us great clues about the potential, you know, cause or association of blank with blank disease or whatever. And usually you'll have it, you'll have the editorial by someone who's very prominent in that disease study and research and say, this article, let me explain this article. This article was done so well, and praise and praise and praise how wonderful and thank you, Drs. Blanca Blanca for publishing this, and this is going to help us research. But in this case, when this issue of Lancet, there was some CDC Center for Disease Control scientists who said, wait a minute, this is, this is, I'm not following this and I'm really concerned about these findings and what the problems that could be. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because I've never seen, and I read a lot of these journals, anybody in the same article, same journal article, the same one, say, nah, I don't think so. Is it remarkable? So the two authors on this commentary, Robert Chen and Frank de Stefano at the time were at Vaccine Safety and Development Activity National Immunization Program at CDC. And they were, you know, just prominent vaccine researchers and really putting in the work on some of these massive studies that found no association between the vaccination and autism. So yeah, these CDC scientists who documented their concerns, they had this incredible list, which really was exactly all the concerns that you would think about if you read this paper. And they know by saying like, hey, they start out by saying like, hey, we need to get this right. You know, vaccines are given to healthy people, almost always children. We really want to be sure about their safety profile. If vaccines are dangerous, everyone has an interest in knowing that. So they do start by pointing out the type of evidence you need to find causation. You know, they talk about needing a mechanism. They talk about the type of studies you need to do because there's a strong contrast between the type of study you would need to do to figure out if something causes something else and what Wakefield had done in the Lancet paper. And they point out that at that time hundreds of millions of people all over the world had received this vaccination or something very like it. You know, so they had evidence that like, look at these gut issues that are being described in this paper. They're so non-specific. They could really be a number of things. They point out that we had had knowledge of autism long before we had had these MMR vaccines. You know, they point out that issue with like, yeah, kids are getting these vaccines at around the time when they might be developing symptoms of autism. They point out the issue of recall bias. So like, trying to think back, okay, when did your kid symptoms start? Okay, what did you see around that time? Yeah, just they really do go through a whole list of concerns. And I've never seen anything like it either. You know, I just need it's astonishing, Frank. It is astonishing. And what's so interesting, Jesse, they said something quote that they were concerned about Wakefield's theory. And how it may quote snowball into societal tragedies. So though they almost had a crystal ball to say that for a society, there's got a lot of tragedies or things that could go wrong if you start believing this in this research. But for them, remember, this is 1998. And for them to predict that if people believe this erroneous paper, that it could cause big problems. And that's what we're getting to next. So over the next 10 years, dear documented all these more and more studies came up more and more to say, no, it doesn't cause, right? There was more studies that supported it. It doesn't cause autism. What are we talking about here? So, you know, took 10 years before Lansing. That's what makes me crazy to really come in and say we got to retract this article. I mean, don't you find that just amazing? It's astonishing that it took that long, especially given again, what we knew in 1998 about the vaccine and about autism. I don't have an explanation for it. I wish I understood. And, you know, I think we do see articles get retracted fairly frequently, but I think typically within a year of their publication these days, you know, it's a relatively quick process. But I don't think that this was normal for back then either, which after all was not that long ago, right? So I think this is really an outlier. And, you know, in the meantime, even though we already had, you know, there's no mechanistic explanation for what Wakefield was postulating. There's no strong evidence for it at all. And we already had evidence that this wasn't, you know, a causal link. But we continued, you know, this really was a clarion call for researchers. They're like, all right, if this vaccine causes autism, we know how to find that out for sure. And just study after study almost immediately, right, started piling up against what Wakefield was saying. And these studies had hundreds of thousands of children in them, right? So some of them, a study in 2002 had the medical records for all children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998, over 500,000 of them of those children over 400,000 had received the MMR vaccine. So they were really, they had a great data set, like the dream data set. And they found no difference in the rate of autism between the two groups. And here's my cat. She agrees. She's a ball, too. And, you know, that type of study just kept on being performed and being published. And, you know, and then, so then we get the meta-analyses and the systematic reviews. So you get, like, here's evidence from over a million children that demonstrates no causal link. It just, at no point was there any type, I would say, of equipoise, right, of uncertainty, right around this. It's astonishing. You know, Jesse, I started spot-on because I teach this large nutrition course for non-majors. So this is like the future Joe and Joseph Eats on the street. And I actually wrote the text book for it. And I started this because I would get these questions in class about what they heard on social media. And I teach them off the bat that there's something called misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is, you just got it wrong, all right. So, in other words, That example of missing from. would be like, oh, and Apple is an excellent source of protein. Well, yeah, that's misinformation. We know that Apple is not good source of protein. Disinformation is don't eat an apple from ABC orchard because they're going to give you cancer. That's disinformation and the difference is intent. Okay, intent. Okay. So when I was looking at this article and reading this and what the heck is theory and the fact that he was trying to start a business and he was trying to start his own vaccine. Now I'm into this is no longer misinformation. This is disinformation. This is where there's an intent or an issue going on here about his theory. I mean, we'll never know that, but it sounds suspicious that why were you coming up with this theory when, you know, we, you know, can cause problems. And guess what? In 2000, measles was really pretty much eliminated in the United States, but in 2025, I read that more than 20, 200 cases of measles have been confirmed. So there we go back to what those CDC scientists said where this could snowball into tragedies. And so I'm like, oh my goodness gracious. And because it was printed, you're going to be able to find online the original Lancet article and the one that says retracted toward it, but you can get the original that doesn't say retracted. So you have now a publication that can be put up to say, see, this is published and it caused way back that we knew this when we didn't know this. I just find this unbelievable. So, you know, this is really, really frightening to me how this all started. And I wanted you on here so that we could, you could explain this and explain what went wrong and what went right with Brian Diaz investigated journalism and what we're trying to do and what the evidence really says. So as far as you concern, you're concerned, what do you think and now about this vaccine and autism? Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I have to say I'm not a parent, you know, so I've never been in that position of, which I imagine must be incredibly difficult of, I have to make the best decision for my kid and I don't understand everything that, you know, the pediatricians are telling me and I see these things online and, you know, my friend who's a nurse says this and, you know, you're receiving all this information from all these different ways. On top of that, I get why we might feel uncomfortable with vaccines. If you think about it is kind of weird, like on the very human level of you're taking a thing and you're using a needle and it's going in your body, I also get why it might be hard for parents to think about autism as a genetic condition, right? I think anytime you're thinking as a parent or as an ancestor about what you're passing on to your kids, I think that carries this emotional weight to it. And parents will always be looking for answers when it comes to their kids health. They'll always be asking themselves about this. On the other hand, you know, I was I was vaccinated on schedule as a kid. My parents were very much like, yep, go for it. Like whatever you got. Let's, and so I was a Peace Corps volunteer too, which, and you just get a ton of extra vaccines. And frankly, I'm grateful for all of that because, you know, and I was 22 so I had no idea, but in retrospect, yeah, I love a vaccine that's going to prevent a vaccine preventable disease. On top of that, I as a master student had the chance to participate as a part, you know, like be in a trial for a phase one HIV vaccine. And it was just amazing. So I go in there and we're doing informed consent and they're telling me all these things about how vaccines work and what's going to happen in my body. If I am randomized into the group that gets the vaccine rather than control placebo, they're talking about vaccine safety. They're using this very simple language. There's a booklet with illustrations. And I was like, yeah, I like told me all of this stuff. And then like, here's my arm. Let's go sign up. And it was so exciting. Because then, you know, I got to come can do applause and they told me all these things about. And then finally years later, I found I had been randomized into the group that received the vaccine rather than the placebo. And I had the HIV antibodies. And it turns out that trial did not pass muster in phase three, but back in phase one, it was such an exciting thing to be a part of. And I think it's just a miracle. As someone who's not really a miracle person, I don't think in those terms, I think it's a miracle that we figured out what happens if we expose our bodies to these harmless bits of these diseases that can kill us. And we get this immune response. And we get the protection and immunity. And it comes from that. It just, it makes me so proud to be a scientist. I just, I think it's remarkable how, how cool our bodies are that we can just do this with vaccines. I know the song really answered. No, no, no, I love that story because it involved us to learn and to be able to protect people from these diseases that we problematic. Let me look how fast we got the COVID vaccine. So quickly, oh my goodness, because we've done so much research on it and have many lives that has saved and everything. And we have that MRNA technology and just some geniuses like what if we try it with the SARS-CoV-2 that's going, you know, and it's just, what a, what a testament to what humans can do, you know, it's amazing when you follow good science. So, you know, again, I wanted to get this story out because you'll see in social media, we will still see people saying that it causes autism. And I just wanted everyone to understand the back story. And I have to thank you, thank you, thank you for writing about this, because I would have never known to go back to Brian Deere's investigative reporting and the whole thing. And when I was going through this and reading the articles in the British Medical Journal, I was floored and that you summarized this so lovely in this article for nutrition action. Again, I'm putting this up on the, the spot on Facebook page, you can read it as long as everything else that we just talked about, because I just want everybody to understand this so they understand what went wrong. Now it took that back then, it took too long to retract, now we will retract it sooner, but things, you know, what happened and why we got to this place. So, my dear, I thank you and I thank the cat for coming on today and talking about this work and keep on writing because find more things that we can talk about because I think it's so, so important for the public to know this type of information. So with that, I just want to thank you, my dear, for coming on spot on. Well, thank you so much for inviting me, thank you for sharing your platform, it's really been a pleasure. Spot on is supported by the Boston University, Sergeant College's Master of Science degree in nutrition program log on to beu.edu to learn more about this fabulous nutrition graduate program. Thank you for listening to Spot on. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. This way you'll get every new episode every week. And by the way, leave us a nice review. And can you also like us on our spot on Facebook page and suggest topics for future episodes? And again, can you kindly follow me on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook at Joan Salgy Blake. And I'm excited to tell you that the spot on podcast is now up on YouTube at spot on with Dr. Joan Salgy Blake.