Let's Call A Spade A Spade

It is time to nail your colours to the mast

I can only admire the resolve of RFK Jr. At a recent HHS news conference he declared that we would know the environmental cause(s) of the autism epidemic by September this year. He intimated that this would be achieved through research at the NIH. You can unpack his pronouncements in a number of ways though you can be quite sure that he knows that no new NIH funded research will identify the environmental cause of autism by September 2025, September 2028 perhaps.

I like that he has used the term ‘environmental cause’ and that he recognises in doing so that autism is a preventable disease of infancy. This is nailing your colours to the mast and is a better headline than simply reiterating an earlier intention to fund research into the cause of autism through the NIH.

Secretary Kennedy already knows my views on the environmental cause of autism and I am hopeful that these will be tested through the NIH in the near future. At this moment in time we need clear and testable hypotheses. We need research that will call a spade a spade and hence allow culprits to either be identified or excluded. It is time to get off the fence and to be serious about preventing infant autism.

I am an admirer of Dr Peter McCullough. He was one of a very few esteemed scientists who brought common sense and thought to the tyranny of covid. I notice that he has recently turned his attention to autism and I took the time to listen to a recent presentation he made on this subject.

Determinants of Autism

The presentation is accurate and lucid as always but it takes us no further forward in our understanding of autism and specifically in addressing the announcement by Secretary Kennedy that being the environmental cause of the autism epidemic. Peter, the time for risk factors and sitting on the fence, just in case you might be wrong, has passed. We have to get off the fence, form a tight and testable hypothesis and prepare a research proposal for scrutiny by the NIH. None of the risk factors described in McCullough’s presentation is a cause of autism. However, to my mind many of the risk factors identified in his talk point clearly to the cause of infant autism.

Let me take febrile seizures as one example. Why not call this condition what it is. Brain inflammation, perhaps occurring in the blood brain barrier or the meninges or within brain tissue. Febrile seizures are fits associated with brain inflammation. In short, infant epilepsy though we are not allowed to equate febrile seizures with epilepsy.

We may have been one of the first research groups to implicate human exposure to aluminium with epilepsy but our finding only supported previous studies going back decades that linked brain aluminium with epilepsy. Indeed, early primate models of human epilepsy (how I wish such experiments had never been allowed) injected aluminium into the brain to induce the disease.

Take a look at what aluminium-induced epilepsy looks like in human brain tissue.

The large image on the left shows a significant deposit of aluminium (yellow/orange fluorescence) in brain tissue and in close proximity to the inflamed tissue, see asterisk, are microglial cells loaded with aluminium. These are shown magnified to the right of the image.

Now take a look at what is seen in autism brain tissue.

Vaguely familiar? A large deposit of aluminium associated with inflamed tissue surrounded by microglial cells loaded with aluminium.

Febrile seizures are moments of brain inflammation in an infant. They may occur at any time including when the infant is sleeping. The consequences of brain inflammation, febrile seizures, are not limited to the immediate affected tissue. They are essentially masts sending out signals to the rest of the brain and body telling of a problem. One outcome of such a message is the movement of white blood cells, such as macrophages and lymphocytes, from the blood into the brain to the affected, inflamed tissue. What happens if those white blood cells are also loaded with aluminium, perhaps picked up from a vaccine injection site.

Something like this.

The image shows lymphocytes loaded with aluminium in transit across the blood brain barrier in autism brain tissue.

The last two images are taken from our seminal paper on aluminium in brain tissue in autism a paper so devastating in its impact and significance that not only its content is censored but also the metrics describing its social impact are censored. The research reported in this paper including the unequivocal images of aluminium in autism brain tissue have never been contested or refuted by any follow up study. I remember that when the research was published and brought to the attention of the individual at the NIH responsible for autism research (I think his name was Joshua Gordon but my memory may have failed me on this) he told me categorically that he did not believe the research and so it would have no influence upon his research programme on the cause of autism. He dismissed it outright. I do hope that the new broom at the NIH will look again at this research. I think that he will.

I am prepared to nail my colours to the mast. To call a spade a spade and to state unequivocally that aluminium is the cause of infant brain damage leading to a diagnosis of autism.

We can test this. We can stop using aluminium adjuvants in infant vaccines and, importantly we can reduce infant exposure to aluminium through formula feeding and other medications such as antacids. None of this is beyond our reach if we truly have the intention of identifying the cause of infant autism. In the shorter term we might use data already available to compare infant exposure to aluminium through vaccines, feeding and other medications with incidence of autism.

When looking to equate aluminium in vaccines with incidence of autism we must not overlook other exposures to aluminium. However, I would speculate that aluminium adjuvants in vaccines are the critical component of this equation. I say this because the immune dysfunction often related to the incidence of autism is caused by aluminium adjuvants. That is how they work. Aluminium adjuvants administered in a vaccine is an acute exposure to aluminium. When will we acknowledge that it can only be detrimental to health to inject a known neurotoxicant into any healthy individual, never mind a new born infant.

Mr Secretary, Mr President, end the tyranny of human exposure to aluminium now and make the world healthy again.