Ten years after a whistleblower at the CDC leaked data showing the agency identified a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in African American boys, the agency has done nothing to address the issue.
by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.
This article was published on The Defender—Children’s Health Defense News & Views Website on August 28, 2024
Ten years after a whistleblower at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) leaked data showing the agency identified a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in African American boys, the agency has done nothing to address the issue.
William Thompson, Ph.D., a CDC senior scientist, on Aug. 27, 2014, issued a statement through his attorney revealing that he and his colleagues at the CDC omitted data from a 2004 article in Pediatrics that “suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism.”
“Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final protocol was not followed,” Thompson wrote.
Since then, the CDC has continued to assert that “studies have shown there is no link between vaccines and ASD,” autism spectrum disorder.
Meanwhile, the agency also reports that autism rates have continued to climb—1 in 36 children now have autism according to its most recent study.
For the first time since the agency began doing autism prevalence studies in 2000, in 2023 the CDC also reported that autism rates were higher among Black, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander children than among white and biracial children.
Since then, the agency has continued to add more vaccines to its list of recommended childhood immunizations, including the flu, COVID-19 and RSV monoclonal antibody shots.
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender:
“Ten years after the revelation that the CDC has been falsifying data regarding vaccine-induced autism, the CDC has still said nothing publicly.
“It is an outrage that for 10 years the CDC has withheld from the public information that could prevent autism. They have completely abrogated their duty and it’s time for radical change.”
CHD’s chief scientific officer, Brian Hooker, Ph.D.,—whom Thompson first told in 2013 about the CDC’s actions in a series of four taped conversations that were later leaked—told The Defender that Thompson was a hero.
Although the CDC never took any action, Hooker said, Thompson’s revelations helped inform the public about the issue. The recorded conversations were the basis for the widely viewed film “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.”
“Fortunately, we had a whistleblower that came forward with the information on Aug. 27, 2014, and he is a hero on my mind,” Hooker said. “And he will be a hero forever because I believe that that revelation did save lives.”
Thompson described culture of corruption at CDC in calls to Hooker
Thompson has been a senior scientist at the CDC for decades and is an author of dozens of CDC peer-reviewed publications, including many of the CDC’s vaccine-autism safety studies.
Between November 2013 and September 2014, Thompson was in contact with Hooker who was then a Simpson University biochemist and a father of a son with autism.
In the series of taped conversations, Thompson shared his concerns about several issues with vaccine safety revealed in his research at the CDC.
He discussed the relationship between thimerosal, a mercury-based adjuvant used in many vaccines at the time, and tics, based on the CDC’s own publications.
He also detailed what happened to the MMR study data that was left out of the Pediatrics article.
Thompson also described a pervasive culture of corruption at the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office—now called Vaccine Safety Monitoring—particularly concerning research about autism. “I have a boss who is asking me to lie,” he said. “The higher-ups wanted to do certain things and I went along with it.”
Thompson was an author on 2 of 3 epidemiological studies the CDC used to argue that thimerosal was safe and did not cause developmental disabilities. The agency used the papers to “debunk” the link between autism and vaccines.
However, in the taped conversations, Thompson said his bosses at the CDC pressured him to alter the results of his study to conceal thimerosal’s risks.
“Do you think a pregnant mother would want to take a vaccine that they know caused tics? Absolutely not!!” he said to Hooker. “I would never give my wife a vaccine that I thought caused tics.”
He also told Hooker he regretted withholding data in the 2004 Pediatrics study. “I have great shame now when I meet families with kids with autism because I’ve — I’ve been part of the problem,” he said.
The CDC team responsible for the paper found statistically significant evidence that Black male children were more likely to develop autism if they received the MMR vaccine before 36 months of age than if vaccination was delayed until after that point.
Alarmed by the findings, people in leadership at the CDC asked Thompson to eliminate children in the sample who did not possess a valid Georgia state birth certificate. That eliminated children living in the Atlanta area who were not born in Georgia, which was about 40% of the sample and diluted the statistical significance of the finding.
Thompson also told Hooker that all data showing the original effect for African American boys was destroyed in September 2002. They changed the protocol during the study to avoid reporting the statistically significant finding.
He submitted an ethics complaint to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity, but the findings of the investigation haven’t been made public, according to a CHD press release.
After the taped conversations were released, Thompson invoked the protection of the federal whistleblower statutes and later released the statement.
Following the release of the tapes, Dr. Frank DeStefano, chief of the Immunization Safety Office and lead author on the study, admitted in a September 2014 interview, with then-CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, that the CDC had eliminated a large group of African American children based on the absence of birth certificates. He defended the decision and said there is no causal link between vaccines and autism.
However, he did concede to Attkisson that vaccines may indeed trigger autism in some vulnerable children.
Thompson also confirmed in a deposition to Congressman William Posey of Florida that the data showed that possibility. Posey asked Congress in 2015 to subpoena Thompson, but no subpoena was issued.
Thompson, who continues to work for the CDC, was called to testify on scientific fraud and destruction of evidence by senior CDC officials in a 2016 lawsuit.
However, in accordance with the Whistleblower Protection Act and other federal regulations, Thompson could not testify under oath without the permission of the director of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, who denied that request.
Hooker reviewed the CDC’s data on autism incidence and the timing of the first dose of MMR. He found that children who received the vaccine before their third birthday have a 152% greater chance of being diagnosed with “isolated autism.”
Hooker also found that African American boys who received their first MMR vaccine before they turned 3 had a 286% greater chance of receiving an autism diagnosis than those who received the vaccine after their third birthday.
“This could have prevented over 100,000 cases of autism in African American boys over the 10 years since Thompson’s revelation,” Hooker said. “Evidently, politics and pharma are much more important than children at the CDC.”
This article was published by The Defender—Children Health Defense News & Views
Website under Creative Commons license CCBYNCND 4.4.0.
