If you think *that* post stirred up the vaccine industry shills, wait until you see how they respond to this: The govt (DOJ)/vaccine industry's chief expert witness that specialized in denying the vaccine autism link *changed his mind* based on advancing scientific knowledge. He said vaccines can cause autism, after all, in exceptional cases, and that he personally treated some. This is like the robber's best friend admitting his friend pulled the job. If Dr. Zimmerman had come down the other way, the vaccine industry and their propagandists would declare it "settled science." But since he came down the "wrong way" on this key issue worth so much $$$$, the vaccine cultists have bent themselves into pretzels trying to minimize him, his findings, spin it. See how they reply to this post for entertaining pretzel-ing. The fact is: if vaccines triggered autism in one child with mitochondrial disorder, it's silly to conclude that's the only child on the planet it could happen to. Quite the opposite. Now that a biological mechanism is identified, it implies more instances. Perhaps many more. (Scientists say today mitochondrial dysfunction is more common than we knew when Dr. Zimmerman labeled it as a factor in vaccine-induced-autism.) Secondly, many other predispositions can cause autism when triggered by vaccines, but the medical health establishment has made no public investment in identifying them. For example, vaccine court and the government have acknowledged kids born with tuberous sclerosis also had autism triggered by vaccination. The government has paid awards to some of those families for that reason.

2008 was an interesting year for vaccines. That's the year the formerly-sealed case of Hannah Poling leaked to the public. (I later reported on the case for CBS News. I'll link to that in this thread.) In Hannahs' case, the govt. (which represents vaccine makers in court, believe it or not) conceded that Hannah's vaccines caused her autism. Mind you, the govt. and head of CDC were denying this in public. We didn't know it at the time, but the govt's own top expert witness in vaccine-autism cases, pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, had shocked the govt. by telling them (DOJ lawyers) that vaccines can cause autism, after all. But instead of helping kids and revealing the truth, the DOJ fired Dr. Zimmermand as an expert witness and misrepresented his opinion in court thereafter. Anyhow, the govt. secretly paid the Poling family a multi million dollar settlement, but then had the case sealed so no other parents would find out. Public health officials continued to tell other parents they were imagining things. Meantime, many experts said that separating multi vaccines into individual doses is inherently safer. Some parents were opting to get their kids Measles and Mumps vaccines separately, for example, rather than giving them the combo Measles, Mumps, Rubella shot. How did the maker of MMR, Merck respond? Merck stopped making the individual shots in the U.S. All around 2008.

Listen and Learn. (h/t Kevin Spacey in "Swimming with Sharks") Dishonest public health officials, other pharma shills, and an unquestioning or uninformed media twist themselves in a pretzel to attribute an illness or death to a “vaccine preventable illness.” Yet they do the opposite with medicine- and vaccine-related injuries: they twist themselves into a pretzel to deny an illness or death is related to the medicine or vaccine. In those cases, they use propaganda phrases such as, “correlation doesn’t prove causation,” or “there’s no peer-reviewed, published studies proving this…” or “the illness was due to their genetics not the medicine.” If a person is unvaccinated, these dishonest people rush to attribute an illness or death to a "vaccine preventable illness” — even when evidence is to the contrary. Then, under the auspices of patient privacy, they will typically try to hide details of the case so it can’t be independently checked. If a person *is* vaccinated and gets a “vaccine preventable illness,” these dishonest people will either say that person’s illness or death is *not* from the “vaccine preventable illness,” and you’ll never hear of it, *or* they will still blame the unvaccinated for supposedly carrying the disease to the vaccinated person. The dishonest people inaccurately inflate the number of “unvaccinated” people who get a “vaccine preventable disease” by unscientifically combining two groups: the “unvaccinated” and “vaccine status unknowns.” Why aren’t the “unknowns” their own distinct category? Why isn’t the number of unknowns separately disclosed? If they’re grouped with anybody, why group them with “unvaccinated” (making that group bigger) rather than with the “vaccinated”? What does “unknown” really mean— that they can’t produce their actual records? (I can’t produce mine but I had vaccines.) Consider this hypothetical: 20 people get chicken pox. 7 are unvaccinated. 5 are vaccinated. 2 are vaccine status unknown. 6 think they’re vaccinated but don’t have their records. You can either report it honestly like above. Or you can unscientifically group the “unknowns” and the likely-vaccinated who don’t have records in with the “unvaccinated” to jack up the appearance of unvaccinated and report this misleading result: 20 people get chicken pox. 15 are unvaccinated or unknown. 5 are vaccinated. There is always an implication that a case or death in an unvaccinated person would not have occurred had the person been vaccinated. But that’s not always the case. There is always an implication that the unvaccinated person would not have been harmed by the vaccine, which sometimes happens. There is always a implication that the unvaccinated person could have been (should have been) vaccinated. But in the case of chicken pox and measles, the first dose isn’t given before age one. In the case of babies or children with known immune issues, they cannot get certain vaccines at all. If there are outbreaks of a “vaccine preventable disease,” the dishonest people issue national alerts, fan out on the media to frighten people, and use it to pump up vaccines and discredit the unvaccinated. If there are outbreaks of disease for which no vaccine can be developed, the dishonest people keep details hidden and won’t do interviews. They force the public and media to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get basic public information about it, and then make sure to obstruct and delay production of documents. This is what a CDC insider meant years ago when he told me, “When the CDC says you need to worry about a disease, you probably don’t need to worry. When they say you don’t need to worry, you probably should worry.” I thought he was exaggerating to be funny, but now I think he was just telling it like he saw it. Welcome to what our establishment health system has become.