After Andrew Wakefield’s 1998, Infamous retracted MMR vaccination and Autism connections paper, another paper was written on Autism that was published in Lab Medicine in 2002. The author’s Rimland and McGinnis cited Andrew Wakefields paper in their paper Vaccines and Autism.

In October 2018, amidst the heaviest controversy of the vaccination industry of the century, Roger L. Bertholf, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Lab Medicine, and Pietro Ghezzi, Ph.D., retracted the paper. They wrote an editorial announcing the change. They said Bertholf and Ghezzi’s paper relied heavily on the original Wakefield paper, so they retracted it. This caused me some concern that the paper would be used to advance an anti-vaccine agenda.

The Restriction stated – However, sometimes, flawed studies that remain in the literature can be harmful when these studies are used by nonscientists to support conclusions that have long since been discredited by subsequent studies. We have learned that this is the case with an article by Rimland and McGinnis that was published in Lab Medicine in 2002.³ The paper proposed a mechanism linking vaccinations with autism, and its conclusions were substantially based on a 1998 paper by Wakefield, published in The Lancet,⁴ (SEE THE PAPERS 103 CITATIONS BELOW) that first suggested this association. In 2010, after a thorough investigation, The Lancet withdrew the Wakefield paper, explaining that several elements of the study it reported had been determined to be incorrect.

On August 21, 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said the following, “The evidence is clear: thimerosal is not a toxin in vaccines, but merely a preservative, preventing contamination, that has been used in vaccines for decades.’ How can this be? If it is not a toxin why did they make this announcement?

In June 2000, a joint statement on thimerosal* in vaccines was prepared by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), and the Public Health Service (PHS) in response to 1) the progress in achieving the national goal declared in July 1999 to remove thimerosal from vaccines in the recommended childhood vaccination schedule, and 2) results of recent studies that examined potential associations between exposure to mercury in thimerosal-containing vaccines and health effects.

Highlights of the Retracted Paper from 2002

A Pattern of Autoimmunity in Autism – Retracted – We had a link here. The source has removed the link. This is the information we obtained from the paper.

Markers for autoimmunity are predominate in autism, and autoimmunity is one of the conditions associated with activation of the inflammatory response. Occurrence of autoimmune illness is 8 times higher in mothers of autistic children.17  Major histocompatibility class (MHC)  proteins are important modulators of the immune response, and in animals, MHC subtype determines susceptibility to an autoimmune response to antigens such as
mercury.18

Conclusion

Depressed immunity, autoimmunity, and inflammatory activation are common features in autism. Impaired resistance to infection may predispose to chronic measles infection of the autistic gut MMR vaccine. Thimerosal-containing vaccine during infancy may depress immunity and lower the threshold for chronic vaccinial measles infection.

Thimerosal and MMR may induce autoimmunity to elements of the CNS individually or additively and thus contribute to the pathophysiology of autism. A significant anatomic and functional gut abnormality is a prevailing theme in autism and may be aggravated by injury from MMR and thimerosal or predispose to such injury.

Much of the clinical knowledge about nutritional aspects of autism, such as low zinc and vitamin A status, help explain a weakened autistic immunity and gut as well as vulnerability to vaccine injury. Ingress of toxins from the gut reflects gut injury and appears significant. We are far from certain that vaccines help trigger autism, but we are farther still from certain they do not. Given current available data, thimerosal would stand no chance of approval as a new injectable medication by modern standards, and

because thimerosal alternatives exist for all the scheduled childhood vaccines, we call for its summary removal and safe disposal from every repository in this country.

We also encourage an intensive effort to find economical thimerosal-free childhood vaccines for the rest of the world. In many respects, the autistic immune profile fits the diagnostic category of common variable immunodeficiency (CVID). Common variable immunodeficiency is strongly associated with gastrointestinal disease, including LNH, in multiple studies.100-103 Autism may very well be nature’s way of demonstrating a subgroup of CVID children vulnerable to vaccine injury.

Current official vaccination guidelines do not exclude CVID children from usual vaccination, but we think this needs refinement. We call for well-funded prospective studies by individuals without conflicts of interest to determine immune, autoimmune, gastrointestinal, and long-term neurobehavioral effects of vaccination, particularly in relation to immune, gut, and nutritional status before and after vaccination. Development of screening tests to identify children with higher risks of any negative effects of MMR should be a high priority. Such screening might include skin-testing for energy, dietary; family questionnaires to identify possible low vitamin A levels; tetanus titers for energy; or immunoglobulin and T-cell counts in special cases. In this period of major uncertainty over MMR and autism, the thoughtful physician would be counseled to temper existing institutional and corporate vaccine guidelines with clinical judgment. In fact,  independent thinking may be the only way to resolve certain institutional contradictions, as in the conflicting recommendations pertaining to the administration of MMR to children with febrile illness.67

As many of our colleagues have already determined, the respect for our vaccination program is not lessened if the physician decides to wait a reasonable period after diarrhea or other illness has abated, or advise cod liver oil prophylaxis before vaccination.99 Published science and clinical experience are converging rapidly to form a more accurate image of autism. We are learning that autism implies a physically ill child with associated immune, gut, and nutritional problems. Besides helping target biological interventions for autism, understanding the underlying physical problems enhances our grasp of the possible role of vaccines.

Retraction