Secretary Kennedy outs autism pandemic
What is behind increasing autism rates and can VAERS help us find out?
Secretary Kennedy outed autism as a pandemic (aka: public health crisis) at a press conference yesterday (April 16, 2025) after citing some very scary statistics. The press conference was based on data collected from the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey and shows that autism prevalence in the U.S. has increased from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31 since 2020.
You can watch some of the press conference below by clicking the photo. You can also see some of the statistics in the photo for a quick glance.
Or a shorter version here:
Now, this is not news to me. Last year I made the following plot using CDC (and VAERS) data and posted it to X and it indeed got quite a few views (287,300), so clearly, this is not new to many other people.
Recently, Peter Marks went on record claiming that “the higher number of autism cases that have been reported over the years almost certainly results from improved diagnosis rather than an increase in prevalence.” I snarked at Peter Marks’ completely confounding claims concerning this clear epidemic in a recent post on X that you can see below.
Autism rate increases are clearly based on epigenetic factors associated with what’s being ingested by and injected into children. Genetic diseases don’t manifest this way clinically, or epidemiologically. I don’t need to cite this. I am stating it because it is true.
Can you feel the snark, tonight?
The autism rate increases are likely a combination of both ingestion and injection of various and sundry neuro/gut-disturbers. Kennedy states that a large-scale study has been launched to determine the exact cause and will yield [publishable] results by September 2025 and this means that we will finally know what the cause of this crisis is and subsequently, pull the tick out of feeding mode.
I have since updated the plot showing the new data point (1 in 31 children) announced by Sec. Kennedy yesterday, without including the VAERS data (for number of vaccines for which adverse event reports have been filed throughout the years).
The aforementioned popular plot demonstrates two main things:
the rates of autism as reported by CDC are increasing at an exponential rate
these rates are correlated (R=0.8) to the number of vaccine products on the market as reported in CDC VAERS data as the years go by.
Now the problem with using VAERS data are multi-fold. Under-reporting is a big one, and the fact that VAERS is a passive reporting system is the main reason behind this. But, in addition to the fact that it’s also very important to point out that the version of VAERS available for download is not the full data set, there may be some data obscuration going on here. Seeing as how Peter Marks threw a hissy fit at the mention of making VAERS data fully transparent to data analysts, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that there is definitely something to hide in there. He says he was “forced out of FDA” for “protecting VAERS from Secretary Kennedy.
In an interview with The Associated Press, former Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks discussed his efforts to “make nice” with Kennedy and address his longstanding concerns about vaccine safety, including by developing a “vaccine transparency action plan.”
Marks agreed to give Kennedy’s associates the ability to read thousands of reports of potential vaccine-related issues sent to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. But he would not allow them to directly edit the data.1
I wrote about this here.
So is something being hidden? Back to the chart.
The blue dots in the chart above represent the number of vaccine products (by VAX_TYPE) for which adverse events (AEs) were filed per year, so it’s likely an under approximation of the real number of vaccines on the market, since this is merely VAERS data. But the relevance of this data does not lie in absolute counts, but the trend. The cyan dots show an exponential rise in vaccine number that correlates strongly (R=0.8) with autism AE reports in VAERS, and if we only use up to and including 2016 data, R=0.96.
I decided to do an experiment and pull out the number of reports of total AEs in VAERS in the context of the MMR vaccines (per year) - considering Andrew Wakefield’s illuminating work on the subject matter of MMR and autism. (His work revealed that combined MMR vaccines were associated with higher rates of autism if given too early in life - especially in “certain demographics” - and it was gut-related.) I pulled out the total number of autism reports in each of these MMR sub-datasets (per year) just to see what was there. Figure 3 shows the MMR reporting rate per 100,000 total VAERS reports (blue) per year, and the autism reporting rate per 100,000 MMR reports (orange) per year.
If this data was clean and raw, and the MMR shots were causing autism, we would see those two lines following each other with great precision - they would track together. But not only do they not track together, they seem to be counter-correlated, if anything. It is amazing how the VAERS data is telling a story opposite of the one that I am convinced is true!
Who knows why? Maybe it’s because I looked only at the MMR vaccine? Maybe the MMR vaccine does not cause autism? Maybe vaccines alone don’t cause autism? Maybe the VAERS data is just that inconsistent with regard to data input due to it being a passive system? Maybe there’s data fudgery going on?
What’s up with URFs?
I decided to consider the CDC’s autism data (plus the new data point), and do some URF calculations according to the VAERS MMR autism reports. If we assume that vaccines are even partially responsible for the exponential increase in autism rates, then we could also assume that some of those reports would end up in VAERS, right? I think this is a safe assumption especially considering that moms know.
Table 1 shows the results of calculating the URF for autism reports in VAERS per year. To get the background rate of childhood autism cases per year as per the US population of children, I used US population of children under 12 data and the combined prevalence per 1000 children CDC data. I then divided the background number (the expected number of autism cases as per the population of children) by the number reported in VAERS to get the URF. Now aren’t those results interesting?
I was assuming as a logical (and trusting) person, that the URF would not have any significant trajectory change as the years go by. In fact, I was expecting a straight line, because, why on earth would the URF change with time? If anything, “with more knowledge of VAERS because of COVID to induce over-reporting”, one might accept that the URF would decrease slightly since 2021.
I asked Grok what it thought and it said that if anything, the under-reporting factor for VAERS would overall likely decrease (slightly to moderately) over a 30 year-period (e.g., from capturing 1–10% to perhaps 2–15% of events) due to better awareness and education, technological improvements in reporting (yeah, sure) and public interest in vaccine safety (yeah, if they knew about it). This would especially be the case with autism, because, well, it’s autism and 1 in 31 kids have it in the US. Isn’t that absolutely insane?
But as shown in Figure 4 which is a graph of the Table 1 data (column 9), that is some surge in under-reporting rates of autism in the MMR reporting context! Wow. From 2016, it sky-rockets - just of like the autism rates themselves. You know what this looks like to me as an impartial data analyst? It looks like data fudgery. It looks like autism prevalence which is sky high is NOT being reported to VAERS. Perhaps because “vaccines don’t cause autism”? The increase in the URF is exponential after 2016 and that is truly weird. I did not expect this. I actually expected see a pretty straight line. Can some of the people out there who know more about autism and vaccines tell me if they know what the hell happened in 2016?
Figure 4 was generated using only autism reports in the context of the MMR data in VAERS. But, what about autism reports per year for all vaccines combined (Table 1 data (column 11))?
Interesting. Same thing. This needs to be explained.
My first instinct was to do a comparative assessment using a different adverse event to see if this ‘URF increase phenomenon since 2016’ was specific to autism. Unfortunately, I don’t have this data on hand yet, but maybe one of you does. But even without a comparison, this finding alone needs an explanation. To me, because of what I know has been going with the VAERS data, this really looks like autism reports are being hidden. I really, really hope I am wrong about that. By the way, do you know how we could find out? By seeing the bigger set of books!
In order to use VAERS with a modicum of confidence, we need that bigger set of books. Paleeeease.
Ask your doctors and senators and teachers and law enforcement officers etc.: Why are the autism reports in VAERS under-reported by a factor 25 between the years 1995 and 2025? Or otherwise written, why don’t the URFs stay the same (relatively-speaking) to reflect the rise in autism rates as per CDC data, accordingly?
The easy answer is: Those reports are not being filed to VAERS because of an unproven and dangerous mantra: “vaccines don’t autism”.
But what if they do?
More and more American children are succumbing to autism - at rates that are exceedingly high - and no one in the public health spheres (HHS: CDC, FDA) seem to know why, and even more disgustingly - after decades - have wanted to find out why. American children get more vaccines than children in any other country in the world (the U.S. schedule includes 38–42 doses across 16 diseases, driven by a dense early-childhood schedule, annual influenza shots, and vaccines like varicella, HepA, and MenACWY, which many other countries omit) and they also very likely ingest more toxins from food. This needs to change. All of it.
We need to stop dumping toxic waste, and improperly-tested vaccines/gene-based injectable products into healthy humans, especially children! It makes no sense to do this. Come September, with proper studies and data to back-up claims, we will know what is responsible for these horrendous rates of autism that are ever-increasing, and with diligence, these causative agents will be eradicated from the marketplace.
Secretary Kennedy. Well done my friend. And please get that data released.
https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-rfk-vaccines-measles-fda-injury-marks-5eda3335bae9b8df88795c2d5e09ae69
EXCELLENT data as usual, Dr. Rose. THANK YOU for helping to reveal this TRAGIC epidemic.
As a Mom of a Teen diagnosed with Autism, I can attest to the heart-wrenching challenges that our Teen has faced DAILY since he regressed from a healthy, neuro-typical toddler at about 18 months old.
It is too late for him...BUT my husband and I PRAY and will help FIGHT for an END to this man-made pandemic and excellent treatments for those like our PRECIOUS Son.
I'm a social research interviewer by trade, and for the last 12 years I've been visiting randomly selected addresses in Scotland. I can absolutely state with certainty that autism is incredibly common here, and that children are not being overdiagnosed, nor are parents over-fussing their children. Its real, and its urgent, and its an absolutely devastating condition that disables the entire family in many cases.