The MMR vaccine increases the risk of autism 3.4 times-but this alarming fact has been covered up by health agencies, worried that parents would stop vaccinating their children.
Parents have been constantly reassured that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine is safe and doesn’t cause autism-as discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield warned-and agencies have pointed to studies that prove the point.
But the data behind one of the most pivotal studies was deliberately manipulated in order to hide the fact that the vaccine increased the rate of autism among African-American boys by a worrying 340 per cent.
Prof Brian Hooker, associate professor of biology at Simpson University in California, made the discovery after he reanalysed the data used in the influential de Stefano study published in Pediatrics journal in 2004. In order to ‘lose’ the autism cases, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reduced the sample size of the dataset by 41 per cent.
Prof Hooker’s discovery has been endorsed by epidemiologist Dr William Thompson, who works for the CDC. He has released a letter he sent to the then CDC head Dr Julie Geberding, voicing his concerns about having to present “problematic results” that demonstrated an association between the vaccine and autism. Subsequently, those problematic results disappeared, and were revealed to parents of autistic children.
Dr Gerberding later left the CDC to take up a new post within the vaccine division at Merck, one of the major manufacturers of the MMR.
