Mapping Autism Causation Studies

Guest author

July 27, 2025

Toby Rogers has a Ph.D., Brownstone Institute

I. RCTs Are Not the Exclusive or Final Criterion

As I showed in my two previous articles, the exclusive focus on double-blind, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by Evidence-Based Medicine is ridiculous because:

There are no proper RCTs of vaccines. Pharma and regulators do not want any data that might contradict their biases and interfere with their profits.
The Contract Research Organizations (CROs) that conduct clinical trials (usually in China and the Third World) work at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry and use a wide variety of tricks to give their clients any results they want.
RCTs perform no better than other types of studies according to the former head of the MHRA in the UK (Michael Rawlins, 2008) and the former head of the CDC in the U.S. (Thomas Frieden, 2017).
Even Bradford Hill, one of the key figures in the development and popularization of modern RCTs, cautioned against overreliance on them, saying, “Any belief that the controlled trial is the only way would mean not that the pendulum had swung too far but that it had come right off the hook” (Hill, 1966).

During World War II, RCTs showed that antibiotics can treat some bacterial infections. By the early 1970s, the pharmaceutical industry figured out how to rig RCTs to produce any results they wish. And so now RCTs are just a way to give the appearance of safety and efficacy to toxic, useless, and deadly drugs.

We can and must do better than this, particularly when it comes to autism research.

II. Activist-Initiated Participatory Science and Samizdat Literature

It turns out that independent autism research is the best example of Activist-Initiated Participatory Science in history — but almost none of the mainstream academics in this field will talk about autism because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

From my doctoral thesis:

According to Moore (2006), Activist-Initiated Participatory Science has a long history going back to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that were alarmed by the role of scientists in the chemical and weapons industries. Scientists were both targets of and sometimes participants in these activist social movements. Activist-Initiated Participatory Science has often been a key feature of anti-toxics/anti-pollution campaigns [Brown, 1992; Bullard, 1994; Lichterman, 1996; and Allen, 2003] and health-related social movement groups [Morello-Frosch, 2006]. Many of these studies could also be considered examples of “popular epidemiology” which is defined as “the process by which laypersons gather scientific data and other information, and also direct and marshal the knowledge of other experts in order to understand the epidemiology of a disease” [Brown, 1992].

As I will show below, in the autism debate some of the most insightful data are from:

parents’ groups;
censored, banned, and blacklisted academics and doctors;
independent and foreign scholars;
court proceedings;
registries and testimonials; and
documentaries.

Historically, this was called the “gray literature” in academia and library sciences (neither the mainstream “white literature” nor the completely inaccessible classified “black” documents). But this term does not do justice to the context in which this groundbreaking autism research is being produced. A more fitting description is Samizdat literature. From Grok:

Samizdat literature refers to the clandestine production, reproduction, and distribution of written works, often political, literary, or dissident in nature, that were banned or censored by authorities, particularly in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries during the 20th century. The term comes from Russian, meaning “self-published” (sam = self, izdat = publishing), and typically involved individuals or small groups secretly copying and sharing manuscripts, poems, essays, or books using typewriters, carbon paper, or other rudimentary methods to evade state censorship.

Independent autism research is being done amidst the most extreme propaganda and censorship regime in history. Elected officials, regulators, the media, and the entire knowledge production process in science and medicine are captured by and work at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry. The fact that any independent research is produced at all is remarkable. The fact that this independent autism research often attracts world-class scholars who are willing to risk everything to tell the truth is a testament to the indomitable human spirit.

Nearly all of the studies that I discuss in this article are censored by the search engines and ignored or covered up by public health agencies and medical associations. But this article will help you to find many of them.

There is also a substantial body of proprietary data that would likely demonstrate autism causation and we’ll need to find creative ways to access those data in the years to come.

III. Ginger Taylor’s Database of 237+ Autism Studies Shows Mechanisms of Causation

Autism parents approach the autism data differently from mainstream academics. Autism parents start with the question: “How can I help my child get better (regain speech, have fewer seizures, have less pain)?” Mainstream academics approach the autism data with visions of publishing and career advancement — and the knowledge that if they ask too many forbidden questions they’ll get fired.

Many autism parents had high-level training in statistics, science, or medicine before their children regressed and that serves them in good stead when they are reading late into the night trying to figure out what happened. Also, autism parents have a tremendous advantage in that they can try treatments with their child to detox, improve gut health, reduce inflammation, etc. and see which ones work.

In 2002, Ginger Taylor gave birth to a healthy boy. At 18 months he regressed following a DTaP shot. She had gone to a prestigious graduate school so she knew how to read scientific studies. She began by reading vaccine inserts. In the early days of blogging she started Adventures in Autism to share what she was finding and learning from others. In 2005, Evidence of Harm was published and became a New York Times bestseller. Ginger went to the references and found 15 to 20 papers, mostly on mercury and autism. In the early 2000s lots of autism parents shared studies with each other on Yahoo groups (when those were a thing) and then later on Facebook. Ginger collected and curated these studies and posted them to her website.

She started with about 60 studies linking vaccines and autism. These tend to be mechanistic studies — e.g. how do vaccines impact mitochondria and how does mitochondrial damage relate to autism? By 2010 she had gathered 100 studies and distributed them through Scribd (a digital library site that’s good for sharing PDF documents). By the start of Covid she had gathered 160 papers on vaccines and autism. And then waves of parents started questioning the childhood schedule so she moved her collection of studies over to HowDoVaccinesCauseAutism.org.

Today, Ginger has 237 studies covering all aspects of autism causation including adjuvants, the different types of vaccines, and the different facets of the autism experience from encephalopathy to seizures to cytokine storms. As she told me on the phone, “If you want to understand the relationship between vaccines and autism, these are the papers you need.” These are the studies that NIH, FDA, and CDC pretend don’t exist but they are all there in black and white with excerpts, abstracts, and links to the full study in every case. See for yourself:

https://howdovaccinescauseautism.org

IV. Parent Testimonials Are Data

One of my “red pill” experiences during my Ph.D. studies was reading the website followingvaccinations.com. I’m grateful to investigative journalist Dan Olmsted (1952-2017) for writing the article that alerted me to the site.

Set up by South African warrior mom, Joan Campbell, Following Vaccinations allows parents to tell the story of their child’s vaccine injury (and autistic regression is a widely-reported outcome). There are now thousands of parent testimonials on the site. It’s impossible to read for more than a few minutes without breaking down crying. The site functions as an autism and vaccine injury registry. Government could easily set up something similar as a sort of Autism Truth Commission but they are too captured and cowardly. I imagine that most people who read the testimonials on followingvaccinations.com will never vaccinate their children again.

Children’s Health Defense has organized a number of similar efforts that are brilliant:

The People’s Study includes several hundred video testimonials about vaccine injury.
The Dedications page includes the names of 1,300 people who signed the Vaxxed Bus to indicate that they or a family member is vaccine-injured.
I also really like the Hear This Well: Autism Parents Speak campaign.

Other efforts along these lines include:

The Highwire’s Dear Moms campaign.
The #WeDid hashtag campaign on Instagram and Twitter by Freedom Keepers.

Were it not for massive censorship on YouTube, there would be hundreds of thousands of these autism and vaccine injury testimonials for the public to watch. We should bring a class action lawsuit against YouTube — and ask Secretary Kennedy to join our effort as well — to get access to these censored testimonials of vaccine injury. Censorship literally kills: the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, died at 56 as a result of turbo cancer following Covid vaccination. Had she allowed free speech she could have learned the information that likely would have prevented her premature death.

V. Official Reports Are Data:

OpenVAERS.com contains 2.7 million reports of vaccine injury. You can search by keyword, symptom or vaccine type.

The Informed Consent Action Network has obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of government public health documents via the Freedom of Information Act. They are building a searchable database of these documents so that independent scholars can use them. Sign up at icandecide.org to be notified of further developments.

Siri & Glimstad LLP, on behalf of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, successfully sued the FDA in 2021 to force the agency to release Covid-19 vaccine data. The Pfizer and Moderna documents are now available on the PHMPT website (phmpt.org) and the Pfizer documents are also available on the ICAN website (icandecide.org/pfizer-documents). Naomi Wolf also led a group of thousands of independent scholars to analyze the documents. They produced a book, The Pfizer Papers, and lots of articles and interviews (DailyClout). While these documents are focused on a wide range of different vaccine injuries, Covid-19 vaccines may increase the risk of autism owing to immunoexcitotoxicity (see Blaylock, 2025).

VI. Books by Suppressed, Banned, and Censored Authors Contain a Treasure Trove of Great Studies

Everyone needs to read Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History(Humphries and Bystrianyk, 2nd edition, 2024). It’s simply the best thing that’s ever been written about vaccines and it includes thousands of sources.

Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers (2016) is essential reading for survival in this era.

How to End the Autism Epidemic by J.B. Handley (2018) is magnificent. In a just world it would have won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Age of Autism by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill (2010) was one of my red pills and provides a best-in-class history of the autism epidemic.

The 192 peer-reviewed papers authored or co-authored by Christopher Exley on the dangers of aluminum are world-class.

The 37 studies in Vaccines and Autoimmunity by Shoenfeld, Agmon-Levin, and Tomljenovic (Eds.) (2015) are groundbreaking. There’s a high degree of overlap between autism and autoimmune disorders but the mechanisms of action are undertheorized because government doesn’t want to fund studies that would hurt the interests of large corporations that are the biggest donors to political campaigns.

Independent scholar Forrest Maready has written five of the best books ever published on vaccines and autism and each includes hundreds of sources:

The Moth in the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio (2018);
Crooked: Man-made disease explained (2018);
Unvaccinated: Why growing numbers of parents are choosing natural immunity for their children (2018);
The Autism Vaccine: The Story of Modern Medicine’s Greatest Tragedy (2019); and
VaxBaby: The Curious Parent’s Guide to Pediatric Vaccines (2019).

Turtles All the Way Down (O’Toole & Holland, Eds, 2022) is a helpful overview of the entire debate and includes over 1,200 sources with links that will take you right to each study.

The preponderance of evidence supports the claim that vaccines cause autism.

Of course there are many more great books on this topic. Please add your favorites in the comments below.

VII. Ashley Everly’s Vaccine Guide

Warrior mom Ashley Everly has built a 2,170-page binder of relevant information to help people make informed decisions about vaccination. The content is free on her site Vaccine.Guide and includes:

It’s an astonishing collection. You can download the documents piece by piece or download all of them in one PDF.

Resources including Vaccine Guide are another reason warrior moms and dads are fearless in the public square. We’ve usually read thousands of pages of original studies and we’re going up against people who have read no original studies and are just parroting Pharma propaganda that they heard in the mainstream media.

VIII. 10,000 News Stories Collected and Curated in Loss of Braintrust

Anne Dachel has built an extraordinary online library of more than 10,000 news stories since 2017 about the autism epidemic. Her site is foundational to any serious understanding of this crisis.

IX. Documentaries Are Data

Imagine you or someone you love is injured by a vaccine. You could write about it, but no mainstream magazine would publish it because they are captured by the pharmaceutical industry. I suppose you could go to medical school or get a Ph.D. to prove your case but scientific journals are also captured so the odds of getting published are close to zero. In the absence of other venues, a lot of people who have been afflicted by the Great Poisoning have made documentary films to tell their story.

Some of the best “vaccines and autism” documentaries, news reports, and films include:

Vaccine Roulette (1982, WRC-TV)

The first in-depth televised report on the mercury-autism link, showing parents whose toddlers slipped away after vaccinations at 18 months. Grainy but still powerful after all of these years.

The Greater Good (2011)

Award-winning portrait of injured families — Gardasil paralysis, DPT seizures, and a baby who died post-Hep B — balanced against Pharma talking heads who end up incriminating themselves.

Bought (2014)

Overlays Big Pharma campaign donations with VAERS injury graphs and ends with an ex-Pharma rep admitting they buried negative trials. I’ve searched high and low but cannot seem to find it anymore. If you know where it can be viewed please let us know in the comments.

Trace Amounts (2014)

One man’s mercury-poisoning odyssey turns into a forensic deep-dive on thimerosal, complete with FOIA-obtained CDC emails and footage of Congressional hearings the mainstream media ignored. I cannot find it anywhere on the internet and the official website has been seized. Please post a link below if you know where we can stream it.

Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe (2016)

An investigation into how the CDC destroyed data from a 2004 study that showed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Features interviews with the legendary warrior mom Dr. Sheila Ealey (1960–2024).

Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth (2019)

A road-trip across America in the Vaxxed Bus collecting thousands of injury stories; raw, unfiltered, and impossible to dismiss.

1986: The Act (2020)

This is a feature film but the information shared by the characters is factual. It explains how the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act gave Pharma legal liability protection and created the no-fault vaccine court that shields this heinous industry.

Vaxxed III: Authorized to Kill (2024)

Children’s Health Defense embarked on a nine-month journey across America, gathering powerful testimonies from vaccine injured people and their families. Their interviews range from mothers and fathers to teenagers, families, medical professionals, whistleblowers, lawyers, and people from all walks of life.

I know there are many more excellent documentaries on this topic. Please add your favorites in the comments below.

X. Cost Studies Are Data

I’m intrigued by the “societal cost of autism studies” because they are an objective indication of the size and scope of the autism epidemic and a measure of the policy challenge ahead (that is currently being ignored by government). Also, the Pharma goons decided to censor the best cost study ever produced (that I co-authored) so that lets us know that we are right over the target.

There are now seven good “societal cost of autism studies:”

Jarbrink and Knapp, 2001;
Ganz, 2007;
Knapp et al., 2009;
Buescher et al., 2014;
Leigh & Du, 2015;
Cakir et al., 2020;
Blaxill, Rogers, & Nevison, 2023.

They all show sharply rising prevalence and cost. On the current trajectory, the US and much of the developed world is facing societal and economic collapse from the tsunami of vaccine injury. Quite literally the only way to save the Republic is to stop poisoning children in the first place. The fact that this is controversial shows the degree of mental capture in our society.

XI. Holland Et Al.’s (2011) Investigation Shows That Even the Vaccine Court Acknowledges That Vaccines Cause the Symptoms of Autism

Holland, Conte, Krakow, and Colin (2011) discovered 83 instances where the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in the US awarded compensation to families of children who developed autism as a result of vaccines. Holland et al. (2011) point out that the table of injuries that can be compensated by the VICP includes encephalopathy and the VICP’s definition of encephalopathy is very similar to the DSM-IV definition of autism (p. 495). In a cruel twist of administrative law, sometimes the Special Masters of the US Court of Federal Claims (aka the Vaccine Court) are willing to grant compensation for vaccine injuries that produce symptoms characteristic of autism so long as the petitioners describe these symptoms as “autism-like” (rather than autism per se) and/or include other comorbid conditions (Holland et al., 2011). So officially the Court claims that vaccines could not possibly cause autism but in many cases the reality is undeniable.

This was true in the Hannah Poling settlement as well. In the Hannah Poling case (one of the original test cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceedings) the CDC admitted that vaccines cause autism in the presence of an underlying mitochondrial disorder which is the case for a large percentage of people on the spectrum (see discussion of mitochondrial disorders in Handley, 2018). Hannah’s parents were paid $20 million, Hannah was removed from the Omnibus Autism Proceedings (even though the CDC conceded her test cases) and the other 5,600 plaintiffs were denied compensation. This is an example of the cruel Orwellian doublespeak of our current system.

XII. Mountains of Relevant Data Are Currently Hidden but Should Be Shared with the Public via Litigation or Government Action

In Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, and East Germany instituted what are called “lustration” laws (from the Latin lustratio, meaning purification). Members of the secret police or Communist Party were removed from government positions. In addition, secret government archives were opened so that the public could see the records that had been kept hidden by the regime. Something similar needs to happen with proprietary autism data that are currently hidden by government and corporations.

Currently all of the records of the US Court of Federal Claims (aka the “Vaccine Court”) are sealed. That means that there are millions of pages of documents — affidavits from doctors and other medical experts, testimony from parents and other family members, medical records, and more — that are not available to independent scholars for research. Sealing these court records serves the interests of the pharmaceutical industry but harms the public interest.

Given that we are in the middle of an autism epidemic, this unnecessary secrecy is unconscionable. ALL documents in connection with the US Court of Federal Claims should be made public (either through litigation or executive action by the Secretary of HHS) so that independent researchers can draw their own conclusions. It would be fairly easy to anonymize all of the data. And what we will likely see is that the US Court of Federal Claims is one of the most corrupt institutions in the history of medicine — consistently ignoring a wealth of data proving causation and going out of their way to protect the pharmaceutical industry. The Omnibus Autism Proceedings (involving 5,600 plaintiffs) were wrongly decided and those records must be unsealed as well.

The same thing is true of the British MMR Litigation (involving 1,500 families) — those records are currently sealed and they must be anonymized and released to the public.

Other records of vaccine injury that are currently hidden that must be pried open via litigation or executive action include:

The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). With nine million records from four US health maintenance organizations, it was taken offline before Robert Kennedy was sworn in as HHS Secretary to keep the data hidden. Access must be restored immediately.
Medicaid data. 49% of US children (37 million children total) were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program as of October 2024, according to an analysis of data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (AAP, 2025). As the recent Mawson and Jacob (2025) study of Florida Medicaid records shows, independent scholars find patterns in the data that captured scholars refuse to examine.
Pediatricians’ records. Every mainstream pediatric practice in the US has evidence of crimes against humanity in their files if we could get access to them.
Insurance company records. Every insurance company in the US has evidence of crimes against humanity in their files if we could get access to them.
Head Start data. Head Start (pre-K for low-income children) mandates that programs comply with state immunization requirements for enrollment and attendance. In blue states and many red states this means children have to be up-to-date with the CDC schedule in order to participate. Access to anonymized Head State data would likely show rising autism prevalence and regression in children forced to catch up on vaccines.
Hospital records. Hospitals know who received the hepatitis B vaccine and “vitamin K” shot. They also know who returned later for high fevers, seizures, vomiting, and other symptoms of autistic regression. The US hospital system could easily prove what is causing autism but thus far they have chosen to keep those records secret.
Databases of military dependents — MHS Genesis, Composite Health Care System (legacy), and TRICARE Claims Data Systems. The children of US service members regress into autism just the same as the civilian population (probably at a higher rate though because of a greater insistence on being up-to-date with the CDC schedule). The US military has those records and they must be released.
Google search histories. Google has detailed profiles on the search histories of nearly every American that they sell to advertisers. But those search histories would also show the following pattern for lots of children who regressed into autism: Google Maps search for directions to the pediatrician; Google search for fever, incessant crying, seizures; Googling directions to the hospital; Googling autism symptoms. All of that would occur within a few hours or a few days. Quite literally in the Google search history is the record of the autism epidemic for the entire country since Google became the dominant search engine around 2002. All of that data can and should be anonymized before being released.
The National Security Agency (NSA) monitors every phone call, email, financial transaction, iCloud photo upload, and more in this country. Again, within that database is the evidence that vaccines cause autism. Using AI and other existing tools from Palantir and others, the NSA could very easily prove the case just as I outlined above in connection with Google. They must be ordered to do so. Of course the data can and should be anonymized.
Facebook censorship records. In 2015 and 2016, Stop Mandatory Vaccination (started by Larry Cook) grew to over 150,000 members. I watched it nearly every day. I saw that lots of parents turned to this group to get advice on their children’s vaccine injuries — sometimes just hours after they happened. Nearly every week there were also SIDS deaths reported to the group by parents trying to understand why their child died suddenly and unexpectedly. Facebook later deleted the entire group without warning. I believe Facebook engaged in racketeering by covering up these injuries and deaths on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. All of those posts and replies still exist somewhere within the Facebook servers. Facebook must be forced to turn over all of the anonymized records of Stop Mandatory Vaccination and the thousands of other vaccine injury groups that once had pages on their site.

What I am alleging in this section is that the obvious evidence of autism causation runs throughout our society — in databases controlled by government, the military, private corporations, and tech giants. The leaders of these organizations can come forward. Whistleblowers within these companies can perform these searches and save Western civilization. Or we can use courts to compel them to do the right thing.

XIII. Conclusion

In my first “Mapping” article I covered about 850 studies and showed the six that stand out as the best — Gallagher and Goodman (2008 & 2010), Mawson et al. (2017A & 2017B), Hooker and Miller (2021), and Mawson and Jacob (2025).

In this article, I’ve covered several thousand more sources including hundreds of studies and a wealth of alternative data sources that provide a comprehensive picture of the autism epidemic in the United States. Together these two articles provide the most comprehensive map of the autism epidemic ever created. Previously I’ve made the case that medical decisions should be made based on the totality of evidence — well, this is the totality of the autism evidence as it stands right now.

A few weeks ago, I read the guidelines for the much-touted new $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative from NIH. The rules of the grants are designed to guarantee that the causes of autism will never be found. They include a misplaced focus on genetics and a specific request for more studies on wearables (I wish I was kidding). Independent researchers (including me!) are barred from even applying.

There is no need for the NIH to conduct further fraudulent studies covering up the causes of the autism epidemic or for the MAHA Commission to produce further reports that will be watered down by Susie Wiles with Pharma lobbyists looking over her shoulder. It’s all right here. We know what is causing autism — the mass poisoning of children, mostly from vaccines and a few additional toxicants. That also means that we know how to stop the autism epidemic (stop poisoning children in the first place). Now we need to summon the political will to implement the obvious and necessary reforms.

Toby Rogers

Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

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