We begin today with America’s still-growing autism epidemic, a crisis that in terms of sheer numbers deserves much more attention than it’s gotten over two and a half decades. The newest data, updated every two years, continue to show an alarming climb: Today, at least 1 in 31 eight year olds have autism. That’s more than 2.2 million children.

At a White House event with President Trump at his side, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced a massive research effort to identify possible root causes including food dyes, painkillers during pregnancy, and vaccines.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

7-year old twins Drue and Dillon are taking a break from schoolwork which can be a special challenge. Their parents, Kimberly and Demek Adams, say they first knew something was wrong when the boys were toddlers.

Kimberly Adams: Their language started to regress. It seemed like their connection was different around two, a little bit, you know, before two. And so, they weren’t responding to their names. So they were just regressing in some of their skills.

Sharyl: And did you go to the doctor and say, “we’re concerned,” or did the doctor do some milestone test?

Demek Adams: No, my wife’s intuition drove it.

They enrolled the twins in early intervention and got the official diagnosis: autism.

Kimberly Adams: You do grieve, you know, you know, a lot of people don’t talk about that guilt that parents feel when they get the diagnosis. And they’re heartbroken because we were, you know, because we didn’t know what was ahead of us.

Drue and Dillon are among America’s autistic children who are visible. They can go out in public. But more than 330-thousand children have autism so severe, they’re rarely seen by the outside world.

Mary Holland heads up the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which advocates on child health issues.

Sharyl: What is the current status of how much autism is in the United States today?

Mary Holland: The current data is that one in 31 children age eight in the United States has autism.

Like many parents, Holland says her son regressed into autism after his battery of vaccines at age two.

Holland: And it was very clear. There was no cogent explanation for what was happening to him other than he had had very serious toxic exposures through his early recommended vaccination schedule. There’s no such thing as a genetic epidemic. It must be epigenetic or purely environmental.

Sharyl: In simple terms meaning: there could be a genetic component that predisposes somebody to the injury if they have some kind of trigger or other exposure?

Holland: So you brought this out, most importantly, Sharyl in your interview with Bernadine Healy, who was at the time the head of an or had just retired recently as the head of the National Institutes of Health.

(CBS News clip, May 12, 2008)

Sharyl: It sounds like you don’t think the hypothesis of a link between vaccines and autism is completely irrational?

Dr. Bernadine Healy, Former Dir., National Institutes of Health: When I first heard that there was a link between autism and vaccines I thought ‘well that’s silly.’ The more you delve into it, if you look at the basic science, if you look at the research that has been done in animals, if you also look at some of these individual cases and if you look at the evidence that there is no link, what I come away with is the question has not been answered. This is the time when we do have the opportunity to understand whether or not there are susceptible children perhaps genetically, perhaps they have a metabolic issue, mitochondrial disorder, immunological issue, that makes them more susceptible to vaccines, plural, or to one particular vaccine, or to a component of vaccine like mercury.

Holland: Probably there’s a subset of people who have a certain genetic predisposition, and when they come in contact with the mercury in vaccines or the aluminum in vaccines or all of the antigens, the formaldehyde, the polysorbate 80, there’s all kinds of very toxic ingredients in the childhood vaccine schedule.

Associations between vaccines and autism are loudly disputed, yet well documented in more than 200 scientific papers and court documents. In addition: Autism once appeared on the warning label for a DTaP vaccine. The government secretly agreed vaccines triggered autism in a girl named Hannah Poling and paid her millions in a landmark settlement — but had the records sealed so the public wouldn’t know.

CDC’s top Immunization Safety official, Frank DeStefano, admitted vaccines may trigger autism in vulnerable children like Hannah Poling.

Dr. Frank DeStefano (Aug. 26, 2014, SharylAttkisson.com): I guess the Poling case maybe suggested it could happen. But it’s hard to predict who those children might be, but certainly, individual cases, can be studied to try to look at those possibilities.

CDC senior scientist William Thompson claimed the agency covered up data linking MMR vaccines to autism in black boys.

Famed pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Zimmerman reversed his original stance and determined vaccines can cause autism, after all. But says when he told Justice Department lawyers, they fired him as an expert witness and covered up his opinion.

And most recently, a study reported vaccinated kids face a 170% greater risk of autism.

Both Democrats and Republicans have told me there’s been a longstanding effort in Congress to protect the vaccine industry.

(Full Measure clip, Jan. 11, 2019)

Sharyl: If you would want to hold a hearing on an issue like vaccines and autism, your own leadership might fight you on that because of the financial influence, the pharmaceutical industry?

Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL): They wouldn’t fight you. They’d kill it. It’s dead. They don’t even want to discuss it. It’s dead on arrival. If you, if you as an individual member want to take on the pharmaceutical industries. It’s forget it.

Sharyl: Can you describe an incident or just how it, how that would go?

Weldon: It would typically be in a hallway or the street and people would come up to you and say, “You know, you really need to, you know, back off on this. It could be, it could be bad for the community or bad for the country or bad for you.”

For every study or allegation linking vaccines and autism, the industry and other vaccine defenders have lengthy counterpoints.

American Academy of Pediatrics video: No, vaccines do not cause autism. It just so happens that kids get several vaccines around the same time that some children start to show signs of autism. But that’s a coincidence. Not a cause.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC (Hill TV, Sept. 26, 2018): Based on dozens of studies and everything I know as a physician and a scientist, there’s no link between autism and vaccines.

Sharyl: There are a lot of other chemical exposures kids are getting today as well. As someone who focused on vaccines early on, are you looking at other contributing causes?

Holland Absolutely. We’re also looking at the water. We’re also looking at the air. We’re also looking at the food supply. We’re looking at the pesticides that are used. And we believe that it is a toxic load that we have to look at. You can’t look at one factor. They integrate, they’re synergistic.

This past week, Health Secretary Kennedy said no stone will be left unturned.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (September 22): Historically NIH has focused almost solely on politically safe and entirely fruitless research about the genetic drivers of autism. That would be like studying the genetic drivers of lung cancer without looking at cigarettes. And that is what NIH has been doing for 20 years.

In addition, based on NIH research, the FDA says it is approving a prescription form of an essential B vitamin for treating autistic children with speech issues.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, funded in part by the vaccine industry, doesn’t want any part of Kennedy’s effort examining autism when it comes to vaccines. The group says: Devoting more research dollars to answer a question that is already known does not add to our knowledge about the safety of vaccines. It does a disservice to individuals with autism and their families by diverting funding that is needed to learn more about autism and how we can strengthen supportive communities.

For their part, the Adams say they do not blame vaccines for their children’s autism. With help, the twins have progressed from no language and few skills to conversations and interactions.

Kimberly Adams: I mean, we don’t believe in a cure, because I don’t believe it’s a disease, right? So it’s nothing to cure, it’s a neurotype. Right? And so you have to get the right services in order to, adapt to the way someone learns or someone thinks, or the way someone’s brain is wired.

Demek Adams: But when I tell you the— what I got from a how to, how to love differently, It’s nothing any child could have gave me as far as me as an individual evolving and developing, right? I just think when people see some of these things, they think of the negative, right? But the special, like joy I get in their milestones, the small, small incremental milestones. That I just took a granted took for granted if I had a typical kid, like, you can’t beat that.

Sharyl (on-camera): For more on this story, listen to my podcast Full Measure After Hours.

Watch video here.