Dear Secretary Kennedy

My request to you is that HHS either differentiate between regressive autism and vaccine induced encephalopathy, or define that they are often the same thing, and mandate training for doctors.

July 31, 2025

Dear Secretary Kennedy,

I am writing to you as the mother of a young adult son named Chandler.

Before

Chandler is diagnosed with autism having suffered developmental regression following vaccines received at his 18-month well-baby visit in 2003. Although we long understood that his autism was caused by his vaccines, I did not learn until 2007, when somebody literally handed me a copy of the Vaccine Injury Table (the “Table”), that his autism resulted from Pertussis Vaccine Encephalopathy (VE), a recognized vaccine adverse event associated with the DTaP vaccine he received at his 18-month pediatrician visit.

While we had heard of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), the only legal recourse to those injured by vaccines like the DTaP, we did not think that we had the evidence to show what we knew to be true – that Chandler’s autistic regression was caused by a vaccine. Unfortunately, when I first saw the Table in 2007 and it was clear to me that he had what should be a compensable Table Injury, the three-year statute of limitation had already passed. Thus, we were barred from filing for compensation in the VICP on his behalf.

Even though we could not file in the VICP, we still tried to have him evaluated for vaccine encephalopathy. However, we could not find a doctor – including Chandler’s pediatrician – to perform such an evaluation.

We asked our pediatrician for a standard of care evaluation for the adverse event. Such an evaluation would be conducted in the manner that a competent similarly-trained medical provider would provide under similar circumstances, i.e., following the standard of care. I truly believed that there must be a rigorous standard of care for physicians to follow in such circumstances. She said that she would look into it what such an evaluation would entail and get back to us. After six weeks elapsed with no response, I made another appointment and again asked her what she had learned on how to proceed. She claimed that she really didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I walked her through the Table (with which she did not seem familiar) and repeated that I was looking for a standard of care evaluation for pertussis vaccine induced encephalopathy. She again said that she would look into it. However, when almost a year had passed with no contact from her office, it became clear that she was not going respond to my request in any way.

I filed a simple one page complaint against her with the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine (attached). I asked the Board the following question:

What is the duty of a physician to his patient when a parent reports a suspected vaccine injury?

The Board accepted my complaint for processing and asked the doctor to respond to some questions. In a written statement through her lawyers, the pediatrician dishonestly answered the Board’s questions, gaslighting me in the process. In reply, I submitted an additional ten pages of information to address her demonstrably untrue statements.

As the doctor involved had spent so much time “playing dumb,” in responding to my complaint, I also included a more pointed reiteration of my question involved in this inquiry:

So the very simple, central and precedent setting question I am putting before this board is:

(1) If the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), associated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has federally recommended a vaccine, and

(2) if the State of Maine has in turn mandated that vaccine for daycare and school admission, then
(3) if a parent or guardian has vaccinated his or her child with this vaccine, and
(4) that parent or guardian suspects that the child has suffered an adverse vaccine reaction,
is that child entitled to a formal evaluation for vaccine injury by a qualified doctor based on an established medical standard of care?

I then asked the Board to consider the following questions related to my initial inquiry:

The resulting questions then follow in this case are:

• If not, why not?

• If so, is there a standard of care for the assessment of Vaccine-induced encephalopathy?

• If not, why not, as the condition defined by HHS more than 25 years ago, and the VICP has paid more than 1,000 cases of VE, thus presumably must have medical assessment criteria.

• Did Dr. John Smith have access to that standard of care assessment?

• If not, why not?

• If so, why was that standard of care assessment not implemented?

• If Dr. Smith didn’t know of a standard of care, what measures did he take to find one?

• What agencies or organizations are responsible to Dr. Smith to provide him the information he needs to properly assess his patients, and how does he go about getting that information?

• Was Dr. Smith obligated to do a cursory screening and document that my son does meet the minimum requirement laid out in the table for VE, a neurological change following pertussis vaccine accompanied by diminished eye contact?

• If Dr. Smith exhausted all of his means of finding the standard of care for this vaccine injury, was he obligated to make contact with us to tell us, make further recommendations, or tell us that he would not be attempting to pursue this matter any further?

• Has this system set Dr Smith up for failure to perform his ethical duty to provide medical assessment and treatment for my son, and my son up for a life time of medical neglect in the event he has sustained vaccine induced brain damage?

• What are my rights as a parent and Chandler’s as a patient? What is my remedy to this very upsetting turn of events?”

At that point, the Board seems to have abandoned the pursuit of truth and reason my questions presented. Instead, the Board inexplicably and contrary to fact ruled that the episode was merely a misunderstanding between doctor and patient. Moreover, the subtext of the ruling was that this was a communication problem on my part. I was offered no further input on the matter, nor any path forward. The Board ignored my subsequent communications. Additionally, the doctor threw me out of the medical practice because they said that I “didn’t trust them.” However, they retained my children as patients.

I believed it was the duty of the Board to educate the doctor from the literature on the standard of care for vaccine encephalopathy as presented by the VICP. This episode seemed to confirm my suspicion that there was no discussion in the medical training literature on how to offer standard of care diagnosis for vaccine induced encephalopathy.

The Board’s tacit answer to my question was that the standard of care for assessing a reported vaccine injury is essentially medical negligence. In other words, the standard of care did not require the doctor to do anything, not even respond to me.

For more than a decade, I have attempted to find training in the medical literature for pediatricians that will educate them on what a vaccine-induced encephalopathy looks like, but I have not been able to find any.

Additionally, I have been trying to get an answer to the question that Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding on CNN in 2008, “What is the difference between autism and vaccine encephalopathy.” Dr. Gerberding never answered the question and I can find no such answer anywhere in the medical literature.

My request to you and to those who are working with you so earnestly on issues related to vaccines, the VICP, the ACIP, and other challenges, is that you please either differentiate between regressive autism and vaccine induced encephalopathy or define that they are, in many cases, the same thing, and that you mandate training for doctors to recognize this VICP Table Injury and other adverse events potentially related to vaccines.

Frankly, I believe that a doctor unable or unwilling to recognize the potential connection to vaccines for both Table Injuries and the adverse events listed in vaccine package inserts is not qualified to administer a vaccine. For too many years, families affected by vaccine injury have been gaslit, ignored, and mocked. Please close the loopholes in medical education concerning vaccine injuries. Recognition of these potential injuries, a proper standard of care diagnosis, identifying and providing treatments to vaccine injured children and adults, and fair compensation to families so that they may care for their injured loved ones are morally and ethically imperative.

Sincerely,

Ginger Taylor, MS

Attachment: https://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-brought-my-doctor-before-state.html

Full account for documentation purposes. (Although Chandler’s doctor was female, in this account I call her “he” in order to preserve her privacy)