Thimerosal Removal and Vaccine-Autism Causation Theory

A primer for one of Offit's colleagues.

A Ph.D asked me a seemingly earnest question on X. The question was well structured and anticipated future questions that it usually takes people at least three or four rounds of debate on X to reach. I've answered versions of this question about 100 times over there, so clearly it's time for me to write the long form answer on Substack, so I can just send people here and give my left hand a break.

Jeffrey S. Morris, PhD is Paul Offit’s colleague at UPenn’s medical school. He also got his undergrad from Messiah College in 1993, the same year I graduated from Liberty University. So although I have not seen any such claim of his, presumably he is my Christian brother.

My regular readers will know that I consider Paul Offit an inveterate liar, and have personally experienced how unfun it is to be yelled at by him. So anything I write here about Dr. Morris should be tempered with the idea that he has likely been saturated by teachings from the the most vocal con man, and vaccine millionaire, that the vaccine propaganda industry has. And that indoctrination may include the Athiest’s training on how to devalue parents with contempt and even cursing.

The questions themselves are riddled with problems as you might expect of someone has been educated at The Profitt School of Vaccine Safety at Fallacious University. So I'm gonna go through the whole thing carefully explaining things both from my specific point of view, and from our communities scientific understanding of vaccine injury.

First the short answer on vaccine autism causation and Thimerosal:

• Mercury is very good at causing autism, but it is not the only thing that causes autism.

• The mercury based preservative thimerosal is very good at causing autism, but it is not the only thing that causes autism.

• Vaccines are very good at causing autism but they are not the only environmental insult that causes autism.

• Environmental injury is very good at causing autism but it is not the only thing that causes autism.

Our community discussing autism causation has never theorized that thimerosal was the sole cause of autism. It may have been the first thing that the media reported in the US, and it may have been the hope of everyone that this was the only problem so that mercury could be removed from vaccines and we could go on as normal, but the first public debate did not discuss mercury, it was Congress’s demand that the pertussis vaccine be studied to see if it was involved in autism causation. The Thimerosal = Autism theory is the straw man argument that the Offiteers put into the public discussion, and it ignores historical record which started with researching the smallpox vaccine. The smallpox vaccine is a live virus vaccine and cannot contain mercury.

Our community has been saying for decades that autism causation is the result of epigenetics. Gene environment interaction. That genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.

“Genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger.” - Dan Olmsted, 2007

And vaccines are not the only environmental trigger.

Other known triggers include pesticides, dry cleaning chemicals, surgical anesthetics, Tylenol, and drugs given during pregnancy like SSRIs, seizure medications, and even thalidomide.

Now to his questions which include a number of false assumptions based on what he has likely been taught. I will break it up so I'm dealing with one problem at a time.

“Question unrelated to this thread: what do you now think about your clear belief at the time that Thimerosal was a primary driver of autism (or at least the subtype of autism you talked about in that paper)…”

Thimerosal has proven to be a driver of autism both in the dramatic number in the rise of cases in the 90s and in the severity of cases. Thimerosal is a primary driver for many cases of autism, it's not a factor in every case. I don't even believe it was the primary driver in my own son's case.

Remember, there are cases of autism in completely unvaccinated children. For Paul Offit to spout that our community ever promoted the idea that thimerosal was the sole cause of autism is a lie.

One of the benefits of having blogged about this since the very beginning of the blogosphere is that I have a history of my own research into how vaccines can cause autism.

My son regressed into “autism” in September of 2003. His autism was recognized by his physician and subsequent therapists in March of 2004. By July of 2004 I started documenting his treatment. There was no blogosphere yet, but I had my I heard that Michael Moore had this thing called a blog where he was writing about Columbine and gun violence. I have always been an early adapter of technology so I started a blogspot (the precursor to Blogger), and called it Adventures In Autism. I figured if we had to go on this journey to try to recover him and his health then might as well make it public so anybody else looking for treatment can use our experience to evaluate whether or not it might be a good thing for them to try.

When it became clear but he was responding to the recommended medical interventions for “vaccine induced autism,” I began looking add his vaccine records and the mercury content in this specific vaccines he had been given. (At the time there was a website where you could put in the vial number on the vaccines that were listed in your child's vaccine records, and see what the mercury content of that individual shot was. That site was taken down a few years after I got into this research so that parents could no longer look up their child's mercury uptake.)

What I found was that chandler's only mercury containing vaccine was his birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine after which he suffered daily fevers, three months of “colic,” and two years of constipation. His autistic regression did not come until his 18 month vaccines which were mercury free. His other mercury exposures that I could discern, were during my pregnancy. As an RH negative mother I was given two mercury containing Rhogam shots during my first pregnancy, 18 months before Chandler was born, and two mercury containing Rhogam shots during my pregnancy. Additionally I have a mouthful of mercury.

We then did a urine toxic metals profile on him and found that he had several medals including mercury. Chelation was the third thing that we tried in his recovery and he had a wonderful response.

As an aside, we have done biomedical intervention with him for more than 20 years now and we like to say that we got him halfway back. He is one of the happiest people you will ever meet, and he is able to ask for anything he needs. He still needed a one-on-one to keep him on task to get him through high school, but he graduated with honors. We don't know what that actually means for him as he is not able to hold a job. He did not attend college, is now 23, he lives at home, and will likely live with his brother when we pass. We will see what the future holds for him.

I did not even start writing about research until November of 2024, my first discussion of the research was not on thimerosal it was on brain inflammation, and I didn't even starting writing about mercury in earnest until 2005. I wrote A summary of the history of thimerosal a year and a half after my son’s first diagnosis.

So you can see it was never my hypothesis that thimerosal was the “primary driver of autism” even in my own child and therefore it was not my hypothesis ever. My first understanding of vaccine autism causation was gleaned in a undergraduate child psychology class at George Mason University in 1988. Thimerosal was never discussed. My understanding that mercury may have been involved, came from a 1999 mainstream news report about the discovery of high amounts of mercury in the vaccine schedule.

“…given that when thimerosal was removed from virtually all childhood vaccines…”

Thimerosal was not removed from childhood vaccines until THIS WEEK!

In 1999, the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics issue a joint statement saying that although they find no “evidence of harm” from the mercury exposure that children are getting in their vaccines, they are calling on vaccine manufacturers to remove it from vaccines on a voluntary basis as a precautionary measure because “some children may” get more than the EPA limit for mercury at their 6 month visits. Manufactures begin the process in 1999, but do not remove it from all vaccines.

No legal ban on thimerosal is issued.

No recall of the mercury laden vaccines is issued and companies continue to sell lots already manufactured. Some of these vaccines containing full doses of thimerosal have been found in doctors’ offices, by parents who request to read package inserts, with expiration dates as late as 2007.

Vaccines containing full doses of thimerosal were found in doctors’ offices, by parents who requested to read package inserts, with expiration dates as late as 2007

No independent or government testing of vaccines is done to confirm that thimerosal has been removed. FDA denies parents request that they set up a system to verify manufacturers claims of low dose or thimerosal free vaccines.

No statement is issued to pediatricians to alert them to the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

No recommendation is made to pediatricians to screen children who suffered the onset neurological impairment after vaccination for mercury toxicity.

No recommendation is made to pediatricians to screen children with an autism diagnosis who suffered the symptoms of vaccine induced encephalopathy after vaccination.

“…(as a precaution, not because there was any evidence it was actually causing harm)…”

At this point in the discussion with the doctor, I had already called his attention to the fact that the response to the false claim that there was no evidence of any harm was written by the late great david kirby in his book, conspicuously entitled… EVIDENCE OF HARM.

The 460 page New York Times Bestseller laid out the Evidence of Harm for him in 2005, including 436 citations. When the book was published the CDC added a note to their web page in April of 2005 that they would be reviewing the book and making a response. They left the notice up there for a few months, and then it disappeared. No response ever came.

I noted for him that in 2007 I used the 15 or so research papers listed in this book to start my own research into on the mercury and autism causation, indiscreetly titled "No Evidence of Any Link", and sent him to the link to my current list which now includes 88 papers. https://howdovaccinescauseautism.org/category/mercury/

And yet following this he stated his position that there was no evidence of harm from Thimerosal.

…”the autism diagnosis rate did not decline, did not level out, but continued on the same trajectory?”

First, just the flat out wrongness of his statement: in the birth cohort born after mercury was removed from vaccines, there WAS a flat line in the increases of the autism rate. (Keep in mind that these numbers are for 12 year olds, so subtract 12 from any of the years cited to get the birth year of the children measured.)

Note that the flat line begins with children born in 2002. This was my son. As more aluminum containing vaccines were added to the schedule in the teens autism rates picked up again at the formerly dramatic rate.

Additionally, my answer to this for the last 15 years (long before CDC reported the flatline in 2016 ) was to point out that was that my observation as the mother of one of those children who began getting the lower dose mercury schedule what is that all the children I knew with autism that were older than him were much more severe cases than his, and all the children that I knew that were younger than him all had much milder cases than he. So my guess was that the amount of mercury contained in each child's vaccine schedule correlated with the severity of their individual cases.

I noted that this was just purely my observation of being around other families with children relatively close to my son's age, but with a wide enough range to get enough of a sample to see the patterns. I always finished it up saying I can see no evidence of this in the literature, because they haven't looked into case severity over time.

Suddenly a wild case severity over time paper appeared.

In fact I gave that response three weeks ago in a 2 hour interview with doctor Michael Nichols. Then before the interview even aired, i found out that a paper was published that backed my theory.

“Time Trends in United States Autism Prevalence with Co-Occurring Intellectual Disability: Is There a Signature of Thimerosal?” Found that, "The sharp drop in the ID fraction between birth year 2000 and 2002 coincided with the removal of thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative and neurotoxin linked to autism severity, from most childhood vaccines. Conversely, the renewed increase in the ID fraction after 2006 coincided with the reintroduction of thimerosal via flu shots promoted for infants and pregnant women. Low-income women and children are particularly likely to receive those products in some states, due to health insurance and daycare requirements, which may be contributing to autism severity as well as to the recent strong divergence in ASD prevalence by race/ethnicity.”

So not only did my observation that the severity of autism cases dropped with my son's 2002 birth cohort, rates of intellectual disability dropped dramatically in my son's cohort and began to climb again as mercury was added back into the flu shot.

Just another example of the fact that the parents are at least 10 years ahead of the science and have been ever since autism ever made its first headline.

“Did this cause you to reject your former hypothesis that thimerosal was a primary driver and shift your hypothesis to some different element? Or do you somehow stand by those beliefs?”

As Dr. Morris started with a Straw man fallacy that neither was the claim of our community nor my own theory to begin with, and added several pieces of misinformation into his calculation, my response to doctor Morris is that I stand by my beliefs, and you can follow my logic of my beliefs from my own documentation beginning only months after my son’s doctor say the word autism.

After doctor Morris posed the question I told him that I would be answering it here in long form so I don't have to try to reproduce my answer anymore on Twitter.

Doctor Morris followed up his question by gaslighting me. Asking me if it could be possible that I was wrong in my vaccine autism causation conclusions from the beginning and wrong ever since. It was said very politely as all good gaslighting is, and seems to be designed for me to go back and defend to him everything that I have written in the last 20 years.

I responded there as I am going respond to him here. Actually read my arguments and critique them there, rather rather than treating me as if you are one of my betters. That it is important to differentiate scientific discussions from gaslighting mothers.

The process of scientific inquiry, which is what this man claims to be interested in, is one of discussing scientific theories using evidendce and reasoning. (And annoyingly often, math.) It goes like this:

Me: “I have a theory, and it is mine and mine alone. My theory is that a brontosaurus is thin at one end, gets large in the middle, and is thin at the other end. Here I present my maths. (In this scenario I am British.)

My Critic: “ I ran your math again (My critic is American), and you forgot to carry the 2. I think you might not be measuring prehistoric, brontosaurus bones, I think those bones were of a giant Anaconda taken from the Amazon in 1972, who was thin at one end, thin in the middle, and then at the other end.”

Me: “ Oh. I retract.”

This is a different approach to gaslighting, which goes like this:

Me: “Awwww… Sweetheart, vaccines are safe and effective and you are just a genuinely distressed mother looking for someone to blame for your child's terrible condition that your genes caused.”

It has been 20 years of gaslighting and we're done with it. Just enough already. I don't even think that Dr. Morris knows that he's doing it. They have just been trained from the beginning to pat mothers on the head, and call them emotional. It was very upset at the beginning but once I saw that they do it to women who are MD, PhD, and MPH holders, I understood it with their coping mechanism to not have to deal with the fact that, there was a chance that they had been tricked into be disabling and killing babies. None of them went in to medicine to do that.

So I have just started sending him polite demure answers. If he chooses to actually start critiquing the science on some of my writing, I will start actually investing in that conversation again.

He did ask this one earnest question though, so I took two days to answer it, but I've probably had enough Twitter for the week. And now I am angry for having to re write what has been written a thousand times before. No wonder us moms are dropping like flies. This work IS stroke/heart attack/cancer inducing.

I now need to go take a Sabbath, do some breathing exercises, and focus on forgiveness.

Forgive us Lord, we know not what we do.

Postscript - he was trolling me. After four days there is no evidence that he even read this post and he never responded at all to it. Once again the doctor places a burden on an injured party and then walks away and takes no responsibility for his request.