California’s Senator Richard Pan – America’s Super-Vaxxer…

Del Bigtree’s Master Class on Vaccines and Autism – Part 3…

By Kent Heckenlively, JD

On Thursday, July 12, 2018, Del Bigtree’s show, High-Wire, gave a master class on vaccines and autism, featuring some of the most exciting news we have heard in YEARS.

The link to the show is below.  I have broken the two hour show down into a several part article as there was so much news I didn’t want anybody to miss it.

Here is today’s installment.

Del:  I am not here to hoodwink you.  I do not want you taking my word for it.  I want to teach you how to read.  I want to teach you where to find the studies.  I want you to teach you how to get back to actual critical thinking.  So that maybe someday you’ll say, “You know what, Del, I think you were wrong on that.”  That would be great if you could find me being wrong anywhere, go ahead, write in.  Put it in your comments right now.  I dare you.  Everything we talk about is backed by published science in public journals.  That’s what the High Wire is all about.

So speaking about vaccine dangers, or special education, which is one of the things that is growing at the exact same time we’re watching vaccines increase, we’re watching it increase in our special needs population.  Well in California back on February 28, our education committee in the Senate got together to discuss this very issue of an exploding population of special education needs.

Here’s just a little taste of what that sounded like:

Senate Education Committee Chair:  The purpose of this hearing this morning is to discuss many of the issues which are unique to special education finance in our state.  We’re going to have Ryan Anderson from the OAO, who is our fiscal and policy analyst.  And he’s going to talk to us about the history of special education finance and give an overview of the current system.

Ryan Anderson:  The relatively mild disabilities that are called out here, so speech impairments and learning disorders, have been about flat for a number of years.  In fact, they’ve declined a little over the last ten years.  Whereas the incident of all other disabilities has increased and for the most part that increase has been driven by a single category, which is autism.

The number of students in California who are diagnosed with autism has, I believe about tripled over the last ten or fifteen years.  It’s been significant enough that by itself the category of autism accounts for more than 100% of the growth of this special education population over the last ten years.

Special Education Committee Chair:  Next we’re going to hear from Jayne Christakos, the superintendent of the San Bernadino Unified School  district.

Jayne Christakos:  The number of special needs students are increasing in our communities and throughout California.  Also the complexity of the disabilities is increasing, which also requires higher levels of services.  We decreased 389 students this year in our total population.  That’s about a four million dollar loss when they apply the attendance rate.

But our special ed population grew by 198 students.  Additionally, our preschool education population grew about 60 students over the last two years and continues to grow.  We have seen huge increase in demand, similar to what you’re hearing here, speech and language impairment has doubled and autism.  We have growth in autism.  About 50 students a year, but 86 this year.  Other health impairments grew as well,  In our preschool age we’re seeing a high increase in autism, speech and other health impairments.

Teacher:  In the nineteen years I’ve been at my school we have seen a rapid increase in the number of students with autism and students with emotional disturbance IEPS (Individual Education Plans) that required more coordinated support and services.  Yet access to those is challenging.  How do we treat a teacher who already has a student caseload of 150 student contacts daily?  How do we insure legal obligations are met without the time, the training, the staff, and the curricular resources to do so?

Committee Chairman:  Is your sense there are a lot more kids to take care of with more severe needs?  Is that’s what happening?

Teacher:  In my particular study, absolutely.  I worked as a special education para for more than twenty years.  The increasing population of special needs students demands more para-educators with regular training.  The population of special education students in California is growing.

Other Witness:  We have declining enrollment statewide.  But we have increasing special education enrollment.  Students are currently being found eligible for autism and there’s incentive for that.  And they’re being found eligible at a higher level.  And these students are severely impacted and need a higher level of support.

Another Witness:  In the last ten years we’ve had an increase in autism.  In 2007 we had 625 students with autism.  Last year we were up to 1600.  It’s a huge increase of almost a thousand students.  There’s a whole spectrum.  Some of them can be very intelligent and do very well in the mainstream, general education environment, and use services.  But 70% is the number I’d heard that also have an intellectual disability.

Another Witness:  Here we have these huge increases in students with disabilities and we have this burgeoning pre-school population that has just exploded across the state.”

The segment ended.

Del:  While I was sitting and watching that, it’s like the opening to a post-apocalyptic movie.  This is what was happening before we lost our society.  You come out that opening in the film and you go out the doors of the news studio and it’s just a barren wasteland.  What is going on?  If you are not terrified by what you just listened to from those school officials, reporting on their different districts, every one of them saying exactly the same thing.  Not only is there an increase in our special needs population, it’s only really increasing in the seriously developmentally disabled group.  The autism group.  Did you hear that term, “100% of the growth is coming from autism alone.”

Our preschools are exploding with developmental disorders.  The one says, yes, there are the smart ones who go on and do well, but my study shows that 70% of them are the worst case scenarios.  Those that have neurological and mental disorders?  People, does this sound like your childhood?  Do you have any recollection of what it was like when we were kids?

Do you remember hearing anything like this?  Well, don’t worry, there’s a savior on our hands.  At this meeting somebody came to really figure out a way through.  Somebody that California can really count on.  Take a listen to this genius.

“Senator Richard Pan:  I do need to clarify some statements you made before.  I myself am a health professional who studies epidemiology. Your comments about autism and autism rates does not accurately reflect the current science.  There’s a growing body of research which shows that the “rate of autism increase” is due to changes in diagnosis, the DSM.  Actually, it was only in 1991 the Department of Education said children with autism qualified for special education and we’ve seen a rise in diagnoses because of that, probably.

We can talk about different incentives.  There’s been research done, for example, in England.  They’ve actually gone back and re-assessed a sample of the population, using standard model of checkers of autism, and found that adults that weren’t diagnosed with autism when they were children, because we have different set if criteria, actually had the same rate as the children.

Basically, emphasizing that those people always had autism, we just had different sets of criteria and those have changed over time.  So you go and take a sample of the population and re-evaluate them, you have the same rate for older people as the children.  I think that body of research is moving in that direction.  I just want to clarify that statement that you made.”

Del:  Actually for that shill – (Plays Batman theme music) – This guy.  Where were all those autistic kids when I was a kid?  Like, where are the adults at my age at forty-eight, where are you keeping all the forty-eight years olds with autism?  When I go to visit my grandma, why don’t I see any autistic people flapping in the corner at the retirement home?

And by the way, why didn’t all the great diagnosticians all throughout history ever describe something like autism in the insane asylums?  This doesn’t make sense.  I can’t even get it to make sense!  This is ridiculous.  The fact that Pan is elected and even allowed to have a job in a state that is supposed to be so intelligent.  How could you possibly say there are just as many autistic adults right now as there are children as he has just described?  This is insane.

The point being, this makes no sense.  I don’t know if these people have an ability to make you erase who you were.  Think about what he’s saying.  Well, actually in 1991 we added autism to special needs and that’s why it increased.  So, based on what you’re saying, Senator Pan, since the dawn of man until 1991, guys like you weren’t sure that people who were flapping and in diapers and unable to get through the day needed special help.  You weren’t sure they should be added to the special needs.  Since the dawn of man.

Cavemen were sitting around thinking, “I don’t know about that poor boy who can’t speak yet and is still in diapers at eighteen, should we call them special needs?  I don’t know.  We haven’t named it yet.  Let him be.” 

He wants you to believe they were in their regular classrooms, they were there, they were doing their math, we didn’t recognize that they couldn’t talk.  If you go back to Adam and Eve, she was autistic.  That’s right.  Why else would she have eaten the apple?

Or where are the cave drawings of the autistic children running on their tiptoes?  Come on.  But look, I don’t want to get too ridiculous about this.  There’s actually science that can prove Pan is lying.  And I don’t know what his issue is with England.  I don’t know what goat farmers he got that study from that said there are just as many adults as children with autism.  But there is not a growing body of science.  We can’t even find the study he’s talking about.  Then again, we may not be looking in the right place.

What is the right place?  California is the right place.  California has been looking right here, where Senator Pan lives, we’ve been looking at the autism numbers.  And now we have a study that came out from several different great people, including Mark Blaxill, and the name of it is “California Autism Prevalence Trends from 1931-2014 in Comparison to National ASD Data from IDA and ADDM.”

Just so you know what we’re talking about, IDA means Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, ADDM is Autism Development and Disabilities Monitoring Network and CDDS is California Department of Developmental Services.  To talk about the study and talk about it I’m bringing Mark Blaxill, one of the co-authors of the study.  Mark, are you there?

Mark Blaxill:  Hey, Del, I’m here.

Del:  Okay, I’m in a bit of a ranting mood here today.  I’m not sure if you noticed.  Let’s get it to you because you always bring sobriety to this discussion.  I’ve had the opportunity to speak with you on multiple occasions  around the country.  You stick to the numbers.  You are not dramatic.  You are not sensational.  In fact, you and I will often argue because you tend to go with the most conservative numbers you can find.  What did we find when you looked at these numbers in California?

Mark Blaxill:  Well, that autism rates used to be really, really low and now they’re really, really high.  It’s not that complicated.  That’s it in a nutshell.

Del:  When Senator Pan says we’re just diagnosing it better, I mean, wouldn’t there be a point where we would see a plateauing if that was the case?  We just saw an increase recently.  We just went from 1 in 68 to 1 in 59 if we’re going by the CDC’s specific numbers.  In this study you look at two different ways that we monitor autism.  Can you explain that to me a little bit?

Mark Blaxill:  There are are a lot of ways to measure the numbers, Del.  And people use lots of different calculations.  But when you collect data by birth year, that’s the most important thing to do, then you compare to the number of cases born in a certain year, with the number of children born in that year you get your prevalence number.  And them you can display that in a graph.  You just show the rate over the birth year.  And if Pan was correct, that rate would be a flat line.

You would see, whatever the background rate of autism was, you’d see a flat line.  You can measure the underlying trend in two ways.  You can keep the age of the child constant as they are diagnosed.  The CDC uses eight years of age.  And the reason to do that is you’re comparing apples and oranges if you compare three-year-olds and ten-year-olds.  Three-year-olds tend not to get diagnosed as quickly.  Holding the age of ascertainment constant is a more rigorous way to measure it.

Del: But there’s an issue with that because we’re always five or six years behind where we’re actually at.

Mark Blaxill:  We’re behind.  And there’s also an issue which is if there’s some kind of oversight of cases, you would miss that.  If cases are getting diagnosed later, you would miss that and maybe there’s some change in that.  So there’s another way of looking which is taking a snapshot, which is just to take a look at, and that gets you up to the more recent data.  To your point.  You take all the children born in a range of certain years at a certain point in time, then you do the rate by birth year within that, recognizing that you’re looking at five-year-olds and sixty year olds and every age in between.

You can do both of those ways and there are pros and cons to each of those ways.  Then you can compare the results you get from doing it both ways.  And that’s basically what we did in this paper with California data, but also some other data.  But we focused on California.

And long story short, no matter how you do it, the trend lines are pretty close.  They’re running right next to each other.  And there’s no flat line.  There’s no grown-ups.  Very few adults.  The increase, you can see cases born in the 1930s, then for a long time there are very few cases, but more, then right around 1980 the trend started going up, then we saw the sharp inflection we always see around 1990, then another kind of acceleration around 2007.

Del:  Why 1990?  Why do we see this thing ramp up, in your opinion?

Mark Blaxill:  Del, this is a trends paper, not a causation paper.  In my opinion, there has to be an environmental cause.

Del:  We’re seeing that more and more.  Autism actually starting to shift, even in the CDC/HHS, starting to use this word “environmental.”  Now, they’ve always seemed to be addicted to it being a genetic problem.  They’ve been trying to sell  that, but it’s really been running short since they can’t really find genes that can represent a big enough body in this group.

So now what I hear all the time is “we believe autism is triggered by environmental issues, but you may have a genetic susceptibility to these environmental issues.”  Explain to me why is it that they don’t consider vaccinating, which is injecting somebody with environmental toxins into their body an environmental issue?

Because I read a paper by the CDC, that referred to smoking as an environmental issue.  So we know that whether it’s injected or you simply walk down the street, if it’s coming from outside your body and it’s affecting you, it’s an environmental issue.

Mark Blaxill:  I think one of the issues that my co-author has written about is to take all of the hypothesized environmental exposures and compare the trend line in the exposure of children of those agents to the trend line in autism.  And you can look at a lot of things, you can look at lead, mercury in fish, and different kinds of chemicals, and smoking, smoking in pregnancy.

There are all sorts of measurable quantities, including vaccines themselves and the components of vaccines.  There are a lot of ways to compare those trends.  And as they say, correlation is not the same as causation.  But if you actually had trends of the exposure going one way and the trend line going the other, you can say if the toxin isn’t increasing, it’s not a good explanation for the increase in autism.

Del:  Is it possible to just do a trend comparing vaccinated along with unvaccinated at this same time?

Mark Blaxill:  It’s been done.

Del:  It has been done?

Mark Blaxill:  The lead author on the paper, Cindy Nevison, published an article in 2014 in which she used this same, she introduced the formalization of these two methods, the snapshot and the constant age tracking. Which is a very helpful way to think about it.  I actually, kind of, implicitly did a lot of that stuff back ten or fifteen years ago, but Cindy really codified it.

And she also took all the information from the Department of Education.  So Cindy has really done a tremendous job aggregating all the different sources of data and measuring it in a consistent way.  And then in this paper in 2014, it’s actually one of the references in our recent paper, she took all the, she referred to another paper about the risks of toxins with children in their neurodevelopment.

She took a list of ten toxins that were commonly discussed, not including vaccines and their components, just normal environmental chemicals.  She gathered trend lines on the data of those and compared those to the autism trends and came to the conclusion there, that most of these nasty chemical exposures were declining over time.

Del:  While autism continues to increase?

Mark Blaxill:  While autism is continuing to increase.  In the supplemental materials to that paper she graphed all kinds of other hypotheses, many chemicals that ween’t discussed, thimmerosal, aluminum adjuvant exposure, and the total vaccine count.  So that’s all there in the supplemental materials.  It wasn’t a featured element.

Del:  But we’re going to have your paper available so people can search through that and get to the other studies and take a look.  I actually sat down the other day, Mark, and I tried to play Senator Pan with my staff.  I tried to argue out this idea that autism has always been with us, as best I could.

You know, I’m a debater, so I can take on the other side of it.  I tried to say that they’re getting more expensive, they’re getting more money for it, but that argument that it’s getting more expensive for special needs, that can be attributed to the fact that if you’re being diagnosed with autism.  If you were being diagnosed as handicapped you get one amount of money, but if you’re being diagnosed with autism you’re getting a different amount of money.  So that could increase the cost.

Then Patrick on my staff said, “No, but it’s not just a cost increase, but the number of children which is increasing.”

And I said, “Wouldn’t that be obvious to the special needs group would be increasing if the population of American school children was increasing?  That’s what we would expect.  But then when I started watching this video we see the opposite of that to be true.  The school attendance is dropping, the number of healthy kids is going down, I think the woman said around 400 in one instance, and we’ve gained around 190 autistic or special needs kids.

These are all teachers, Mark.  You can listen to some tool sitting in their office in a senate building, discussing some study they got from a bunch of sheep-herders in England somewhere.  But the truth is we have teachers on the ground and everyone of them is saying the same thing.  It doesn’t matter what we call them.  It doesn’t matter if we called them autism now, and once we called them retarded or whatever the word was at the time.

They were still there, were they not?  You can’t create an explosion unless you’re creating something that’s brand new.  Am I missing something?

Mark Blaxill:  No, not at all.  Can I offer two little figures to support your point?

Del:  Please.

Mark Blaxill:  Pan’s study, that he spent minutes on, was a study looking at Asperger’s rates in adults.  And to read the study, it’s one of the most tortured models you’ll ever see. And it estimated that Asperger’s rates were 1% of adults, but that was based on an extrapolation of an extrapolation of an extrapolation.  The number of adults in their survey they were using as their foundation was 19.

19 cases of Aspergerish adults were used to justify this extravagant argument.  Just think how extraordinarily bold and outrageous this argument that all of these numbers we’re seeing going up exponentially is just an illusion.  An extraordinary argument like that requires extraordinary proof.  And they do not from that study have any level of confidence, or I wouldn’t, that 19 cases means we’ve seen this forever.

The other fact, the other figure I throw out there is the caveman argument you were making.  Leo Kanner defined autism in the 1930s and he wrote about it in 1943.  And if you say we were just not alert to all of these things, then let’s start the clock before 1930.

And there’s a population scientist who wrote an article that the total number of human beings born before 1930 in history is a hundred billion.  It’s a simple number.  And it’s a round number.  Take whatever rate you want to apply to that. Say it’s 1 in 36.  That’s 2.76%.  That means that 2.76% of one hundred billion is 2.7 billion human beings.

So before 1930 there were 2.7 billion of these rocking kids that we just never wrote about?  No cave drawings?  No literature?  No nothing.  We had a lot of recorded history before 1930 and there were supposedly 2.7 billion autistic people that we just missed?  It defies belief that you could make that extraordinary claim.  That we missed 2.7 billion humans with autism, before Leo Kanner described it as a rare condition.

Del:  For a second I thought Pan was going to say, by the criteria that the study used, I’m autistic!  Then he would have made the pint perfectly.  I’m with it!  Mark, I really appreciate you for joining us and bringing out this information.  You have an amazing book, that deals with this called, Denial.  If you have not read Denial, and you’re really tired of this tired argument, then you need to read this brilliant book.

Mark, thank you for your work.  Keep up and I look forward to seeing you out there on the trail.

Mark Blaxill:  My pleasure.  Talk to you soon.

Del:  There you go.  You have a study in California.  I don’t know what Pan is going to do about this.  And they just keep ticking up every time we add a new vaccine to the schedule.  If it’s not vaccines, can somebody tell me what it is?  And does it bother anybody that it’s the only thing we’re not looking at right now?

In the United States of America, with millions of people walking around the country, deaths in Samoa, you have Nick Catone and his beautiful family who lost their child, a nurse say I watched my child die because it happened right after a vaccine.

All these parents are crazy?  All these parents are wrong?  All of these teachers are wrong?  The only guy who got it right was Senator Pan?  And by the way, the only thing we will not look at when it comes to autism, the only thing we will not look at when it comes to SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), the only thing we will not look at in America, when it comes to multiple sclerosis, is vaccines.

We will use the word environmental, but we will not use the word, vaccines. 

We refuse because we know, we absolutely know.  I’ve joked about it before.  It’s like trying to investigate a murder, and all the witnesses are saying the murderer never came out of the house.  Well, we already searched the house.  Did you search the master bedroom?  No.  Why?  Murderers never go into master bedrooms.  What do you mean?  Why don’t you check every possible room?

No, all statistics show murderers never go into master bedrooms.  So they just leave it taped off and somebody on the other side is going to get away with murder.  That’s what I believe is happening here.

We’re going to get deeper into this.  I want to bring on Brian Hooker.

By Kent Heckenlively, JD

Kent’s book PLAGUE was released by Skyhorse Publishing in 2014 and is now available in paperback. Skyhorse also publishes the work of Mo Yan, the 2012 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature.

The book is co-authored with Judy Mikovits PhD. It is an indictment of the “Fake Science” we find so prevalent in the US.

 

Kent Heckenlively is also the author of INOCULATED: How Science Lost its Soul in Autism, available on Amazon and at Barnes&Noble.com

 

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