By Kent Heckenlively, J.D.
We autism parents have all been there. You know what I’m talking about. Your child was normally developing, they got their vaccinations, and then everything started to go very wrong.
They say when terrible things happen to human beings we need to talk about it, to process what has taken place. You get into a car accident, and for the next few months you’ll talk about it to just about anybody who will listen. The trauma begins to recede and you can move onto the next phase of your life, whatever that may entail.
But nothing even remotely similar to that has taken place for autism parents. It is as if we have been in a horrific car accident, but when we go to talk about it, people tell us there are no such things as cars.
Like many of you, I have had to endure the same response from family and friends. Perhaps it is my overly optimistic nature, but I kept thinking there had to be a way to get people to listen. I may have a law degree, but not a medical one. But lawyers are the ones putting doctors on the stand, and when the evidence warrants, making them pay for their mistakes. If the evidence is overwhelming enough, we even charge them criminally and prosecute them. I think that’s what I do in my new book, INOCULATED: How Science Lost its Soul in Autism, now available on Amazon.
The Reality of “Science…”
I mean, seriously, over the years, science hasn’t really had a good track record when it comes to social policy. At the beginning of the last century they were all over the idea of eugenics, giving rise to the crimes of Nazi Germany, then they really liked electro-shock treatment for mental problems, as well as forced sterilization, and hey, even in my life-time the American Psychological Association declared that being gay was a “mental disorder.”
In 2012 I started putting together a book, PLAGUE, with Dr. Judy Mikovits, that used her research published in the journal Science, to argue that an HIV-like retrovirus (originally found in mice, but which had somehow jumped to humans) might be causing the body to overreact in some people and trigger conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and autism. The scenario would go something like this: scientists know the HIV retrovirus hangs out in the cells of the immune system, so any attempt to stimulate the immune system could cause the HIV retrovirus to replicate out of control and cause disease. That’s why babies born to HIV-infected mothers are IMMEDIATELY put on anti-retrovirals, PRIOR to ANY vaccination. The concern was also raised in the book that the virus had jumped from mice to humans during vaccine production as mice tissue was used to grow and weaken many of the viruses later used in vaccines. One might say I’d argued for a vaccine two-fer. Vaccines not only transferred the retrovirus to humans which had caused the problem, but continued stimulation of the immune system was causing this retrovirus to rampage out of control.
I really thought I’d threaded a needle, creating a plausible explanation for the scientific community which would explain why a vaccination might trigger autism in some children, and hopefully lead to a productive discussion.
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