I’ve been saying for a long time now that when it comes to antivaccine misinformation among COVID-19 antivaxxers, everything old is new again in antivax. Whether it’s claiming that COVID-19 vaccines sterilize our womenfolk, contain “fetal cells,” cause cancer, are resulting in global “depopulation,” are loaded with “toxins,” cause Alzheimer’s disease, permanently alter your DNA, or worse, old antivax claims have been, predictably, applied to COVID-19 vaccines. (Indeed, I used to joke that the only reason antivaxxers hadn’t claimed that COVID-19 vaccines cause autism was because the vaccines hadn’t been authorized for children under 5 years of age.) Then, as I had been predicting, increasingly the “new school” antivaxxers started circling back around to “old school” antivax claims about not just COVID-19 vaccines but all vaccines, such as the oldest of old school claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. All of this is why, increasingly, I’ve been saying on Twitter that, sooner or later, COVID-19 antivaxxers generalize their antivax beliefs about one vaccine to all vaccines and become just antivaxxers. While it’s true that some “new school” COVID-19 antivaxxers (e.g., Geert Vanden Bossche) have shown acute discomfort at the “old school” antivax rhetoric that they’ve found themselves associated with, most seem to be jumping right in, head first.
Sometimes I even quote Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back:
Dr. Peter McCullough: All-in on vaccines causing autism and “transgenderism”
This brings me to Dr. Peter McCullough. I first encountered Dr. McCullough when he started repeating the old antivaccine narrative about global “depopulation” as applied to COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, he’s gone full antivax quack, glomming onto NFL player Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse as evidence that vaccines were causing young people to “die suddenly” co-authoring dubious scientific review articles full of antivax disinformation, and even selling an “anti-spike protein supplement” to cleanse you of COVID-19 vaccine damage. Meanwhile, he’s rejecting accusations of having become a conspiracy theorist by asking, in essence, “I know you are, but what am I?“
If you want to get an idea of what I mean, his appearance on May 12 as part of the cavalcade of right wing, Christian nationalist, and antivax grifters known as Reawaken America will show you what I mean:
In the beautiful setting of the Trump Doral Resort in Miami, I had the privilege of addressing a huge engaged audience who were ready to take the next steps in restoring our great nation. I crafted speech that called out a mental contagion that has set down upon the earth driven by insecurity, fear, resulting in greater tribalism and division. In the backdrop has been a >50 year meteoric rise in autism spectrum disorder from 1:10,000 in the 1970’s to 1:36 children born today. I outlined the major theories of why this is happening.
I swear, Dr. McCullough is partying as though it’s 1999—OK, maybe as though it’s 2005 or 2009. That message, that there has been a “meteoric rise” in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder over the last several decades. Dr. McCullough actually goes a bit further back than old school antivaxxers used to. You’ll recall that they usually target the time that the increase in autism prevalence began as being 30 years ago, when there was an expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule. Be that as it may, it’s the same message. The rest of that article, being from Dr. McCullough’s Substack, is behind a paywall, but it wasn’t hard to find video of his appearance on—where else?—Rumble, Bitchute, and SoundCloud. Here’s the video:
The first thing you’ll notice is the two-minute video shown to introduce Dr. McCullough, after which Clay Clark introduces him as though he were a professional wrestler at WWE SummerSlam. (I’m not kidding. Clark sounds like Vince McMahon announcing a match four decades ago, which was probably the last time I ever watched professional wrestling.)
Another useful bit of information in this introduction is that Dr. McCullough first became a COVID-19 “contrarian” through his support of “early treatment protocols.” It’s a term that should sound familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the early days of the pandemic, when bad scientists like Didier Raoult and quack groups like America’s Frontline Doctors and the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) were promoting hydroxychloroquine (and continued to do so long after it was shown not to work). Of course, if you believe that COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as advertised and that inexpensive, “nontoxic” repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (and/or various permutations of these drugs with supplements, antibiotics such as azithromycin, and other ineffective interventions) are miracle cures for it, then of course you will believe that vaccines are unnecessary. So it was not the least bit surprising that when COVID-19 vaccines arrived in December 2020—much sooner than expected—Dr. McCullough quickly pivoted to blaming them for mass death and started saying that they were part of a “depopulation agenda.” Still, at least initially, Dr. McCullough seemed to be anti-COVID-19 vaccine only and not more generally antivax.
After an introduction like that, Dr. McCullough is surprisingly diffident approaching the microphone, but he soon starts feeling the crank energy of the audience and becomes more confident feeding it exactly what it what it wants to hear, referring to the “crimes” of COVID-19 and how SARS-CoV-2 definitely escaped from the Wuhan lab after having been created by the current CEO of Moderna—I kid you not—who supposedly created a COVID-19 vaccine years before the pandemic and thus before anyone even knew what SARS-CoV-2 was. He trots out the old (as in 2020) lie that most people died “with COVID” rather than “of COVID” (not true) and brags how he and his fellow quacks “saved as many people as possible”—millions of people in America and tens of millions of people worldwide—with their “early treatment protocols.” He also claims that we’re all “safe” now because we all have “natural immunity.” This leads him into reiterating his claims that the vaccines have resulted in a wave of deaths and to brag about his testifying in December 2022 before Congress to stop all COVID-19 vaccination.
Let me just interject right here that I don’t plan on addressing in detail the many, many lies and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines that Dr. McCullough lays down in his talk (although I might mention some in passing), for the simple reason that I’ve addressed many of them before over the last three years and doing so would balloon this post beyond even Orac standards of logorrhea. More importantly, the purpose of this post is to examine how Dr. McCullough has gone beyond COVID-19 antivax conspiracy theories into very old school “vaccines-cause-autism” pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and how he has gone from anti-COVID-19 vaccination to just plain antivax.
The “old school” antivax began at around 10:00, when Dr. McCullough talks about there being a drive—by the usual suspects cited by the antivax movement, of course, whom he describes as a “biopharmaceutical syndicate” made up of “powerful entities” —for the “worldwide mass vaccination”of children” against “disease after disease after disease” (as if that were a bad thing!) and “not just COVID-19,” after which he notes that when he started out as a doctor autism prevalence was only 1:10,000. Those of you who’ve been following this blog almost certainly know what’s coming next. If you don’t, well, here it comes: He reveals to the crowd that autism prevalence is now 1:36. Of course, I recently discussed the likely reasons for the increasing prevalence of autism over the last three decades or so, as I have done periodically over the years whenever the CDC releases updated statistics on autism prevalence, none of them involving vaccines. The details are in the posts that I just linked to, but a short version is that widening of the diagnostic criteria, diagnostic substitution, increased screening and support, and increased awareness probably account for the increase in diagnoses of autism without there having to be a dramatic change in its underlying “true” prevalence.
Autism 1970’s 1:10,000 today 1:36! Whatever is causing it is moving fast. @CDCgov @NIH should have a Manhattan Project on etiology of autism and all associations including the progressively intensified ACIP schedule should be on the table. #courageousdiscourse @TheClayClark pic.twitter.com/sXjYUwlue9
— Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH™ (@P_McCulloughMD)
Yes, to him it’s the vaccines. Quelle surprise. In fairness, he does say that “no one knows for sure the cause,” before pivoting to saying that there are “many, many theories.” He even mentions genetic associations, the observation that older fathers are associated with an increased risk of autism in the offspring. However, he dismisses them as insufficient to explain the increase in prevalence, instead claiming that it “must be an exposure” from the environment. Guess which “exposure” he favors as the cause: “One theory is that it’s hypervaccination from an accelerating childhood vaccine schedule.” He then calls for an “all hands on deck,” “Manhattan Project”-like effort to determine the causes of the autism “epidemic.”
Gee, where have we heard nearly this exact sort of patter before? I swear, I’m having flashbacks to 2005.
Consistent with antivax narratives portraying autism as horrific brain damage, Dr. McCullough also describes autism as a “terrible, emotionally draining, heart wrenching neuropsychiatric disorder.” (Word to Dr. McCullough: Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder.) He also claims that he has “these patients” in his practice as an adult cardiology/internal medicine doctor, and he calls it the “single greatest childhood epidemic of public health proportions that exists in society today” that is “very difficult to treat.” Oh, really? What about gun violence, which is the number one cause of childhood death in the US now? Or what about obesity, which affects far more children, with the potential to shave years off of their life expectancy through chronic disease? I could go on. None of this is to suggest that autism isn’t important, just to point out how Dr. McCullough has adopted some very “old school” antivax descriptions of autism as a horrifying public health problem, never mind that most autistic people live perfectly fine, productive, and satisfying lives. Also, Dr. McCullough is treating autism now? It wouldn’t surprise me, but it’s not clear to me from the talk if he is.
Then, at around the 14 minute mark, consistent with how increasingly the antivax movement has been embracing transphobia, Dr. McCullough also claims that large numbers of these autistic children are “coming out as transgender,” thus laying down the claim that vaccines are causing autism which is then causing kids to become trans. No doubt he is riffing on studies that have found that trans and non-binary adolescents are up to six times more likely also to have autism. Nor is this a new finding, as the neurodivergent, trans, and nonbinary communities have been discussing research results that have found an association between autism spectrum disorder and gender dysphoria. This association is an area of active research, in particular into how to develop more tailored approaches to gender dysphoria that take into account that there is a higher prevalence of ASD in trans people. Leave it to antivaxxers, however, to use this observation not only to portray trans people as “brain damaged” (as they long portrayed autistic people before the latest wave of transphobia) but to blame vaccines for turning kids trans.
Either that, or “groomers,” apparently.
Dr. McCullough warns, darkly, that prepubertal autistic children are perfectly set up to be “preyed upon” by a counsellor or a peer or relative and “have it put in their mind that they should make a gender journey and change from a boy to a girl or a girl to a boy.” He then proceeds to lie to his audience about the horrors of being transgender and how gender-affirming care leads supposedly leads to more suicide and worse psychiatric outcomes and how any physician, counsellor, parent, or peer who has influenced a child to “change their gender” has “caused harm.” None of this is accurate. Gender-affirming care is not experimental and results in better, not worse, psychiatric outcomes. Dr. McCullough also echoes Abigail Shrier’s conspiracy theory about how the increased number of adolescents coming out as trans is due to “social contagion” and “hypersexuality.” Indeed, he even calls it a “plague of immorality.”
If you manage to suffer through all 30 minutes of Dr. McCullough’s presentation, you might reasonably note that he spends a lot more time ranting about “transgenderism,” “social contagion,” and demonizing gender-affirming care than he does about the nonexistent vaccine-autism link that “old school” antivaxxers used to use as part of their central narrative demonizing the childhood vaccine schedule. That is undeniably true. However, he used the “old school” antivax narrative blaming vaccines for an “autism tsunami” or “autism epidemic” as the introduction and as the “in” to blame not just this “epidemic” of autism on vaccines, but the increasing number of children identifying as a gender other than the one to which they were assigned at birth. Moreover, he tied it all together in a way that we’ve seen many times before, by labeling gender-affirming care, vaccines, and all the public health interventions against COVID-19 as “unnatural” and “not what it was like when you were a kid.” He links the “wave of autism” with the “wave of transgenderism” to both vaccines and “mental contagion,” thus linking two conspiracy theories that have long resembled each other: Antivax conspiracy theories and transphobic conspiracy theories demonizing gender-affirming care.
Meanwhile, just over the last couple of days, Dr. McCullough has been active on Twitter:
We have to face the music and all hypotheses must be on the table for investigation and discussion. When I asked the crowd, one third said their lives have been touched by autism. #courageousdiscourse @TheClayClark @GenFlynn @ChildrensHD https://t.co/8LurMz5S5h
— Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH™ (@P_McCulloughMD)
Societies will have to face up to this issue affecting so many. 1) increased clinical recognition, 2) CBT and special needs education/counseling, 3) protection from transgender predatory activities, 4) search for etiology–must be a widespread exposure given ubiquity of risk. https://t.co/LUDp9ZEITb
— Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH™ (@P_McCulloughMD)
Basically, Dr. McCullough has gone from denying the severity of COVID-19 and promoting “early treatment protocols,” to anti-COVID-19 vaccine, to more generally antivaccine and echoing old antivax conspiracy theories and pseudoscience about vaccines and autism. Whether he believes them or not is unclear, but he is definitely using them as a way to link general antivaccine sentiment to the sort of culture war fear mongering, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories about “transgenderism.” Other “new school” antivaxxers, in contrast, appear to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for “old school” vaccines-cause-autism pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, which brings us to Steve Kirsch.
Steve Kirsch: Citing old school antivax figures Brian Hooker, the Geiers, Stephanie Seneff, and Andrew Wakefield
I realize that when Elon Musk took over Twitter I said that I was going to try to back away. However, somehow over the last few days I’ve found myself in exchanges with Steve Kirsch. You remember Steve Kirsch, right? He’s the tech bro turned COVID-19 crank, turned full-on antivax conspiracy theorist issuing ridiculous “challenges” to “debate” while claiming that autopsies of everyone who “died suddenly” will demonstrate whether COVID-19 vaccines were the cause while touting a “secret plan to end the vaccine madness.” What this exchange showed me is that, more and more, not only is everything old new again in antivax messaging—albeit with updates to tie “old school” antivax lies into the latest moral panic, as Dr. McCullough did—but increasingly “new school” antivaxxers are resurrecting bogus studies done by antivax physicians and scientists long before the pandemic.
By way of introducing this concept, let’s look at a Tweet from him form yesterday:
Want to know how I figured out so quickly that we were being lied to? Injury and death rates from friends didn’t match what the government said. So I started looking at big ground zero databases including VAERS. Truth wins over trust. pic.twitter.com/iTbW1lKnn9
— Steve Kirsch (@stkirsch)
Regular readers know that the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database is a system to which anyone can report anything. It cannot accurately assess the prevalence of any given adverse event after vaccination and was always intended to serve as a “canary in the coalmine” early warning system to draw the CDC’s attention to adverse events that should be investigated using more rigorous systems. It’s a system that antivaxxers had misused and abused long before the pandemic, and, predictably, antivaxxers weaponized it as soon as the first COVID-19 mRNA vaccines started rolling out.
In any event, what got my attention was this Tweet four days ago:
Seriously? https://t.co/4Qet4Ozhbi showed vaccinated kids had statistically significant more risks and it was dose dependent. So we have vaccines causing harm. Where’s the more recent study showing that this study is wrong?
— Steve Kirsch (@stkirsch)
I immediately recognized that study. It was a study by Brian Hooker and Neil Miller done before the pandemic and published in May 2020. I’ll leave this link explaining why it was such a horrible study to those of you who are interested. The point is that Kirsch had resurrected bad studies from very “old school” antivaxxers. Remember, Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield were behind the 2014 “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory that led to the 2016 antivax conspiracy film disguised as a “documentary” called VAXXED.
Later—not much later—Kirsch was citing the Hannah Poling case from 2008 as evidence that the government had “admitted” that vaccines cause autism:
For all those people who are attacking me for my factual statement above, you’d need to show the following to be convincing:
You’d have to explain what I said in the tweet that was not factual. My tweet was objective facts.
If it doesn’t cause autism, then why did the US…
— Steve Kirsch (@stkirsch)
Hannah Poling was, of course, not evidence that vaccines cause autism, as I wrote about in 2008 and have written about periodically since, and as Dorit Reiss explained:
On Mr. Kirsch’s errors about the Poling case, see: https://t.co/PzrtYIRuEq
And https://t.co/TAMtk8qhGU https://t.co/x1KZIHf8DM
— (((Dorit Reiss))) (@doritmi)
Not satisfied to resurrect 15 year old antivax talking points, Kirsch then cited Stephanie Seneff. I kid you not, he cited Stephanie Seneff to claim that autism was being driven by a combination of vaccines and GMOs:
Autism background rates seem to be primarily driven by the use of glyphosate. From Stephanie Seneff. If you fully vax, you’ll also be 5X more likely to get autism than unvaxxed. So it’s a COMBINATION effect. pic.twitter.com/6IdqBhgVa8
— Steve Kirsch (@stkirsch)
There was only one response:
Now Mr. Kirsch is citing Stephanie Seneff? She’s the MIT computer scientist who in 2014 predicted that by 2025 half of all babies would be born autistic due to glyphosate. Truly, there is no depth of ridiculousness in old antivax studies he won’t plumb.😂 https://t.co/Tn9k0BKCf2 https://t.co/TZOIO2sVJd pic.twitter.com/BhkYaqdGvP
— David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon)
Seneff, of course, has no relevant qualifications in infectious disease, epidemiology, or any other scientific discipline relevant to vaccines, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), or vaccines. She’s a computer scientist at MIT, and her sole qualification (if you can call it that) is an undergraduate biophysics degree from the late 1960s. She has, however, made some mind numbingly stupid proclamations over the last several years, including her prediction in 2014 that by 2025 half of all children born that year will be autistic, risibly also stating that “side effects of autism closely mimic those of glyphosate toxicity.” She’s also been known to “dumpster dive” in the VAERS database to blame vaccines for autism. Truly, Kirsch’s bringing her up was a blast from the past.
And then:
You are out of your league and mind, Steve.
— Allison Neitzel MD ❤️🩹 (@AliNeitzelMD)
This should have come as no surprise to me, as Kirsch had been cozying up to the granddaddy of the modern antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield.
There is no difference between “new school” and “old school” antivax anymore
I’ve long been saying that, in terms of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, there is nothing new under the antivax sun, at least substantively. Indeed, I would argue that even Dr. McCullough’s co-optation of the vaccines-cause-autism lie in service of the current moral panic and fear mongering over transgender adolescents and gender-affirming care isn’t truly new. Rather, it is merely an update of the old homophobic conspiracy theories dating back to the 1990s claiming that vaccines turn kids gay and even older conspiracy theories dating back to the 1970s (at least) that a combination of “grooming” by adult gay “activists” and, yes, “social contagion” had led to more kids “coming out” as gay. Dr. McCullough and Mr. Kirsch are excellent examples of this adage. They are “new school” antivaxxers who are now discovering the deep well of bad antivax studies from years—and even decades—past to use to support their evolution from anti-COVID-19 vaccine to just antivaccine. Yoda was right.
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This content was originally published here.