Last week, a CDC whistleblower, senior scientist at the CDC for more than a decade, said that he and coauthors had committed misconduct in changing the critieria for their study after the first criteria showed that blacks getting MMR before 36 months had 3 times as much autism as those who got it after. This was a study the CDC had very prominently cited as showing safety, the cover up of the unwanted data is apparently documented to have gone all the way to the head of CDC, who has since left to take a presumably lucrative position at Merck. The most interesting thing about this affair to me, was the fact that the entire media except for a few alternative websites completely ignored it, except for one or two belated and slanted mentions. So you out there reading this, you should wonder what else they have suppressed from your knowledge.
The passages below (and the citation numbers) are mostly excerpted from post1 on this blog.

Of course this kind of age dependent effect in a genetically distinct subgroup is exactly what you might expect from the animal results.
Injections into infant animals of simple antigens, never mind antigen-aluminum combos, caused long-term brain damage when the injections occurred during critical periods in development, even when such injections would have been harmless at other times [2,sec 4.4; 5; 6].

Meanwhile, the CDC http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/Autism/antigens.html is currently touting another study by the same lead author as its flagship argument that vaccines don’t cause autism. In so doing, even assuming this study is honest and correct, they are still and in broad daylight committing the same kind of misconduct of finding a way to slice the data that allows them to make the claims they want. The paper they cite by DeStefano et al [20] has been cited as reporting: “The Risk of Autism Is Not Increased by ‘Too Many Vaccines Too Soon’”[21]. Unfortunately this paper, as indicated in its title, “Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism”, compares patients who received more antigens rather than patients who receive more aluminum adjuvants or more or earlier vaccines. This compares one group of vaccinated patients to another, and there is no reason to believe either group had more aluminum, nor more or earlier vaccines, nor does the paper make such a claim. So they wouldn’t find a connection even if adjuvant aluminum or many early vaccines were the sole cause of autism.

According to table 1 in DeStefano, DTP has 3004 antigens, while no other vaccine except typhoid, which hardly appears in the data set, has a large number. So what their study effectively compares are high-antigen patients, those who got DTP, who score over 3004 antigens, and low antigen patients, who got other vaccines such as DTaP but did not get DTP, who score several dozen antigens if they got everything else but typhoid. Their claimed results indicate that DTP isn’t dramatically more likely to produce autism than DTaP, in patients who also got other vaccines. What’s particularly frustrating about this is it looks to me like (assuming they were honest about other things and their statistics is ok in other ways I haven’t checked), if they just reanalyzed their data to weight by adjuvant content rather than antigens, replace table 1 with aluminum table and process, they would have a more pertinent result. Also if they replaced table 1 with the constant 1 per vaccine, they would have a more interesting result.

[20] “Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism” by Frank DeStefano, Cristofer S. Price, and Eric S. Weintraub, Journal of Pediatrics (www.jpeds.com), DOI 10.1016 2013.02.001

http://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476%2813%2900144-3/abstract

[21] http://www.jpeds.com/content/JPEDSDeStefano

Journal of Pediatrics editorial, March 29, 2013, “The Risk of Autism Is Not Increased by ‘Too Many Vaccines Too Soon’”

[2] Tomljenovic L, Shaw CA. Do aluminum vaccine adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism? J Inorg Biochem. 2011 Nov;105(11):1489-99 http://omsj.org/reports/tomljenovic%202011.pdf

[5] M.A. Galic, K. Riazi, J.G. Heida, A. Mouihate, N.M. Fournier, S.J. Spencer, L.E. Kalynchuk, G.C. Teskey, Q.J. Pittman, The Journal of Neuroscience 28 (2008) Postnatal Inflammation Increases Seizure Susceptibility in Adult Rats

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/27/6904.full

[6] Metabolic Brain Disease, Volume 26, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 237-240, Peripheral immune challenge with viral mimic during early postnatal period robustly enhances anxiety-like behavior in young adult rats Konat, G. W., Lally, B. E. , Toth, A. A.,Salm, A. K. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21643765