21. Vaccines, Autism and Misinformation: Exposing the Lies

In this episode of Nourished with Dr. Anikó, Dr. Anikó tackles one of the most heated and misunderstood topics in modern medicine: vaccines, autism, and the machinery of misinformation. With honesty and depth, she unpacks how one falsified study in the 1990s fueled decades of fear, why misinformation continues to spread, and what the science actually shows about vaccines and autism.

Through clear examples, compassionate perspective, and a call for deeper conversations, Dr. Anikó explores the difference between correlation and causation, the power of placebo, and how fear can be manipulated by those in power. She also raises critical questions about recent CDC contracts, the politics, and how we can meet each other in our shared fear to find truth and unity.

Episode Highlights:

02:00 The Wakefield study: how falsified data linked MMR vaccines to autism and ignited global fear

 05:00 Why correlation is not causation: clear explanation of the differences and why it is so important to understand

11:00 The heartbreak of misinformation: how families searching for answers were misled

 13:00 Measles, tetanus, and the life-saving power of vaccines compared to disease outcomes

 16:00 How fear on both sides of the vaccine debate can unite us in conversation

 18:00 Why the CDC’s new contract to study vaccines and autism raises alarm bells

 22:00 Building trust through science literacy, compassion, and shared truth

 23:00 Tylenol in pregnancy: what observational studies do and don’t prove

 26:00 The cruelty of guilt-based misinformation targeting mothers and parents

 27:00 Why healthcare is not political, it is humane, sacred work to care for one another

Whether you’ve felt vaccine hesitant, overwhelmed by conflicting narratives, or simply want clarity, this episode offers both scientific grounding and compassionate truth-telling.

Tune in now to uncover the lies, reclaim the facts, and open space for conversations that matter.

Connect with Dr. Anikó:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aniko/

Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

Dr. Anikó: [00:00:00] Hello. Hello y'all, and welcome back to Nourished with Dr. Aniko. So I'm gonna just get real with y'all that I have tried to record this episode so many times at this point, and there is just so much to say that it's hard to stay on some kind of thread. That seems reasonable. It's been all very unreasonable because the [00:01:00] topic that we are embarking upon today together is vaccines, and not just vaccines, but the active.

Misinformation that was spread intentionally, knowingly from the highest level right now of our government.

That's just lies. So I'm going to just start off by stating clearly. All of the robust quality research we have today. At this point, we have information on more than 1.8 million children. That is a lot of information in many different countries. These are all studies that are really methodologically sound.

And we will get into that in a future episode. What that means, right? What it means to have a study that has really good methodology, what it means to have a study that [00:02:00] doesn't, what it means to have a study that claims to say there's a cause. Between this thing and the other thing, and really the study could not ever show that.

Like the Wakefield study in the nineties that was done, that claimed to show a link between the MM MR vaccine and autism. And not only was this study designed, not able to do that, but also the study results were falsified in many cases. I'll just start there. Why don't I start there? I'm clearly already starting there.

Um, so there was this study by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield, who was very well respected. So it really was, it kind of shook the medical community when all of this ended up coming out. And it was started by a journalist who started digging more deeply into this study. Um.

And what happened was Andrew Wakefield got this small group, like it was 12 kids who ended up being in the study. More kids were looked at, but he [00:03:00] cherry-picked some kids to report and some not to report, which is already a huge no-no. Nope. You do not do that in research. Right? You take all the information that you got.

Right? Because if you could do that right then I could take a thousand people, let's say. And then give everybody peanut butter and then five people have some kind of reaction to it. And I only look at those five people and I say, a hundred percent of people have reactions to peanut butter. That would obviously be a lie.

That's what this guy did. Right?

Some of the other things that he did, and it originally was a study with. Many authors, most of whom retracted afterwards. And another thing that he did was that he lied about when symptoms appeared. So his basically hypothesis was that MMR [00:04:00] caused autism, the MR vaccine. And then it turned out that some of the kids who he reported on.

In the study, but then when the reporter talked to the parents, Wakefield reported that, you know, the symptoms began within weeks of deve having the MR vaccine. And then you talk to the parents, and the parents say, oh no, like they've always had these symptoms. They've always had neurodevelopmental delays, right?

So there were things like that. And then the kicker, for me anyway. Was that Andrew Wakefield was actually being paid by a legal firm in the UK because they were preparing a lawsuit for the people who manufactured the MMR vaccine. That's awfully convenient. So anyway, this paper ended up being retracted and you know, the parents of the kids, many of them were just horrified that it was misrepresented and their kids were used to propagate this lie, but the damage had kind of already been done.

Right. And [00:05:00] this, this was the jumping off point for MMR vaccines causing autism. And I wanna be super clear that this study if done truthfully right, if there were a study to say, Hey, we're noticing that kids are getting the MMR vaccine and we've just observed, it's called an observational study. We've just observed that, you know, within like a month of getting the vaccine, they start developing these symptoms that wouldn't prove anything yet.

It would show that there's a correlation if done correctly. Right? No lying, no cherry picking your people, right? If done correctly, it would show that, huh? These two things are correlated. The MMR vaccine and this development of these symptoms is correlated. Now that is an amazing jumping off point to start designing [00:06:00] studies with big enough sample sizes.

So you need enough people and you need to control for all the different things that could make. Your result's not valid. So for example, the classic example that we use, um, in talking about causation and correlation in like scientific communities is ice cream and drowning, right? Clearly, like if you were to do this observational study and you're just looking at what's happening, you're not intervening in any way there.

It's not an experiment, right? You're just watching people and you're like, huh. Yeah. The more ice cream people eat, the more they drown. I think ice cream might be causing drowning. Right? That's essentially what Wakefield did in his study. Only He lied about whether or not people drowned and lied about whether or not when they had the ice cream, right?

Essentially, [00:07:00] but. If you were to then take that observational information to say, oh man, a lot of people are drowning when they eat ice cream. You would then have to do a study where you got two groups of folks, and let's say you gave one ice cream and one you didn't give ice cream to. Ideally you'd want to give them something because.

Because you want to account for the placebo effect, which just as an aside placebo effect is something you have to control for in studies because if you tell somebody that you know this intervention is going to help you, or you give them a pill that's just a sugar pill and you say, Hey, here's some medicine, people are going to actually respond to that, some people will actually have a healing response to that, which in science.

Circles is kind of thought about as like a pesky thing you have to control for in research. I think about it and a lot of people in the integrative community [00:08:00] think of it as a really robust, beautiful representation of our own innate capacity to heal. Like it's a really cool thing and we'll talk about the placebo effect in future episodes anyway, so.

Let's say now you want to look into this a little bit. It's really important that you have two groups that are comparable to one another, right? Because if I'm studying whether or not ice cream causes drowning, and my two groups are a group of like three year olds who can't swin, and then a group of lifeguards, clearly the ice cream isn't gonna be the big difference between these two, right?

It's the, it's the swimming ability, it's the age. That's not a comparable group, right? So you want to create a group where you do everything to what we call control for the confounders, which means that you try to do everything to make sure that the only difference between these groups is the [00:09:00] ice cream.

Right. So it's not swimming ability, it's not age, it's not gender, it's not ethnicity, it's not any of those things. You try to make them as equal as possible so that when you do your intervention, which in this case is the ice cream or the lollipop, right? Let's say that's your, that's your placebo control thing.

You give the other group a lollipop, and then you see is this group that's only different from the other group because of the ice cream. Are they drowning more? Obviously they wouldn't. Right? Because we know that ice cream isn't causing drowning. It's that it's summertime and people are swimming more, and that's why they're drowning more, right?

But this is an example of why correlation is not. Causation. So you might hear that a lot in the science world, and that's not super helpful if you don't know what correlation means, which I don't know that I would know what that meant if I weren't a doctor and hadn't taken biostatistics and you know, read research and written up papers and that kind of thing [00:10:00] for so much of my life.

So ice cream and drowning is correlated. They're linked, right, but ice cream is not causing people to drown. So that's really, really, really important as we talk about why the research that we have around vaccines and autism has shown that there is no causative relationship between vaccines and autism.

They can be correlated, right? Because autism symptoms typically get diagnosed around the age that people get the MMR vaccine, right?

It's probably an amalgamation of a bunch of things, right? Predispositions, environmental factors, genetic predispositions, all of those things, right?

And it, it makes me, I was gonna say angry, but it's actually not that it breaks my heart that [00:11:00] someone like Wakefield. Who clearly was a good doctor at some point, right? Well respected, good at his job

would decide that monetary compensation and this lawsuit was worth misrepresenting data and taking advantage of these kids in these families who were just looking for an answer. We're all just looking for an answer. We're all just looking for the best way forward to protect our most precious people.

Right? And I think that's been the missed opportunity in this conversation around vaccines is meeting one another in that space of, I'm so scared. And then me being like, I'm so scared that this thing is gonna hurt your kid. And how can we have a conversation around that where we have a shared truth, right?

Because there's emotional truth and then there's facts, right? And at this point, because [00:12:00] of our collective experience, that's so great. It's so great that the average person is not familiar with the ravages of these diseases. That's an awesome thing. And yet, if it causes us to fear the thing that could protect us from those diseases more than we fear those diseases, now that's a problem.

And if we have. People in really powerful positions spreading lies about this, that confuse things further in order to gain more power, right? Because they're not just saying vaccines cause autism. They're also privatizing medicine. So that we have to buy it from them. They're also advertising certain treatments for things that I imagine they have investments in.

The people who claim to care so much [00:13:00] about autism are also shutting down services for people who have autism, shutting down educational opportunities, educational equity. For people who have autism, it again, it's, it's not just rage, it's like heartbreaking. And it's deep fear too, around the fact that somehow healthcare and taking care of one another has been politicized.

This isn't politics. Measles doesn't care who you voted for. Like really, really doesn't, you know, really doesn't. But if the people in power have dismantled our ability to protect ourselves against those diseases and be treated for those diseases in terms of having access to medical care, measles is gonna be pretty excited.

Y'all measles is, is, is having its day. And the reason that I keep talking about measles in particular is because [00:14:00] that. That vaccine in particular, has been credited with saving the most lives because it is the most prevalent, Because it's the most common of the diseases that we vaccinate for.

And also it's the most contagious. It is so contagious. Like it's the one where you have to shut down the room like it is. It's a scary one, right? And the outcomes are usually okay, but when they're not, they're horrible. And if you compare the likelihood of you having a horrible outcome with measles versus you having a horrible outcome with the measles vaccine, it's, it's like no contest.

Measles wins. And so I think the part that we're really missing in this conversation. Is to meet one another in the fear. That's the same level of fear, right? My level of fear around the diseases is the same as someone's who maybe knows somebody who has a vaccine [00:15:00] reaction,

because at this point, nobody knows somebody who's died of tetanus. And dying of tetanus is really, really horrible. And I did a version of this episode where I explained it and then I was like, I don't know that that's necessary. If you want to look it up. It is awful. Right? And so. I left the window open today.

This doesn't sound like it's related, but it is. I promise I left the window open today as I recorded, because I wanted to stay connected to the world outside and the sunshine and the birds and the trees because it's so easy to get into the whirlpool of your mind and your echo chamber and all of that.

and forget that there's this whole world that we're a part of, right? There's a whole world that we are a part of [00:16:00] together, and we are all acting from the same place when it comes to vaccines. And when I say all, I mean the general public. And healthcare professionals because there is a misinformation machine also happening that is looking to divide us, that is looking to keep these conversations from happening essentially

because they are looking to create mistrust in the current.

Healthcare institutions so that they can then build their own and sell healthcare to us. That's why so many physicians believe that healthcare is a human right, because it is. It shouldn't matter how much money your parents make or you make for that matter. That should be something that every human being gets because we know how to take [00:17:00] care of one another.

We know how to cure diseases. We know which antibiotics to use. We have vaccines. It is a travesty to humanity that we do not help one another and take care of one another when we can. That's not politics. To me, that's humaneness. Right. And Humaneness also includes holding someone's fear around something that is not the scariest thing in the room to you, but is the scariest thing in the room to them.

'cause that's the one they know. And those are the conversations that are going to bring us closer, that are going to ultimately unify us because we have a common goal. We all do. We all want to know what leads to autism. I mean, there are researchers dedicating their lives to it, their lives, you know, in ethical ways, right?

They're not building [00:18:00] cases against. Vaccine companies that they're getting ready to sue and make a lot of money off of.

And on that note, it is interesting to note that the CDC. Announced on the 11th, so September 11th, that it is going to award a non-competitive contract, meaning that they are just giving this contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. RPI. To study a link between vaccines and autism, even though all the research that we have done that's really good research has shown that the vaccine is not connected to autism, right?

It's not actually causative of autism and the institute and the person who agreed to do the research. Have all been criticized for being willing to do research and take money from the government [00:19:00] that could be used to do research in areas where there might actually be a potential cause, right? Because clearly there's so much that we don't know.

But to put more money into an area where all of our most robust research has said there is no causative relationship between this thing and autism means that we take money away from the areas where there could be. A causative relationship. So the person who has agreed to do the study is Professor Jurgen Han, and he's been criticized by other organizations like Boston University Center for Autism Research Excellence, which I would.

I would consider their criticism reasonable, and they've criticized his other papers about autism saying he relied on small sample sizes and that the results haven't been replicated. And [00:20:00] then Dr. Hanh himself said that the question is worth investigating, even if this study only serves to replicate the results of previous studies, all of which found no connection between vaccinations and autism.

Y'all. The fact that the CDC is awarding a no bid fixed price contract to RPI to do research on this link that has proven to not be a link should raise some wakefield level alarm bells in people, right? And it's worth asking.

What the goal of spreading misinformation is, right, and as far as I have seen in my lived experience, it's to not trust your healthcare providers, which check it's been doing that and it's to have control and make money. Because the [00:21:00] fact that a no bid non-competitive contract was just given to this sort of random university, right?

It's not like a center of excellence for autism research or anything like that is notable. It's like Wakefield notable, right? And the way through this.

Is to have conversations with one another where we honor each other's point of view. We're not condescending, right? Because having. More scientific knowledge and more scientific literacy doesn't make anyone a better, smarter, more valuable person. It just means your skills are in this area. This is something we can use to empower one another.

Just like I'm not gonna feel bad about myself if somebody's like, you don't know how to play guitar. Like, oh, I don't. I would love to know [00:22:00] how to play guitar. Can you teach me how to play guitar? And then maybe we can start a band together. Right. That's what this is. This is all of us coming together with our skills and our strengths and helping us all advance and connect like as a human race.

Because if we have already had the conversation about what good research is. About the fact that looking at millions of kids at this point show us that vaccines aren't related to autism, then we are no longer susceptible to the misinformation of vaccines cause autism. No, they don't. And I know why.

Right? We're also no longer susceptible to people saying. Tylenol taken during pregnancy causes autism. Here's the difference between vaccines and the Tylenol question. [00:23:00] We don't know that Tylenol taken during pregnancy causes autism and it's actually, acetaminophen is the generic name. Tylenol is the brand name, and the reason we don't know this.

Is that there have been some observational studies. Remember we talked about observation. You're just looking at a group, right? You can't tell if something's causing something. You're just saying, huh? These two things seem to be happening like at the same time, let's say. So we do have some studies, observational studies, where we're just looking, remember.

That report, that long term use and frequent use, and if I were writing this, this would be like capitalized, bolded, underlined, long term use. Frequent use of acetaminophen during pregnancy. They've noticed that. Babies born, two moms who [00:24:00] used acetaminophen long-term frequently have had some negative neurodevelopmental outcomes, not autism, because not all of these studies looked at autism.

They just looked at neurodevelopmental delay. Those are different things and also. What is Acetaminophen used for? Why would a person use it while they were pregnant frequently and with long-term use? Could it be that we're having prolonged fevers in pregnancy? Well, you know what else causes neurodevelopmental delay in the offspring when you're pregnant?

Fever, maternal fever. That's why we take maternal fever so seriously during pregnancy. None of these studies have addressed that yet. Right? I mean, there are studies that are going to look into this, but none of that has been addressed. They haven't [00:25:00] addressed the genetic makeup of the babies.

They haven't addressed the illnesses, the conditions of the mom, because why is the mom. Taking Tylenol or acetaminophen long term and frequently during her pregnancy or their pregnancy, and they're not also talking about what else might this pregnant person be taking besides Tylenol. Right? We don't have two equal groups right now.

Right. We have a whole mix of stuff and someone's saying like, oh, Tylenol is also in that mix, and it's definitely worth looking more deeply into. Absolutely. But to say that acetaminophen is linked to autism, specifically autism, when these papers didn't even all look at autism, right?

To say that acetaminophen is linked to autism when taken during pregnancy is an absolute. Lie. It's a lie. And as [00:26:00] if motherhood and having a baby weren't hard enough and just having a child out in the world and the reality of the fact that we can't control everything in the world, right? We actually can't control everything that might pose a danger to our children.

And that is a scary, scary reality that we just have to make friends with as much as possible. To dump these lies and misinformation into the middle of that. Not just misinformation, but misinformation that creates guilt is just unconscionable. And my heart is going out to all of my parents out there and all of my moms and all of my pregnant moms, because if you are pregnant or have been pregnant, you also probably know that acetaminophen is the only.

The only thing you can take during pregnancy because things like ibuprofen and other NSAIDs are not safe to take during pregnancy. [00:27:00] So it's a big deal to be cutting this off at the knees without the evidence to do so. So ugh. I hope this episode leaves you with some really good information. I hope you feel seen if you have felt vaccine hesitant or vaccine terrified, because it makes sense in a world where you don't have the daily dose of, whoa, these diseases are super scary, to then be scared of the thing that you are seeing on top of the misinformation machine.

That has been feeding us lies from the highest level of our government. And I hope you're also left with a sense that like healthcare is not political, y'all. Healthcare is humane. It is human beings using their gifts and their skills to take care of one another. Healthcare work is sacred work. It is an honor to be in this field.

I take it so seriously and [00:28:00] everybody I know who works in this field takes it deeply, seriously. We want the best for the people we take care of, and all people. Actually, we are working towards the same goal, which is the safety and the health of as many people as possible. Ideally, every single person in the world.

And I hope this inspires you to have some really meaningful, present curious conversations around this 'cause that's the way that we're gonna get through this. Y'all. Thank you so much. Whew. I don't know why I'm getting chipped up now. I just appreciate y'all being here and having this conversation and coming together.

'cause there are some hard moments happening right now and I feel your presence and it. It strengthens me and I'm so grateful for y'all. So thank you for being here, and I will see you next time. [00:29:00]