A recently released peer-reviewed study co-authored by Anthony R. Mawson and Binu Jacob looks into the connection between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) in nine-year-old children enrolled in Medicaid.
Its purpose is to point out the impacts that the vaccination program of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be having on children in the United States.
Published on January 23, 2025, in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, the study examined 47,155 children who were enrolled in the Florida State Medicaid program from birth through age nine during the years 1999–2011.
The primary aims of the study were to determine whether:
1) “vaccination is associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), hyperkinetic syndrome, epilepsy or seizures, learning disorders, encephalopathy, and tic disorders;”
2) “vaccination coupled with preterm birth increases the odds of NDDs compared to preterm birth without vaccination;” and
3) “increasing numbers of visits for vaccinations are associated with increased risks of ASD.”
Overall, the study found that 27.8% of vaccinated children were diagnosed with at least one NDD, compared to 11% of unvaccinated children who received an NDD diagnosis. The difference in these percentages leads to the authors’ observation that vaccinated children were significantly—212%— more likely than unvaccinated children to be diagnosed with at least one NDD.
Specifically, learning disorders were 6.81 times higher in the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated children. Tic disorders were 6.25 times higher. Encephalopathy was 5.19 times higher. Epilepsy or seizures were 3.52 times higher. Hyperkinetic syndrome was 2.81 times higher. And the Autism Spectrum Disorder was 2.70 times higher in the vaccinated comparison group.
One subsection of the study looked at 5,009 preterm children. It revealed dramatic upticks in NDDs in premies. The authors found that 39.9% of the vaccinated preterm children were diagnosed with at least one NDD, while only 15.7% of unvaccinated preterm children had that diagnosis.
Drilling down into this preterm comparison group, Dr. Mawson, who is the founder and president of the Mississippi-based Chalfont Research Institute, and his study collaborator, Dr. Jacob, noted that vaccinated children were 9.84 times more likely to develop learning disorders, 7.12 times more likely to develop encephalopathy, and 3.14 times more likely to develop ASD compared to unvaccinated preterm children.
They highlighted these findings by noting that “children born preterm and unvaccinated were no more likely than children born at term and unvaccinated to be diagnosed with ASD, hyperkinetic syndrome, encephalopathy, tic disorders, and learning disorders.” [Emphasis added.]
The study’s eye-opening conclusions on preterm infants suggests “that the current vaccination schedule may be contributing to multiple forms of NDD; that vaccination coupled with preterm birth was strongly associated with increased odds of NDDs compared to preterm birth in the absence of vaccination; and [that] increasing numbers of visits that included vaccinations were associated with increased risks of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).”
The eye-opening findings of this recent study come at a time when “American trust in vaccines is plummeting,” according to a CNN poll cited in a ZeroHedge article last December. The poll serves to intensify the discussion about the possible connection between vaccination and autism as well as point to additional associations that may exist between childhood inoculations and various other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Importantly, the Mawson/Jacob study is not the only one of its kind. It joins a growing body of evidence that indicates a possible association between vaccines and multiple medical conditions. But the numerous studies investigating this controversial subject have largely been kept from public view by the mainstream media and the government agencies themselves.
One such study was done in 1999 by CDC in-house researcher Thomas Verstraeten. He found a link between hepatitis B vaccines—which contained the organomercury compound thimerosal—and several neurological injuries, including autism. Transcripts from a secret June 2000 meeting between government regulators and vaccine-makers, held at the now-infamous Simpsonwood, Georgia, conference center, reveal how attendees schemed to create phony studies in an attempt to exonerate vaccines.
In an article posted at Children’s Health Defense in 2019, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summarized the Simpsonwood findings, writing, in part:
“CDC shared Verstraeten’s analysis with the then four vaccine makers but kept it secret from the American public.
“The data in CDC’s 1999 Verstraeten study clearly inculpated thimerosal as the principle culprit behind the autism epidemic.
“The world’s largest vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) then whisked Verstraeten off to a sinecure in Brussels and CDC handed his raw data to his CDC boss Frank DeStefano and another researcher, Robert Davis[,] who served as a vaccine industry consultant. Those two men tortured the data for 4 years, removing all unvaccinated children, to bury the autism signal before publishing a sanitized version purporting to exculpate the vaccine.”
Mawson and Jacob concluded in their recent study that more research must be done to identify potential causal relationships between NDDs and individual vaccines. They highlighted, in particular, the need to examine the cumulative effects of multiple vaccinations.
Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher, MPH takes it a step further, suggesting that the current “CDC hyper-vaccination schedule needs a complete overhaul. Not only is it likely contributing to the autism and chronic disease epidemics, but almost all of the vaccines were licensed without proper long-term, placebo-controlled trials.”
An aspect of vaccine safety that is rarely addressed is the synergistic impacts of combination vaccines, even though reliance on them has been increasing in the ever-expanding vaccine schedule. Combination vaccines were essentially designed to ensure more compliance by parents and children, to widen vaccination coverage, and to serve as an economic benefit for healthcare systems. Multiple problems regarding safety and formulation issues of combined vaccines were noted in an October 2020 article titled “Efficacy, safety, and formulation issues of the combined vaccines” by Say-yed Hesameddin Tafreshi.
The Mawson/Jacob study offers an opportunity to revisit an assemblage of nearly 60 studies that find “vaccinated cohorts to be far sicker than their unvaccinated peers.” This compilation, done by the aforementioned Children’s Health Defense (CHD), has been buried by pharma-friendly major media outlets.
Such studies not only provide an abundance of statistical fodder for the “Vax–Unvax” debate, as Brian Hooker, PhD, calls it, but perhaps more importantly bring us to to ask even larger questions surrounding public health, such as:
“Why aren’t government agencies doing these studies?”
“Why do CDC and NIH officials continue sweeping vaccine safety issues under the rug?”
“If these government health agencies, with their copious resources, won’t do these studies in the interest of the American children and the wider public, then whose interests are they guarding?”
