In the wake of institutional failures exposed by Covid, dissident movements face a predictable danger: moral certainty’s hardening into a new orthodoxy. What begins as resistance to epistemic bullying can, over time, reproduce the same intolerance it once opposed. This inversion is not merely psychological but structural. History offers ample warning — in tobacco and opioid settlements, vast sums flowed not only to injured parties but to states, advocacy groups and law firms, subtly shifting emphasis from truth-seeking to blame-assignment. In the autism debate, acknowledging complicating factors such as genetics or diagnostic expansion risks diluting vaccine-centric narratives and, by so doing, the prospects for settlements, consultative authority and power. Science, however, requires resisting such gravitational pulls. Evidence must take precedence over moral fervour and inquiry over empire-building. The current autism controversy provides a striking, ongoing illustration.
Entering the Autism Debate
I began my deep dive into autism research in late winter 2025, culminating in a long-form analysis published in May 2025. In his preface to his republishing my ‘Unraveling Autism’s Surge’, Dr Robert Malone stated:
This may be the longest essay we have ever published. However, Dr Bock does an excellent job of making the vast array of information available on autism comprehensible. … This is essential reading.
I came to autism as a concerned physician, not an activist. During my medical training and decades of primary care, autism had received little formal or general attention. By the 2020s, however, its growing prominence and frequent invocation as an ‘epidemic’ warranted scrutiny. What aspects of its ‘spectrum’ were increasing and why? That inquiry followed the same method I had applied to Zika microcephaly in Overturning Zika: The Pandemic That Never Was, wherein close, ground-level examination separated genuine pathology from public health foofaraw. Autism deserves the same discipline.
Early Engagement and the Shift to Blockade
That inquiry led me to consult Toby Rogers (PhD, MPP), who had become influential within dissident autism discourse and advanced a vaccine- and intoxicant-centred thesis. Early correspondence was cordial. He recommended Hallmayer’s 2011 California twin study and I granted him commenting rights on the draft.
Hallmayer’s study is often favoured because it reports a relatively low heritability estimate, potentially as low as 38% (and thus consistent with environmental causation narratives). While methodologically careful, it involved a small sample with low participation (under 200 pairs). By contrast, large population-based studies, including Swedish sibling and twin analyses of millions of records estimate heritability up to 80% with far tighter confidence. Havdahl arrived at a genetic preponderance based on Bai’s 2019 synthesis of large-scale genomic and familial studies. Rogers’s prioritising the former over the latter may reflect narrative preference over evidentiary balance.
My eventual conclusion that autism has a majority genetic causation inevitably clashed with Rogers’s apparent set-point. I wrote:
The Solomonic (un)happy medium indicates more than half of autism risk is genetically set by the time of birth; however, that assessment comes with caveats: … autism occupies a mixed-influence zone: genetically weighted, yet with implicit environmental triggers; not unlike schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Tourette’s.
As I questioned vaccine-centric narratives and weighed genetic, environmental and diagnostic factors, his tone shifted. He questioned why I was joining the debate: “Why do you want to enter the most contested and miserable debate on the planet?” This foreshadowed a broader blockade.
A Funny Thing Happened That Night At The Forum
The tension peaked at a forum celebrating open debate. In a private, post-dinner, three-person conversation with Rogers (and Professor Bret Weinstein), Rogers argued that vaccines are broadly dangerous and must be removed wholesale. He stated that unless his conclusions about removing all vaccines were adopted in full, existing public health institutions and the government itself should be dismantled, in wholesale rupture. This radical position is consistent with his self-description as an unabashed “revolutionist“. Disagreement with his no-vaccine stance would entail forfeiture of legitimacy.
I responded calmly. Even if one were to stipulate his conclusions, science does not operate by fiat or emergency decree. Truth emerges through accumulation, replication and contestation, not through ultimatums or institutional rupture. I noted that history offers sobering lessons about tearing down governments in the name of moral certainty. Libya, Syria and the Congo did not improve when unjust systems collapsed without viable replacements. Our own system, for all its failures, does not merit that kind of punishment, nor would such chaos produce better science.
I congratulated him on his Senate testimony before the Homeland Security Subcommittee on September 9th 2025, and said so sincerely. The fact that such views could be aired publicly represented progress. It was precisely the kind of open process that allows contested claims to percolate, rather than be imposed.
His response was a slap down: “You never did read my work; you have no right to be talking about autism.”
When I affirmed that I had read substantial portions, incorporated his recommended studies, and circulated drafts for feedback, he thundered: “You’re just an amateur!”
I coyly repurposed his derision as a compliment, noting that “amateur” literally means one who works from love of the subject rather than professional obligation, and that I was honored he noticed. The distinction was dismissed.
Trillion-Dollar Transitional Tribunals
The next day, at the panel discussion, Rogers publicly elaborated his “biological colonialism” thesis, advancing it with declarative certainty. The argument fused claims about autism causation with a Marxian narrative of class extraction and medical exploitation, and was presented as effectively settled:
We know with reasonable certainty that about a dozen toxicants in the environment and the vaccine schedule are causing the autism epidemic… that will cause the collapse of the United States within our lifetimes. … For the last 500 years, if you were a nation that wanted to get rich, the way you did it was you built a bunch of ships… and you took their stuff. … At some point, there were no new lands left to conquer. And so what the ruling class decided was… to extract wealth from the middle class… through iatrogenic (i.e., medical) injury. … If you can get the entire population to inject their kids 72 times during childhood… you can enslave them for life to chronic illness. … Lifetime care costs for autism are in the range of five million to seven million per kid. That’s a lot of money… to the pharmaceutical… hospital industrial complex and the ruling class.
He continued:
“We need to set aside a trillion dollars to compensate autism families who’ve been injured by the childhood vaccine schedule. And we need to set aside (another) trillion dollars to compensate people… hurt by COVID-19 vaccines. That is foundational… to this country rebuilding and becoming a democracy again. We need to have a conversation about transitional justice.
Conversely (channelling Everett Dirksen): “A trillion here, a trillion there, and soon enough you’re talking about real money.”
Advocacy Over Rigour
Rogers frequently recounts being ignored or marginalised by academic institutions and invokes personal proximity to autism, including references to his former partner’s son. These experiences do not substitute for methodological rigour.
Rogers’ academic background lies in political economy and public policy, not medicine, epidemiology or science. His scholarly work consists of a single 2021 paper, ‘Autism Tsunami: The Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States‘ (with Mark Blaxill and Cynthia Nevison), which was retracted in 2023 by the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The retraction cited methodological deficiencies, undeclared conflicts of interest, misrepresentation of autism prevalence trends, inflated cost estimates and inadequate consideration of alternative explanations such as diagnostic expansion. The authors disputed the retraction.
Rogers states:
After conducting my systematic review of 1,000 studies my belief is that the autism and chronic disease epidemics are primarily caused by toxicants — mostly from vaccines and about a dozen additional toxicants.
Science, however, advances not by tallying aligned papers but by weighing conflicting evidence, testing assumptions and remaining open to revision. Within Rogers’s applied framework, autism is compressed into a single liability narrative, accompanied by projections of catastrophic cost. Through the language of “transitional justice”, a term historically associated with regime rupture, he urges discontinuity with existing institutions rather than accountability within them.
This is not scientific adjudication but extrapolative prediction. Like other ‘hockey stick’ narratives, it relies on forward projection from selective inputs, with limited attention to uncertainty, replication or alternative explanations. Science is both a body of knowledge and a method. It proceeds through iterative testing, not through apocalyptic forecasts or claims of epistemic finality.
Grooving Towards Massive Settlements
This is where the debate is increasingly being steered: towards settlements that isolate deep-pocket villains and authorise massive payouts, often before causation is fully resolved. History shows how health controversies can evolve in this direction, even when the evidentiary paths differ substantially.
Tobacco
Tobacco litigation followed decades of evidence-convergence’s linking cigarette exposure to lung cancer. Pathology, epidemiology and dose-response relationships aligned. The resulting settlements reached into the hundreds of billions. In this case, litigation followed science.
Opioids
Government and professional institutions promoted a paradigm shift that reframed addiction as a chronic disease requiring long-term pharmaceutical management. Regulators endorsed the ‘pain as the fifth vital sign‘ framework, encouraged liberal prescribing, and praised abuse-deterrent formulations. Purdue Pharma, which held only a small market share, complied with these directives and developed OxyContin II in 2010, which data showed reduced abuse even as heroin and illicit fentanyl surged. Despite this, Purdue paid disproportionately, many times more than larger producers. Litigation concentrated blame on a single company while overlooking systemic drivers including methadone maintenance programs dating to the 1970s, pill mills and black-market opioids. I posit that ‘Methadone Maintenance Ignited America’s Opioid Crisis‘ – and as I argued in ‘Empowered by the State, Condemned by the Crisis: The Purdue Paradox‘, the settlement largely redirected responsibility rather than resolving causation.
NFL concussions
The NFL concussion settlement advanced rapidly through advocacy and legal pressure, reaching roughly one billion dollars before independent scientific replication settled key claims. As Daniel J. Flynn documents in The War on Football, much of the concussion narrative relied on contested data and underappreciated safety improvements, including documented reductions in concussion rates over time. Replacement players from the 2011 lockout year, unlikely to achieve long careers or high earnings, brought grievance-based claims that contributed to broad payouts. Concussions occur across football, hockey, snowboarding and horseback riding, yet litigation converged on the NFL alone – because that is where the money is.
Asbestos
Asbestos policy treated disparate fiber types and exposure contexts as a uniform hazard. While certain forms and manufacturing exposures clearly caused disease, other uses, including encapsulated fireproofing, posed far lower risk. Moreover, abatement from the 1990s sometimes increased exposure. Entire industries collapsed under uniform assumptions, and public safety gains proved uneven.
Other large settlements
Silicone breast implant litigation produced multibillion-dollar settlements despite later studies’ failing to confirm many alleged systemic harms. Talc and glyphosate cases proceeded amid contested evidence and regulatory disagreement. Agent Orange-settlements functioned more as moral and political reconciliation than as precise causal adjudication.
Across these cases, large sums flowed reliably to participants such as attorneys, advocacy groups and institutions, even when biological proof remained incomplete or contested. The familiar streetlight effect prevailed. Inquiry gravitated towards where money and liability were easiest to assign.
Autism’s Climate Changed
In the autism debate, vaccine manufacturers now occupy the same symbolic position of concentrated blame. Meanwhile, as Christopher Rufo has documented, large-scale fraud in autism services in Minneapolis arose from local incentive structures rather than from a single malicious actor: inflated diagnoses, public funding streams, shell nonprofits and political protection. Autism diagnoses unlock monthly payments for families, additional staffing for schools and expanded roles for special-education bureaucracies.
Even absent fraud, these incentives create predictable pressures. A struggling student, often from an immigrant or low-income household, may be steered towards an autism diagnosis through well-meaning but permissive evaluations. The family receives monthly support and additional services. The student gains individualised attention and accommodations. The classroom gains another adult. The school secures guaranteed funding. Special education, already the fastest-growing segment of public education, expands further. Each participant experiences benefit. No single actor need act cynically. The system rewards diagnosis.
What remains largely absent from this loop is the taxpayer and, more importantly, rigorous scrutiny of whether diagnostic expansion is being mistaken for disease expansion. Reclassification quietly masquerades as epidemic, e.g. California’s autism caseload has nearly quadrupled since 2011.
Vaccine manufacturers emerge as symbolic deep-pocket villains, while diagnostic expansion, genetic contributions and institutional incentives receive comparatively less scrutiny. Schools receive funding. Families receive services. Bureaucracies expand. These dynamics shape classification without requiring malice.
Autism prevalence has risen. That point is undisputed. What ‘autism’ describes, however, has changed substantially. In the 1980s, it referred to a rare, severe condition almost always accompanied by intellectual disability; however, autism without intellectual disability (mental retardation) increased 13-fold between 1992 and 2005 into a spectrum that frequently excludes disability. Severity did not explode. Definitions expanded.
The original 2009 paper by King and Bearman illustrated this shift using two static figures — 1992 and 2005 — drawn from California’s Department of Developmental Services databases showing how autism expanded relative to intellectual disability and how co-morbidity proportions declined even as absolute numbers rose. My created animation presented here extrapolates between those endpoints, assuming smooth (year-to-year change).
This second animation extends forward two decades using subsequent DDS Fact Book totals. The intermediate frames simply interpolate between reported annual counts. The visuals speak to the structural trend: autism’s diagnostic footprint expands relative to intellectual disability over time.
Treating these eras as equivalent and inferring a single causal toxin commits a category error. Sequence matters. Definition precedes causation. Without that discipline, reclassification masquerades as epidemic.
Consider an analogy: today’s autism is a butterfly, quite distinct, larger and independent of the larva or pupa, freed from chrysalis confinement. Despite its own metamorphosis, autism has kept one name, inflating counts while diminishing underlying median severity.
The butterfly here represents (autism’s definitional) transformation, not its biological proliferation.
Rogers, by contrast, argues for something far more dramatic: a literal biological surge, a toxin-driven explosion of severe autism in the population itself. Those are fundamentally different claims. Rogers’s hockey-stick projects 10% of children as autistic by 2060 (absent his own ‘cure’).
These extrapolations ignore saturation effects, ceilings, cross-national variations, relatively stable rates of severe disability and historical precedents like ADHD expansions.
The analogy to climate science’s ‘hockey stick’ controversy is imperfect but instructive. Criticism was treated as existential threat: marginalised, not answered. Questioning the moral engine of a movement is seen as sabotage.
Before committing to trillion-dollar liabilities, society must determine whether autism resembles tobacco-type causation or diagnostic/institutional expansion amplified by incentives. The question remains open, but blockades hinder exploration.
Inversion, Conversion, Subversion, Reversion
Covid failures deserve accountability; vaccines were over-deployed – but inversion becomes subversion in claiming all vaccines are dangerous and autism is solely from vaccines or toxicants. I practised primary care for decades; vaccines curbed diseases like measles. One may debate proportionality, but not effect.
Dissident science must resist becoming what it opposes. It must preserve the distinction between harm, causation and remedy. It must remain capable of saying, ‘We do not yet know.’ Trust requires verification. Verification requires patience.
Dr Randall Bock is a primary care physician near Boston, Massachusetts, and the author of Overturning Zika. A longer version of this article was first published on his Substack page.
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I’m sorry, but after the Covid government sponsored massacre and the “settled science” of the climate fiasco, I wouldn’t believe a scientific paper if it leapt up and bit me in the bum!
Unless of course it was written by people whose integrity I had personal knowledge of and no connection to the people making the “medicine” or any so called leading university such as Oxford or Cambridge; Harvard or Columbia.
The authors view on autism is very much like smoking. Scientists discovered that smoking was a leading cause of cancer, but over egged the pudding by opining that anyone who smoked would die of lung cancer.
if that was true, “the science” would have been talking to a load of corpses; as in the fifties and sixties, smoking was the norm.
same with autism. Yes, I’m sure there is a genetic predisposition in some people but 80%? I’d not think so as if that were true, the majority population would be autistic by now. Squirm as much as you like, but changing environmental, ways of food production and yes, far too many vaccines pushed at an immature immune system have a greater role to play.
Quackcines kill and cause autism. This has been known for 40 years. This pseudo-quackery of an article notwithstanding.
When I grew up, 2 stabs, autism 1:10.000
Now, 50-70 stabs, 1 in 30.
Case closed.
To confirm your hypothesis you would need to have data on the number of autistic people pre your ‘when I grew up’ surveillance period. Personal anecdote is not scientific. It’s personal bias.
Personal anecdote is evidence.
The plural of anecdote is data.
Not just that but documented anecdotes cease to be anecdotes alone by documenting them. They become evidence.
When verified and substantiated, including by other witness testimony which is itself verified and substantiated it becomes a strong body of evidence.
Crosspost: CHS Medical Myth Smasher #1“The Plural of Anecdote is Data” – Is The Correct Original Quotation Posted on November 20, 2012 by ChildHealthSafety
Mike Zimmer
Aug 07, 2023
It is okay, you can use the word vaccines.
please see the larva to butterfly analogy. There has been HUGE diagnostic drift of autism. Any attempt at solving the problem requires finer classification what it is precisely one wants to solve– in a sense, necessitating reverse irredentism.
Lithuania once had an empire, now it does not. The reverse is similar to autism. The lines on the map have vastly changed and encompassed other entities. One needs to return to the central, essential “Lithuania”, the rocksolid severe autism –and determine changes thereof and causality– rather than look at an empire of territories that are unrelated but overtaken.
The US CDC figures are only for classical autism and don’t extend to Aspergers when I last checked which is why the current US prevalence is so much lower than that UK’s figures which include Aspergers’ Syndrome.
Under DSM V [Pervasive Developmental Disorder] and ICD 9 to 11 [Autistic Spectrum Disorder] one can still distinguish classical autism from Aspergers’ as the two main groups although they are not called that in DSM V and ICD 9 to 11.
And the diagnostic criteria have remained stable for over two decades so it is not correct to claim “The lines on the map have vastly changed and encompassed other entities.”
Plus the diagnostic methods in the UK apply calibrated diagnostic instruments to ensure consistency in diagnoses across the country.
I have heard all the same old excuses time and again and they just don’t work. Only facts do and they do not support this idea of a diagnostic drift into other conditions.
It’s good to see you are back again & ready for battle, Iconoclast.
Thanks Heretic.
Reading this stuff forced me out of hibernation.
Why does the Daily Sceptic publish this stuff and not the real info about what is really going on?
I thought people had wised up enough with the Covid kill shots.
Sadly I learned recently and had not realised earlier that even if we got a natural Covid infection and not the jab we all still have the spike protein which is toxic, unnatural, manmade and can cause serious ill health in some people.
We can also get it by horizontal transmission from those who have been infected or have had one of the vaccines.
There are ways to remove the spike protein but it is not easy because it replicates.
This truly was a prematurely released doomsday biological weapon. In fact it seems to have escaped rather than being released.
Don’t worry if this one did not kill you the next one will get a lot more of us.
I think there is probably a genetic factor, based on the incidence in one (distant) branch of my family where 2 out of 3 sons are autistic and also a friend whose husband and their two children have Asperger’s Syndrome.
It is possible that, at least in some cases, a genetic pre-disposition may be “triggered” by vaccines.
Correct. See: https://dailysceptic.org/2026/02/14/the-truth-about-autism-and-vaccines-doesnt-suit-either-side/#comment-1080931
thank you. Please as well, see my https://randoctor.substack.com/p/unraveling-autisms-surge which covers the genetic aspect as well as “regression”.
It’s not genetic. It’s brain damage from toxic injections. Did all those “autistic” people get multiple “vaccines”?
Sadly, and I hope Dr Randall Bock comes back to respond to this but I am not encouraged by his seeming absence of basic scientific medical knowledge. Over the past 22 years I have seen all the false arguments about why autism is not caused by vaccines and Bock trots them out. Bock seems to not understand basic causation as he repackages tired old arguments for a new unguarded audience. Let us take the ‘autism is genetic’ argument. That is autism just happens and is because some people get it and others don’t. This conveniently ignores the fact that all disease is genetic. Autism is not like haemophilia – an internal disease with no external environmental trigger. Haemophilia is genetic solely – there is no external trigger. The ‘its genetic’ argument confuses internally and externally caused diseases. And so many medical doctors like Dr Bock seem not to understand the difference. We are genetic machines. If we were not we would rust instead of getting sick. Some people never succumb to ‘flu but no one would claim ‘flu is solely genetic. Some people are more predisposed to particular diseases but will not develop them without the external trigger, whether a toxin.… Read more »
There has been substantial diagnostic drift in autism. Any serious attempt to understand causation requires first clarifying what, precisely, is being counted. That means finer classification, not broader aggregation.
Autism in the 1980s referred to a rare, severe neurodevelopmental condition. Today it encompasses a wide spectrum, much of it without intellectual disability. Treating these eras as equivalent and inferring a single cause commits a category error.
An analogy: Lithuania once had an empire. Today it does not. If one were studying changes in Lithuania itself, one would not include all territories once absorbed into its empire. Autism requires the same discipline. We must return to the central, severe form and study changes there, rather than infer causality from an expanded map of loosely related conditions.
I have replied to this issue of diagnostic drift in other comments here already. Suffice to say, whilst you may be well intentioned, erudite knowledge from questionable journal papers is no substitute for direct experience over decades. In the UK there is no diagnostic drift. It is not a change in definition either. The definitions have remained the same for over two decades. The diagnostic criteria are also applied using calibrated diagnostic instruments to ensure a high degree of uniformity of diagnosis across the UK. Furthermore, the most seriously affected cases have been increasing in step with the overall increases. In other words, the unmistakeable cases which no one could possibly misdiagnose, have been steadily increasing. That is not drift – that is a real increase. Plus we can chart the steady annual increases in the various UK schools censuses – where every child is counted. Every time there is a change in the vaccine schedule with a new vaccine or a new antigen added to an existing vaccine one can see the result as each new birth cohort enters the education system and it takes 12 years for the full effect to work its way through. MMRV recently reintroduced… Read more »
The published figures for NI shows the most seriously affected proportion of school children – the ones hardest to miss and hardest to misdiagnose remain a steady proportion of around 60% year on year but the overall numbers keep rising year on year – from 7.6% of school age boys the number is now 8.8% – or 1 in every 11 boys:
https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-05/asd-children-ni-2025.pdf
Key Findings
Prevalence rate of autism for school aged children in Northern Ireland – 5.9% Refers to all children of compulsory school age (4 – 15 years old).
5.9% is 1 in every 17 overall [with at 8.8% of course 1 in every 11 being boys].
Prevalence rate of autism in females 3.4%
Prevalence rate of autism in males 8.3%
Proportion of children with autism who had no special educational needs 18%
Prevalence of autism was almost 38% higher in the most deprived decile compared to the Northern Ireland average
This is not diagnostic drift. It is not Lithuania. It is not better diagnosis or greater awareness. It is a real increase in real children in real families and the medical professions keep pumping kids full of vaccines and still claiming no one knows what is causing this.
It is outrageous when there is very clear scientific and other evidence constantly being suppressed by the mainstream.
2055 should be 2005 – when MMRV was first disastrously introduced into the US with a doubling of febrile convulsions [US – seizures] – which of course also confirms the MMR causes febrile convulsions [US – seizures]. So both MMR and MMRV can cause autism as a consequence of an encephalopathy – the seizures/convulsions are symptomatic. Of course because the DTP is given to infants at 2, 3 and 4 months under the accelerated UK DTP schedule they are often sleeping so parents rarely if ever get to see any symptoms of a convulsion [seizure]. The UK accelerated DTP schedule is argued on supposedly scientific grounds but I very much doubt the proponents were unaware they would be masking the risk of convulsions because jabbed infants at those ages are very often asleep. An encephalopathy following a DTP jab is a US VICP statutory Table injury which automatically qualifies a US jabbed infant for compensation for consequent harms. But as the infants are sleeping and unless their parents happen to be neurologists it is most unlikely any US parent is likely to even be aware of the problem UK children get nothing. VICP is the US statutory Vaccine Injury Compensation… Read more »
Several additional claims recur in Rogers’ presentation and warrant clarification. The suggestion that recognizing genetic contribution somehow denies environmental influence misstates basic causation. In complex neurodevelopmental conditions, genetic architecture establishes vulnerability ranges while environment modulates expression. This is neither controversial nor evasive. It is how multifactorial disease works. Genetic predominance does not imply genetic determinism, nor does it exclude environmental effects. It does, however, constrain the scale and universality of any single external trigger. Likewise, rising autism prevalence does not, by itself, establish rising biological injury. Population-level data show that severe autism with intellectual disability has remained relatively stable, while diagnoses without intellectual disability expanded markedly following diagnostic broadening, service eligibility changes, and educational incentives. Temporal correlation between vaccine schedules and autism prevalence is insufficient to establish causation, especially when similar trends appear across countries with differing schedules and coverage. Rogers’ forward projections rely on linear extrapolation from selective windows, producing hockey-stick forecasts that assume no saturation or diagnostic stabilization. That is predictive analytics, not scientific adjudication. Before assigning liability or invoking redress, inquiry must first determine what is changing, in whom, and by what mechanism. Science advances by resisting premature closure, not by collapsing uncertainty into moral certainty. please… Read more »
“Science advances by resisting premature closure, not by collapsing uncertainty into moral certainty.” In the philosophy of sciences there continues to be debate about how “sciences advance“. Thomas Kuhn changed the debate long ago with his 1960s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revised in 1970 with his 2nd Edition. There is no such thing as “premature closure” in the sciences. Nor is there any such thing as “sciences” “resisting premature closure” [as if an abstract concept of a body of knowledge or the practice of a field of study can do anything all by itself]. This is one of the problems of the medical world. Medical professionals never learn how to practice science but they feel so confident in their hubris that they can expound on subjects they have no grasp of whatsoever, such as in the completely bonkers “Evidence-based Medicine” movement which has no sound foundations whatsoever and is now shifting all over the place as the chasms in the non-existent foundations undermine the pyramid hierarchy. Unlike the Egyptians, EBM’s pyramids will not last 50 years let alone thousands. Anyone who knows and understand evidence know it has no hierarchy so artificially constructing false hierarchies to suit commercial drug… Read more »
I have no firm opinion about the Autism increases. I suspect it’s a change in definition.
But Pharma are definitely villains and they, along with the media, deserve zero trust. The vaccine schedule is (was?) pretty crazy in the US and, as I understand, they only test them individually, never in conjunction. I suspect the UK have similar issues.
“science does not operate by fiat or emergency decree” LOL
Fool me once… Not again. Trust is earned.
So when you get a nasty infection, you never use a pharma developed and manufactured antibiotic?
Complex society comes with complex mistakes and deliberate corruption. It happens at small scale: individuals cheating and stealing, and large scale: corporations cheating and stealing. Its human nature.
The best remedy is to ensure transparency and application of the scientific and empirical principle.
There is no such thing. Did you not know that?
It is not a change in definition. The definitions have remained the same for over two decades. The diagnostic criteria are also applied using calibrated diagnostic instruments to ensure a high degree of uniformity of diagnosis across the UK.
Furthermore, the most seriously affected cases have been increasing in step with the overall increases. In other words, the unmistakeable cases which no one could possibly misdiagnose, have been steadily increasing.
but nothing like the diagnosis itself. please see the GIF(s), and the “Lithuanian Empire” analogy above.
I don’t defend pharmaceutical companies as moral actors. I defend them as functional ones. (occasionally falsely pilloried, purged then plundered, see my Empowered by the State, Condemned by the Crisis: The Purdue Paradox _____________________________________________________________ Modern medicine depends on economies of scale, regulatory compliance, manufacturing cleanliness, liability coverage, and distribution capacity that simply do not exist in boutique or artisanal alternatives. That is not ideology. It is logistics. ———————– We criticize “Big Oil,” but no one fuels a car with backyard moonshine. We criticize “Big Agriculture,” but we do not expect subsistence plots to feed cities. Pharmaceuticals are no different. When people have angina, heartburn, gout, diabetes, infections, or epilepsy, they rely on standardized, mass-produced drugs that meet stringent purity and safety standards. Those standards are expensive, and they exist for a reason. —————————– I personally take allopurinol for gout. It costs pennies a day. It is off-patent, generic, and widely available because a pharmaceutical system exists that can manufacture and distribute it reliably. That is not exploitation. That is near-charity enabled by scale. Yes, there are abuses. Martin Shkreli-style price gouging deserves condemnation. Overpromotion, regulatory capture, and COVID-era overreach deserve scrutiny and accountability. But pulling effective drugs from the market,… Read more »
Is it co-incidence that I know two people who had a normal child until the MMR jab?
‘But it would have been so much worse…’
Deaths from measles – 0.
Death from rubella – 0.
Death from mumps – 0.
0 need for the stabs. None whatsoever.
Eh? What ia your point? Lots of kids died from these diseases in the past. Have you heard of the childhood mortality rates pre 1945?
Once again, “lots of kids” did not die from measles, chickenpox mumps.
Nonsense:
Vaccines Did Not Save Us – 2 Centuries Of Official Statistics
No, they didn’t. Measles, mumps & chickenpox were all considered NORMAL CHILDHOOD DISEASES that conferred LIFETIME IMMUNITY afterward upon the whole population.
Childhood mortality rates pre-1945 were caused by problems with public hygiene and contaminated food, as well as bacterial infections, not viruses, which have never been proven to exist.
Am reposting. Too many links.
The main advances in combating disease over 200 years have been better food and clean drinking water. Improved sanitation, less overcrowded and better living conditions also contribute. This is also borne out in published peer reviewed research:
The following superb BBC FOUR broadcast by Professor Hans Rosling shows how health improved in step with wealth over the last 200 years “200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes“:
Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling shows that health improves in step with wealth everywhere.
Better living conditions, sanitation and nutrition are the main contributing factors – not modern medicine and definitely not vaccines.
The data could not be clearer but the medical professions and the media go out of their way to claim its all medicine and vaccines.
Interesting stuff!
Or does autism start to emerge around the same time as jabs are given? How do you confirm your anecdotal observation? And what if those parents are just gaming the system and wanting an autism diagnosis? Plenty of it about.
Speak to the thousands of parents who witnessed their child change post vaxx. Ever heard of SIDS, same thing. Post vaxx. Look it up. Yes, not one article in msm about causation, just parents telling what happened. Watch VAXXED. An eye opener.
Watch the movie An Inconvenient Study:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvEuMMAafF8&t=3242s
364,720 views 13 Oct 2025
In 2016, journalist Del Bigtree issued a challenge to the head of infectious disease at one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world: conduct the most thorough vaxxed vs. unvaxxed study that has ever been done. The expert took up the challenge and ran the study to prove Del wrong. That study never saw the light of day… until now.
Spoiler alert: The study showed that vaccinated kids are around four times sicker than unvaccinated kids who tend to be in robust health.
There are millions
the child was normal until an MMR shot? There are stories of “regression”, but this is not dispositive of some underlying genetic predisposition – moreover, the case descriptions differ person to person to person. It is not as well defined as sickle-cell anemia. This is covered in my Unraveling Autism’s Surge
Genetics, Environment, and the Expanding Diagnostic Net
Here you can read the real diagnoses of real regression in real children in their medical records from transcripts of legal proceedings. Take special note of Child 8. Catastrophic unmistakable reactions and regression shortly after MMR vaccination which cannot realistically be attributable to any other cause – but all the reported regressions were real regressions and linked to the administration of the MMR vaccine:
Step 8 Allegation 2: The BMJ Made It Up to Claim Fraud – Video 12 – 35m 45sHow the Case Against Andrew Wakefield Was Fixed – a 21st Century Controversy
I found this article quite interesting, so thanks for that. I think one thing that has definitely changed between the days of my youth in the 1960’s is this. Then parents wanted their kids to fit in, and they would do as much as they could to try and make sure that little Johnny or Jane weren’t the weird ones. In most case they weren’t weird anyway, perhaps because of the level of social activity with their peers, perhaps. Play with pals was a thing you did from just after breakfast until the streetlights came on. Now, parents want to micromanage their children, with structured play opportunities, and the blessed ‘tech’ to disappear into. They have their own spaces, protected from all evil. Parents are only too willing to highlight their childrens flaws, stick a big label on them with this condition or that syndrome, as some kind of badge of honour (it isn’t…), and demand medical, physical, psychological support, and money of course. In that background, a lot of stretching is being done to Autism, ADHD, and so forth. I have no doubt there are genuine cases, but little discussion of BPLSS (Badly Parented Little Shit Syndrome), a term… Read more »
I’m going to nick BPLSS. It describes so many …..
Excellent comment. Fully agree. Autism is now the term for badly parented little shits.
What a sad comment.
Really? According to you:
“Personal anecdote is not scientific. It’s personal bias.“
But when it suits you your anecdotes are gospel.
LOL. Hypocrisy hand in hand with nonsense together in action.
Well done.
There were no kiddie vaxxes in the 50’s, maybe smallpox? Oral polio?
so not many kids with autism. The autism explosion folllowed the mass vaccination schedule.
True.
The experts who favour jabbing kids and making money from it are certain of one thing – vaccines don’t cause autism – but they can’t tell you what does.
And because of that they can’t stop it spreading as new vaccines continue to be added to children’s vaccine programmes worldwide.
Get real people.
Thank you.@NeilParkin There is a great deal in your observation that aligns with what I was trying to get at, though perhaps from a different angle and vocabulary. You are right that something profound has shifted since the 1960s. Childhood has become increasingly structured, supervised, and technologized. Unstructured peer play has diminished. Risk, friction, and informal social negotiation have been engineered out of daily life. At the same time, parents are now encouraged to micromanage development, monitor deviations, and seek formal labels early, often with the best of intentions._______________ I cover these ideas extensively in my Unraveling Autism’s Surge Genetics, Environment, and the Expanding Diagnostic Net _______________ That cultural shift matters. Diagnostic categories do not exist in a vacuum. They interact with parenting norms, school incentives, service availability, and broader social values. In the United States especially, diagnosis has become a gateway: to resources, accommodations, staffing, funding, and sometimes even moral standing. That creates pressure to stretch categories like autism and ADHD well beyond the severe, functionally disabling conditions they originally described._____________________ I agree that genuine autism exists and always has. The question is not whether autism is real, but whether the dramatic rise in prevalence reflects a comparable rise… Read more »
“I practised primary care for decades; vaccines curbed diseases like measles. One may debate proportionality, but not effect.”
Sure doc, but what caused the 99% reduction in measles mortality before any vaccine was available?
The autism question is very simple to answer, conduct a suitably powered, double blinded RCT with a proper placebo and follow up period.
Evidence of this brash statement?
There are ONS graphs available that clearly show the decline in death-by-measles well before the measles jab was introduced.
True – lots of stats going back two hundred years:
Vaccines Did Not Save Us – 2 Centuries Of Official Statistics
People are rightly fearful of vaccine damage to their babies and children particularly after all the deaths and injuries from the experimental Covid jabs.
Ninety-nine percent of the reduction in measles deaths in England & Wales occurred before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1968 due to better sanitation etc. and deaths have continued to fall since then. A graph from the ONS is included in this link.
https://www.hartgroup.org/measles-fearmongering/
92.3% of the mortality rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950, before most vaccines existed.
Below is a link with charts supporting the arguments that societal improvements like better sanitation, not vaccines, played a significant role in the disappearance of childhood diseases:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/child-health-topics/false-narratives/deaths-from-childhood-diseases-were-declining-before-vaccines/
I think RFK and his team have come to the same conclusion.
May God bless him and his team for exposing the truth to the public.
This response sidesteps the claim I am addressing._____________
The issue is not whether measles mortality declined before vaccines. It did. Nor is it whether vaccines have effects. They do. I said so explicitly. The claim I am disputing is Toby Rogers’ far stronger assertion: that autism is primarily or overwhelmingly caused by vaccines or toxicants, and that this justifies sweeping moral and financial reckoning.____________________________________________________
That claim collapses a heterogeneous, historically fluid diagnosis into a single biological entity. Severe autism has not exploded in parallel with today’s prevalence figures. What has expanded is the diagnostic net, along with powerful institutional incentives that reward classification. Treating that expansion as a toxin-driven epidemic is a category error.____________________________________________________
Proposals for massive, preemptive settlements rest on that error. Once you accept monocausal certainty, you invite trillion-dollar payouts untethered from resolved causation and elevate the most absolutist voices. That path has consequences. Science advances by refinement, replication, and restraint, not by ultimatum.____________________________________________________
One can criticize COVID policy failures and still reject the idea that scientific disagreement warrants institutional rupture or moral crusade. Those are different projects.
“Science does not operate by fiat or emergency decree” – Amen to that.
It is not supposed to “operate by fiat or emergency decree”, but the truth is very different particularly in the environments the Dr Randall Bocks of this world operate in.
Scientific truths are not determined by “consensus” but by scientifically collected and analysed evidence.
But when it comes to many things like ‘global warming‘, Covid and vaccines we are told it [whatever it is] is “the scientific consensus“.
So suddenly “science” is a democracy when it suits the monied corporations.
And the truth about scientific consensuses is a tiny number of people tell everyone what the “consensus” is and the media and then a ton of people who describe themselves as “scientists” jump on the bandwagon whether they have any scientific expertise in the field concerned or not.
Many don’t want to lose research grants, their research teams or their jobs and others don’t want to be cancelled in our amazing cancel culture.
Bock admits he entered autism research only in late winter 2025.
Some of us have been researching autism for decades.
I am convinced autism is caused by vaccines and other toxicants.
Even if autism is due to a genetic disposition to a particular toxin, then that toxin should obviously be avoided regardless of whether the toxin is in a vaccine or not.
I compiled a list of scientific studies of the harms from the Covid jabs and have also done the same with vaccines causing autism.
Here are a list of studies (many peer reviewed) and articles linking vaccines etc. to autism.
https://classicrecords1.wixsite.com/the-sceptic/post/here-are-a-list-of-studies-and-articles-linking-vaccines-etc-to-autism
I have also done a blog on paracetamol being one of the causes of autism.
https://classicrecords1.wixsite.com/the-sceptic/post/paracetamol-tylenol-acetaminophen-does-cause-autism
100%, Andrew Wakefield published why autism was caused by the stabs – he was delicensed and physically threatened by the Scientism.
Been known since the 1990s – the CDC knew it then and covered it up.
Correct. Wakefield established the cause was multiple jabs in one hit on a child that was not able to cope with multiple jabs in one hit.
He was forced out of Britain as the costs to go back to ‘safer’ single shots was more than the cost of the victim.
However, the cost to the victim was underplayed as the parents provided the care and the NHS the medical input.
These costs have risen with the increase in damaged children.
Meanwhile America has been paying compo for years to those who received multiple jabs and were damaged.
We know the truth because you cannot get single jabs in Britain for children.
I witness elderly parents with a grown autistic child walking our promenade throughout the year. I wonder who will take care of these sons and daughters when their parents have passed on?
It is very sad and you have a good heart. The child will go into a care home.
All we can do is warn others and hope they may listen.
How the Case Against Andrew Wakefield Was Fixed – In Eight Steps – A 21st Century Medical ControversyA Video Series – With Audio Only Option [to listen on the move]
The proof is laid out in detail.
Euripides substack quotes directly from the children’ medical records in transcripts from legal proceedings showing that Wakefield faithfully reported the presentations and findings his Royal Free Hospital expert colleagues discovered.
It also shows how the British Medical Journal manufactured false claims of fraud against Wakefield.
This has all been published for a long time and the BMJ has never been able to answer the allegations against it. They were challenged to but have never done.
I know I was an oily rag at one of the meetings where they took steps to push Wakefield out.
Exactly the same with the Covid jabs. My hopes are pinned on RFK Jnr who really might be standing up for the people.
I have sympathy for Andrew Wakefield, but two things can be true at once; Wakefield’s work did not establish that MMR causes autism, and it was never sufficient to justify sweeping causal claims. At the same time, the institutional response to Wakefield revealed how medical authorities behave under reputational threat: narrative consolidation, selective scrutiny, and the rapid weaponization of labels like “anti-vaxxer.” The danger now is repeating that mistake in reverse: replacing one enforced certainty with another, and mistaking unresolved controversy for proof.
It was not Wakefield’s work. That is one of the many false claims made. He did not do it. He just wrote the paper reporting the findings of 12 colleagues who were co-authors. But they could not be blamed because they are all leading expert medical professionals so the old Nazi propaganda trick was used of picking just one enemy and blaming that enemy for everything. Neither Wakefield not the other 12 made sweeping causal claims in the paper but there is plenty of scientific evidence to justify causation now. But Wakefield was wrong. He thought it was MMR but in fact it is all vaccines. The VICP table injuries support that specifically wrt to DTP and MMR for encephalopathy and its sequelae. The Lancet paper made no causal claims: “Interpretation We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers.” “We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue.” “We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most… Read more »
He is successfully continuing to work in the USA on projects such as the film VAXXED. A film well worth watching for anyone who thinks autism “just happens”.
You can watch it here:
https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/vaxxed-from-cover-up-to-catastrophe/
Thank you very much for that link! I’ve wanted to watch “Vaxxed” ever since it came out, but couldn’t find any free links online.
Yes, I was arguing with people on The Guardian many years ago that Wakefield was right and it was one of the reasons they started moderating my comments “below the line”.
I saved all my old comments on why Wakefield was right in my MS Word documents and they sometimes get an airing if anyone says he was “disgraced”.
Well done to you for boldly standing up for truth!
My relative late arrival to autism research does not mean late exposure to autism itself. I practiced street-level primary care for decades, seeing patients and families across generations, long before autism became a capacious umbrella term. Severe autism existed then, unmistakably so. What differed was not its biology, but its visibility, labeling, and institutional handling. ———————————————————————————— In the mid-20th century, autism was narrowly defined and often subsumed under broader categories of intellectual disability. Many affected individuals were institutionalized, for better or worse, and therefore largely absent from public life and epidemiologic tallies. As deinstitutionalization advanced, driven by humane intentions and political momentum, those individuals re-entered society and new diagnostic frameworks rushed in to meet them. Visibility replaced concealment. Labels proliferated. Prevalence appeared to explode. ———————————————————————————— This shift did not occur in isolation. Opioid addiction, homelessness, autism diagnoses, and children of divorce have all risen sharply in the wake of deinstitutionalization, the collapse of stigma, and the belief that community integration alone could substitute for structured care. The idea that exposure to the “magic air” of freedom would resolve deep psychiatric and developmental disorders proved optimistic. Homelessness alone has increased by roughly fifteen-fold since that era. ———————————————————————————— Historical context matters. In… Read more »
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now frames autism as a singular toxin-driven epidemic requiring a culprit.”
No he doesn’t. He acknowledges it is due to a variety toxins some of which are found in vaccines.
He also rebuffs the notion that the increase is down to better diagnosis.
“If it [autism] was just a matter of better diagnosis or better recognition, you would see it in older people. But you don’t. The epidemic is taking place in a specific generation—it’s kids born after 1989. That’s what you see,” Kennedy explained.
“You don’t see autism, one in every 31 people, my age. I’ve never seen somebody my age—71 years old—with full-blown autism,” he continued.
“You don’t see that… If it was anything other than an epidemic, why would you only see it in a SINGLE generation?”
Sadly, the problem is time. Whilst we have these streams of denialists obfuscating about the causes of the worldwide autism pandemic, those autistics who are not killed by the toxic mental health drugs will survive into their old ages.
So it will become normalised over time.
And of course in the UK in October 1988 DoH and NHS were doing catch-up campaigns on older children so children born from around 1978 were affected so some are now 48 years old. And that does not include the autistics who developed autism from the DTP vaccines and measles vaccines which had been administered since the 1960s but not to all children.
The reasons for a scientific paper being retracted were:
The retraction cited methodological deficiencies, undeclared conflicts of interest, misrepresentation of autism prevalence trends, inflated cost estimates and inadequate consideration of alternative explanations such as diagnostic expansion
Why were such basic questions not pursued before publishing the paper? This is surely the correct due diligence procedure. Unless we have confidence in the vetting of papers we shall lose confidence in their scientific veracity.
You are right. This should have been picked up at peer-review.
How often are the peers funded by big pharma?
Sadly the scientific papers being published are too often funded by big pharma.
It is common for papers to be retracted which tell truths the medical professionals and drug industry don’t like.
This is a load of obfuscation. If he had been studying hard re vaccines and autism he would know a number of absolute facts. 1.) properly powered double blind inert placebo trials have never been done . 2.) the safety inserts show that studies which have been done are underpowered, for ridiculously short periods of time and use another vaccine as the comparator. 3.) other studies such as for DTP, show vaccines as effective, but creatine worse overall heath outcomes. 4.) extensive freedom of information request have come up with no meaningful safety studies. Those produced are either off point or meta studies of all the crap mentioned above. To repeat the proper safety studies were never done, and anyone who repeats that they have been either doesn’t know what they are talking about or is lying. Of course there may be a genetic predisposition in this story, but predisposition to what, autism or some poison which triggers it , and which could also be environmental and also related to highly processed diet . So in summary BOLLOCKS! Do the studies and then come back and tell us
There’s at least one control group: the Amish.
Although, as well as zero stabs, they have a confounding factor, i.e. no electronics and therefore zero ‘screen time’.
And no autism. Look it up.
Yes it is hard to imagine a working pediatrician does not know any of this. A worry.
I believe in erring on the side of caution and – since no childhood vaccinations have ever gone through a proper blind testing process – it is better to assume that they are all potential causes to /contributory to autism until such tests have been carried out and the evidence is presented to prove otherwise.
A responsible Pharmaceutical Industry would welcome the opportunity to prove that its products are safe.
I am troubled by the conclusion in its reference to science. Science doesn’t have a stance, it cannot be dissident.
And it cannot be explained away as science conducted by a dissident. True scientists should present hypotheses not opinions, and to be a dissident you have to have an opinion.
I agree with the author that it is important to stay vigilant in terms of all claims about vaccines.
There are a few points of note.
First of all the difference between the USA in terms of number of vaccines (around 72 by the age of 18) compared to Europe (around 17). If there is a toxicity issue (for instance with Mercury or Aluminium) it may be interesting to compare?
Then there is the issue of expansion. HPV, Hepatitis B, Rota virus, Chickenpox. Is there a good risk/benefit ratio to vaccinate all children with these vaccines?
It is important that vaccine science goes back to basics. Risk/benefit analysis, efficacy studies.
Exactly what wasn’t done when covid vaccines were given to children.
“Truth emerges through accumulation, replication and contestation…” And ruined lives.
I will never forget one afternoon playing on the beach with my non-MMRed children. We made the acquaintence of a young mum and her obviously autistic, non-communicative toddler. She told me, “He was a perfectly normal little boy until that filthy vaccine. Within days he changed from a happy kid who was into everything into someone we didn’t recognise”.
That so well describes what one of my neighbours years ago told me about her little grandson!!! Except that their happy little boy changed overnight, within only hours of the MMR jab.
It saddens and tires me to read such a long denial of causation of autism via childhood vaccines. Dr. Bock, you of all people are witnessing the damage done to babies, toddlers and young children post childhood vaxxes. When thousands of parents can name the day their child changed, stopped feeding, stopped making eye contact, began having difficulty sleeping, dropped down on all developmental targets, even you have to admit childhood vaccines may be the cause. Did you know not one childhood vaccine safety study with a double blind benign placebo was ever performed? The “placebo” was another vaccine. It is enough to make any adult cry. Who will take care all of these severely autistic children as they age and their parents pass on. this is not a discussion of compensation. Everyone knows Unvaxxed children are healthier than vaxxed. You never mentioned the wide research being done by RFK and his team, Dr. Brian Hooker, Del Bigtree and his team, Steve Kirsch and his team Andrew Wakefield and his team. This is a discussion of causation. I no longer know any families where at least one child is not on the autism spectrum. It is a disappointment when I… Read more »
Well said!
Toby Rogers’ argument re vaccines and autism can be read here:
https://brownstone.org/articles/mapping-the-entire-field-of-autism-causation-studies-in-one-article/
Marc Girardot, in The Needle’s Secret, argues that vaccine harm comes when vaccine injections, which should be into muscle tissue, instead go into a blood vessel. He argues this can lead to serious harm to the lining of blood vessels, with many possibilities of consequent damage to organs and tissues in the body, including to the brain and to the intestines. There is always a small, but significant, risk that injection into a blood vessel can happen, even if precautions such as aspiration are taken. The more vaccine injections someone has, the more they are likely to experience such an incident.
I find Bock’s argument in this article to be unclear and inadequate.
This article is Big Pharma-funded CODSWALLOP.
Autism is not “genetic”.
It is BRAIN DAMAGE from toxic vaccines.
The unjustly vilified English Doctor Andrew Wakefield will go down in history as a hero for saving millions of lives, just as the unjustly vilified Hungarian Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis has gone down in history for saving millions of lives.
One neighbour of mine in another town over a decade ago told me how her happy, bubbly, laughing, playful little grandson CHANGED OVERNIGHT into an autistic child who lost all interest in everything, never smiled or interacted normally with his family again, only a few HOURS after getting the MMR jab.
She said the parents, grandparents and whole family protested to the doctors, nurses, hospital, social workers, police and politicians, but nobody did anything to help them. She said sadly, “We finally gave up, because THEY HAVE ALL THE POWER, and they don’t care. We’re just ordinary people with no money for lawyers and all that, so all we can do is try to raise him as best we can.”
Also, a Christian nurse at a local church reacted with outrage and continuing resentment when I tried to warn people in the prayer group about the dangers of childhood vaccines, because she said it was her job to administer all the “lifesaving” vaccines to babies and toddlers, and people like me were spreading “dangerous ideas”.
A couple of years later, she admitted that she’d been dismayed by the number of children who came down with bad measles infections soon after she had injected them with the MMR…
“…For the last 500 years, if you were a nation that wanted to get rich, the way you did it was you built a bunch of ships… and you took their stuff. … At some point, there were no new lands left to conquer….”
What? This is standard Marxist reframing of the West. For millenia naions became rich using the method above. The last 500 years mark a fundamental civilisational shift towards making stuff to get rich as opposed to taking stuff.
I don’t believe it’s just capitlilism but here is Walter E. Williams
“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”
Excellent post. I’m sure you won’t agree, but in addition to capitalism, there is something else that happened 500 years ago that caused a “civilizational shift”, and the nations adopting it became the most prosperous in the world. What was it? The Protestant Reformation.
Yes. Without a doubt.
Protestantism enabled the following “Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England. The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use…” Jacob Bronowski “It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more… Read more »
I am astonished that you actually agreed with my mention of the role of Protestantism! I’m not used to anyone agreeing with me about religion, especially because Catholics tend to control or at least dominate almost all “patriotic” or “right wing Conservative” websites and political parties in the West, as they also do in the comments section of this Free Speech website.
May I put in a good word for the humble English inventor of the steam engine, Thomas Newcomen, who was appalled by the deaths of so many Cornish miners from flooding, and devised his steam engine to efficiently pump the water out of the tunnels to save lives. His invention was improved by Scotsman James Watt, who got all the credit in the public mind, but Thomas Newcomen’s motives stemmed from his compassion and Protestant work ethic, rolling up his sleeves to make life better for everyone.
As your quote from Walter E. Williams said,
“Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”