Erasing Encephalitis — Why Vaccine Brain Injuries Became Autism
Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor
October 03, 2025
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/a...&rid=401633026
https://media.mercola.com/ImageServe...autism-pdf.pdf
(Hyperlinks in the article not embedded here.)
"Story at-a-glance
For over a century, vaccination has been repeatedly linked to severe neurological injuries including brain damage — with many modern studies showing a 3 to 7 fold increase in common chronic illnesses
To dodge this massive liability, all research into vaccine injuries (and many other catastrophes like Agent Orange) was suppressed so that health authorities could claim there was “no evidence” of vaccine harm
Another scheme was to redefine the brain injury as “autism” rather than encephalitis (which the U.S. government was legally required to provide injury compensation for)
Previously, children with significant vaccine brain damage were referred to as “mentally retarded.” However, after a multi-decade campaign cancelled “retarded” they were instead diagnosed as autistic — a vague term which blurs severe and minor disability together, thereby effectively concealing the severe cases from the public’s awareness
This article will reveal the manipulative techniques and wordplay that have been used to conceal vaccine injuries from the public’s awareness, as now is the time when we can at last end this atrocity
I've long believed that public relations (propaganda) is one of the most powerful but invisible forces in our society. Again and again, I've watched professional PR firms create narratives that most of the country believes, regardless of how much it goes against their self-interests.
What's most remarkable is that despite the exact same tactics being used repeatedly on the public, most people simply can't see it. When you try to point out exactly how they're being bamboozled by yet another PR campaign, they often can't recognize it — instead insisting you're paranoid or delusional.
That's why one of my major goals in this publication has been to expose this industry. Once you understand their playbook — having "independent" experts push sculpted language that media outlets then repeat — it becomes very easy to spot, and saves you from falling into the traps most people do. The COVID-19 vaccines, for instance, were facilitated by the largest PR campaign of our lifetime.
One of the least appreciated consequences of this industry is that many of our cultural beliefs ultimately originate from PR campaigns.1 This explains why so many widely believed things are "wrong" — if a belief were actually true, it wouldn't require a massive PR investment to instill in society. Due to PR's power, the viewpoints it instills tend to crowd out other cultural beliefs.
In this article, we'll take a deeper look at what's behind one of those implanted beliefs: "vaccines don't cause autism."
The Frequency of Vaccine Injuries
When vaccinated and unvaccinated children are compared, chronic illnesses are 3 to 7X as common in the vaccinated individuals. Because of this, there is a longstanding embargo on ever conducting this type of research (allowing the status quo to remain that “no evidence exists” between the vaccine and the injury).
Recently, Senator Ron Johnson revealed that a robust study comparing vaccinated children to unvaccinated had been conducted at a premier medical institution in 2020, but due to the results it showed, despite previously committing to publishing the paper, its authors chose not to, due to how much it violated the medical orthodoxy.
It’s important to note that beyond these results being earth-shattering, they are also entirely in line with every other long-term comparative study that has ever been done on vaccines — all of which I synopsized here (along with the characteristic signs that allow one to identify the frightfully frequent vaccine-injured children).
Erasing Encephalitis
A key theme of George Orwell’s book 1984 is that language defines a culture. If ideas aren't present in language, the populace can’t conceive of them (which is why 1984’s ruling party eliminated words like ‘freedom’, ‘rebellion’, and ‘justice’ from the new language).
Another way language controls the public consciousness is through the use of ambiguous terms which are not clearly defined, so that depending on the needs of the situation, the audience can be steered towards the desired interpretation of it, even if those interpretations sometimes overtly contradict each other (effectively allowing the PR firm’s client to “have their cake and eat it”).
For example, Fauci was a master of using slippery language to constantly get whatever he wanted with no accountability through implying but never explicitly stating his desired conclusion (which the media would then run with).
A classic example is having everyone in lockstep assert vaccines are “safe and effective” without ever defining what that actually means, thereby allowing that meaningless statement to be treated as “vaccines are 100% safe and effective,” yet simultaneously, having no accountability for lying as those who repeat it never actually said that.
This was best demonstrated when Fauci (who continually told us the vaccine would definitely prevent us from getting COVID) was grilled at a recent Congressional hearing,2 where in response to:
“But we knew from the trials that people who got vaccinated still were subject to getting COVID, so was the COVID-19 vaccine 100% effective?”
Fauci stated:
“I don't believe any vaccine is 100% effective.”
Note: In a recent article I also highlighted how the ambiguous phrase “brain death” was created to make people believe unresponsive individuals were in fact dead, thereby both removing the societal cost of perpetually caring for them and securing a reliable supply of donor organs.
One of the most widely recognized side effects of vaccination is neurological damage (particularly to the cranial nerves and brain). Prior to the censorship which took over our medical journals, reports of vaccine brain and nerve injuries (e.g., encephalitis) were extensively reported throughout the medical literature — including many identical to what are seen in modern-day autism.
Furthermore, it used to be widely recognized that vaccines could make you “mentally retarded” or “severely retarded.” Consider for example, the language at this 1983 debate between doctors which took place on the Donahue Show (which at the time was the largest talk show in America) — that to my knowledge was the last time a publicized debate on vaccines was allowed to happen:
https://x.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1970439175187972521
A Midwestern Doctor
@MidwesternDoc
In the 1980s, the media had not yet been bought out by the pharmaceutical industry and programs critical of vaccines were aired.
This incredible 1983 show was the last time vaccine safety was publicly debated and shows just how differently the public used to see vaccines.
Last edited
5:44 AM · Sep 23, 2025
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Given the taboo around “retarded” that exists now, it is quite noteworthy how nonchalantly it was used there. This shift resulted from disability groups in the late 1990s and early 2000’s campaigning against “retarded,” an extensive 2008 campaign (ending the “r-word”)3 and in 2010, Obama signing a law which effectively outlawed the term by removing “mentally retarded” from all federal laws and statutes and replacing it with “intellectual disability” (something which has never been done with any other word).4
As such, the vaccine brain injuries, which made children mentally retarded were re-labeled as “autism,” while in tandem, autism was given an extremely broad and vague definition that swept over all the concurrently occurring neurological injuries.
Because of this, the stark and unmistakable impression of a severe vaccine brain injury (e.g., “you know Sue’s son became severely retarded after their 2 month vaccines”) was displaced with a much more amorphous term that was easy to write off because it was too complex and vague to think about — hence providing easy mental escapes from this uncomfortable topic, thereby making it easy to write off and close one’s mind to.
Note: The mechanisms through which vaccines cause autism are explained here:
Mild Autism
Anytime something injures human beings (unless it’s highly lethal), less severe reactions will be much more common than severe injuries (e.g., far more were disabled than killed by the COVID vaccines5).
As such, individuals with minor neurological injuries from vaccination have changes that lightly overlap with those seen in severe injuries.
Because of this, “autism exists on a spectrum” with many of its characteristic changes being seen to lesser extents in individuals who are not severely disabled (e.g., Elon Musk has characteristic autistic traits and has admitted as such6).
Yet, rather than recognizing that the rise in autistic-like traits signals something is profoundly changing in the population — and that a smaller group may be developing severe brain damage and more extreme versions of these traits — the prevailing narrative claims the autism surge is simply due to people who were otherwise basically normal (aside from a few “autistic quirks”) being re-diagnosed as autistic.
As such, the autism epidemic is dismissed as an illusion, attributed to “selective data interpretation by anti-vaxxers” — a convenient explanation that allows many to avoid grappling with an uncomfortable possibility.
Likewise, whenever “autism” is equated to brain damage, a large chorus of people can be relied upon to denounce them by saying their (highly functional) autistic child is not brain damaged, thereby silencing and ending the actual debate (e.g., Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly done this to RFK7).
Similarly, once the societal conception of vaccine brain injuries was shifted from “mentally retarded” or “autism,” a push began to normalize autism (e.g., with terms like neurodiversity), thereby making it even more taboo to criticize the complications of this illness.
Fortunately, independent voices are beginning to sound the alarm over this issue. Gavin de Becker (a longtime advocate for vaccine safety), in an excellent newly released book points out that:
1.There is no clear definition for autism or a definitive way to diagnose much of it.
2.The same people who whitewashed the link between autism and vaccines by claiming there is “no evidence” also did the same for many other controversies, such as:
•Agent Orange being safe — when in reality (due to faulty production by Monsanto) it was extremely dangerous
•Vaccines causing SIDS (something there actually is a century of evidence for)
•Vaccines causing Gulf War Syndrome (a devastating military illness Congress’s GAO admitted was likely due to a poorly manufactured anthrax vaccine).
The book has many poignant quotes like this one:
“Promoting their work on vaccine safety, an IOM spokesperson said, ‘We looked very hard and found very little evidence of serious adverse harms from vaccines. The message I would want parents to have is one of reassurance.’
Since that’s the same ‘very little evidence’ the Government found with Agent Orange, burn pits, the anthrax vaccine, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, breast implants, and Gulf War Syndrome, I’m not sure how reassuring it ought to be to parents.“
Note: At this point, one of the primary obstacles we are facing in ending detrimental vaccine mandates is not a lack of data, but rather finding a way to reach people who are resistant to the idea that vaccines could be harmful. De Becker’s book (Forbidden Facts8) was specifically written to provide the rhetorical tools that could bring about this shift.
Autism Data
Given all of this, there are two critical, but almost never discussed data points to consider. First, one of the primary studies cited to support the argument that the rise in autism actually is due to diagnostic reclassification is a 2009 study from California9 (conducted when the word retarded was being banned). Rather than show minor traits were being relabeled as autism, it showed 26.4% of children who had previously been diagnosed as "mentally retarded" became "autistic" (as did another commonly cited study10).
Second, while the general public has been conditioned to believe in the amorphous autism label, since this is untenable for those actually working with severely disabled children (vs. those on the spectrum), within the autism field, the two are differentiated by the terms “profound autism” and the far less severe “non-profound” autism. CDC data11 in turn, shows that roughly 26.7% of autistic children have "profound autism," and that it is continually increasing (although at a much slower rate than non-profound autism):
However, since clarifying what autism is defeats the purpose of the label (having it be an ambiguous term that ultimately sweeps everything under the rug), this distinction is rarely if ever mentioned, and folks outside the autism community are seldom even aware of the term “profound autism” — they simply know “vaccines do not cause autism.”
The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act
The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act had a large number of supporters in Congress due to a recent public recognition (made possible by the mainstream media of that era not habitually censoring pharmaceutical injury stories) that the original DPT vaccine frequently caused brain damage and severe disability.
Because of that, the act was created with the intention of fixing many of the major safety issues with vaccines and providing for injured parents to have an easier time obtaining compensation (by having the government rather than vaccine manufacturers pay for injuries), with the industry, in turn, agreeing to the act as they needed a way to be shielded from injury lawsuits that were bringing them to bankruptcy.
However, while well-intended (e.g., it put into place many critical provisions we rely upon now, like VAERS), give or take, every key provision in the act was implemented at the H.H.S. Secretary’s discretion. As such, once it passed, most of the things it was intended to do never happened and the overall situation instead became much worse as vaccine manufacturers no longer had any legal liability for making injurious products, hence allowing a flood of them to enter the market.
Note: This was also enabled by a 2011 Supreme Court ruling, which erased a critical provision of the act that had previously allowed the public to sue manufacturers for defective products.12
As the act was structured:
•If someone was afflicted with a condition that was agreed to be linked to vaccination shortly after vaccination, the Federal government was responsible for paying compensation to them, and to do so through a “vaccine court” designed to be much easier to handle than the hostile court system parents of DPT-injured children had navigated.
Note: DPT brain injuries were so prevalent that after I posted an article on them, along with another on SIDS (a common complication of DPT), many readers shared they had witnessed the exact injuries I described following that vaccine — which, in short, is why DPT injury lawsuits were bankrupting the vaccine manufacturers.
•In the original act, after intense negotiation, a series of vaccine-linked injuries were put into it (forming the initial vaccine injury table), along with a stipulation requiring continuous research to identify other complications that could be linked to vaccination.
Since much of that was at the H.H.S. Secretary’s discretion, there was an incentive to never allow future research which could unveil additional injuries requiring compensation. As such, despite twelve new vaccines being added to the schedule and decades of science since 1986, virtually no additional neurological injuries have been added to the table.13
Likewise, at the time the original act was written, brain damage (encephalopathy) was a widely recognized complication of vaccination.14 Hence, this was one of the few neurological conditions for which it stipulated that coverage was required.
Note: Peter Marks, the head FDA official who relentlessly covered up all the reports of COVID vaccine injuries the FDA was receiving and overrode the FDA’s top vaccine experts to rush a formal approval of it (necessary to enact mandates) recently went on national television and made many false statements about MMR including that it “does not cause encephalitis.”15
As such, replacing encephalopathy with “autism” (which vaccines “do not cause”) made it possible to exempt the federal government from the massive liability it faced for these ever-increasing vaccine brain injuries.
Note: One of the things many people do not realize is that most of what RFK is trying to do with vaccines (which has provoked so much hysteria from the politicians and the media) is simply what the 1986 Act required the H.H.S. Secretary to do, but none ever have.
Conclusion
Despite endless attempts by the CDC to gaslight us about the COVID vaccines, more and more of the public is now awakening to the fact that they are, in fact, killing people. This was best shown by a recent poll that found 56% of American voters believe the COVID vaccines have caused mass deaths16 along with previous ones that showed:
•Two years ago 49% believed the vaccines had caused a significant number of deaths,17 while a year ago, 53% did.18
•That 34% of vaccine recipients had minor side effects19 and 7% had major side effects.20
•Four years ago, 32% believed public health officials were lying about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines,21 and two years ago, 57% wanted Congress to investigate how the CDC handled assessing vaccine safety.22
Note: The earliest poll I'm aware of — conducted on stage by Charlie Kirk at a large December 2021 event — found that nearly everyone in the audience either had personally experienced or knew someone who had suffered a severe adverse reaction to the COVID vaccine and that almost all attendees knew someone they believed had died as a result of the vaccine.
Similarly, while they’ve buried the link between vaccines and autism for decades, too many have now been affected that it can’t be swept under the rug anymore. Fortunately Trump’s recent historic press conference on Autism marked a turning point many parents have waited decades for.
There, the President stated he strongly believed vaccines caused autism, correctly identified simple measures to reduce this (e.g., spacing vaccines out) and emphasized that ending this tragedy was his top priority, after which RFK Jr. stated:
“Some 40 to 70% of mothers who have children with autism believe that their child was injured by a vaccine. President Trump believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting and marginalize them, marginalizing them like prior administrations.
Some of our friends like to say that we should believe all women. Some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades because research on the potential link between autism and vaccines has been actively suppressed in the past. It will take time for an honest look at this topic by scientists.”
Now that real change is on the table, the vested interests will fight much more fiercely to protect their status quo and it is upon each of us to do all we can to work together to protect humanity's health.
Author's Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article which goes into greater details of the points mentioned here. That article, along with additional links and references can be read here. Additionally, a companion article on how vaccines cause Autism can be read here.
A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD's exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD's work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
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- Sources and References
1 Dissident Voice, December 11, 2002
2 Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies before House subcommittee on COVID-19 pandemic, June 3, 2024
3 Special Olympics, Accessed September 2025
4 Wikipedia, Rosa's Law, Accessed September 2025
5 Phinance Technologies, Humanity Projects, March 2023
6 Axios, April 15, 2022
7 A Midwestern Doctor, April 17, 2025
8 Skyhorse, September 9, 2025
9 Int J Epidemiol. 2009 Sep 7;38(5):1224-1234
10 Pediatrics. 2006 Apr;117(4):1028-37
11 Public Health Rep. 2023 Apr 19;138(6):971-980
12 Wikipedia, Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, Accessed September 2025
13 Vaccine Injury Table, January 3, 2022
14 PUBLIC LAW 99–2660—NOV. 14, 1986 100 STAT. 3755
15 A Midwestern Doctor, May 9, 2025
16 Rasmussen Reports, September 11, 2025
17 Rasmussen Reports, January 2, 2023
18 Rasmussen Reports, January 12, 2024
19, 20 Rasmussen Reports, December 7, 2022
21 Rasmussen Reports, July 2, 2021
22 Rasmussen Reports, January 20, 2023
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