Anti-Vaccine Mad Libs: The McCullough Foundation’s “Landmark” Report

Same recycled claims, shiny new packaging

Here we go again.

A new report from the McCullough Foundation claims to have found the “smoking gun” linking vaccines to autism. Released October 27th, it declares that “combination and early-timed routine childhood vaccination constitutes the most significant modifiable risk factor for ASD,” depicted alongside a pie chart showing that vaccines make up half of the underlying causal factors of autism.

Translation: This report claims that vaccines are the leading preventable cause of autism.

This is completely false. It contradicts decades of rigorous research involving millions of children showing no link between vaccines and autism. But it’s dressed up in sophisticated medical language designed to sound credible to worried parents.

Here’s what the report actually says, how it manipulates evidence to reach its conclusions, and why parents searching for answers deserve better than recycled pseudoscience. Let’s discuss…

---

What Does This Report Actually Say?

The report wraps its claims in dense medical jargon. Here’s the key quote:

“The totality of evidence supports a multifactorial model of ASD in which genetic predisposition, neuroimmune biology, environmental toxicants, perinatal stressors, and iatrogenic exposures converge to produce the phenotype of a post-encephalitic state. Combination and early-timed routine childhood vaccination constitutes the most significant modifiable risk factor for ASD, supported by convergent mechanistic, clinical, and epidemiologic findings, and characterized by intensified use, the clustering of multiple doses during critical neurodevelopmental windows, and the lack of research on the cumulative safety of the full pediatric schedule.”

Let’s decode this:

• “Multifactorial model” means they are claiming that autism has multiple causes (this is actually true, but they’re about to misuse this).

• “Iatrogenic exposures” refers to medical treatments (they mean vaccines).

• “Post-encephalitic state” is a scientifically unsupported description suggesting that autism results from brain inflammation.

• “Most significant modifiable risk factor” inaccurately asserts that there is one main preventable cause (there is not).

• “Convergent mechanistic, clinical, and epidemiologic findings” falsely states that all types of evidence point to the same conclusion (they don’t).

• “Clustering of multiple doses during critical neurodevelopmental windows” repeats the debunked argument that “too many vaccines too soon” causes autism.

• “Lack of research on the cumulative safety of the full pediatric schedule” means they are claiming that no one has studied overall vaccine schedule safety, which is false. The entire schedule has been studied extensively, including by the Institute of Medicine.

Their bottom line: Stop or delay vaccines = prevent autism.

Our key takeaway from this report is that these 308 references confirm what we already know! Several review papers, published in well-respected and peer-reviewed journals, have examined the majority of these references before and concluded there is no association between vaccination and autism.

There is no reason for alarm. Though recently published, this report does not introduce any new concepts or evidence that would support a link between vaccines and autism. Good scientists start with a hypothesis they investigate with an open mind, letting data guide their conclusions. These authors, however, had already concluded that vaccines cause autism before conducting any analysis (and we know this because these authors have a history of promoting anti-vaccine misinformation). They set out to prove their predetermined belief rather than objectively investigating the evidence. That’s not science, and it’s crucial when examining the credibility of the report as a whole.

In the words of Sherlock Holmes… “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.”

Understanding Who’s Behind This

We don’t usually focus on authors’ backgrounds, but understanding the authors’ biases is essential. All of the report’s authors are members of the McCullough Foundation. Per the foundation’s website, they focus on “the intersection of public health, liberty, and defending the US Constitution”—this kind of language is often used by vaccine critics and anti-vaccine advocates to frame public health measures as infringements on individual rights.

More specifically, the author list includes:

• Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH: The foundation’s leader, a cardiologist who became prominent during COVID-19 for spreading vaccine misinformation. He’s had his board certifications revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine for promoting COVID-19 vaccine misinformation;

• John S. Leake, MA: Vice President of the McCullough Foundation with no medical qualifications. In fact, he is a non-fiction author and writes true crime novels;

• Andrew Wakefield, MBBS: Yes, he’s back. The author of the fraudulent 1998 Lancet study that started the entire vaccine-autism myth. His medical license was revoked for research fraud;

• Nicolas Hulscher, MPH: The report’s primary epidemiologist, who joined the McCullough Foundation immediately after completing his MPH in 2024;

• Seven other foundation members and associates with previous publications examining vaccines as a “risk factor” for various diseases and adverse outcomes.

One more thing: The report also received funding from the Bia-Echo Foundation, founded by Nicole Shanahan, who served as RFK Jr.’s running mate in 2024 and shares his skepticism about vaccine safety. The foundation’s mission to turn ‘advocacy into actionable research’ is also noteworthy.

Despite these clear biases, the authors do not declare any conflicts of interest.

Finally, and perhaps most telling, this report was uploaded to Zenodo, which is an open repository where anyone can post documents without scientific scrutiny. It did not undergo rigorous peer review and is not a scientific journal with credibility. Zenodo serves a legitimate purpose for sharing datasets and preprints, but using it to make controversial claims while bypassing the peer review process is telling. When you can’t get published in a legitimate journal or don’t want to field critiques from external scientists reviewing your work, you self-publish, self-promote, and call it “landmark research.”

What We Found When We Examined All 308 References

The report sought to “assess outcomes, exposure quantification, strength and independence of associations, temporal relationships, internal and external validity, overall cohesiveness, and biological plausibility.” These are all legitimate principles for examining and comparing associations across studies. Yet somehow, behind the technical language and epidemiological jargon, they reach completely different conclusions than the scientific consensus.

We manually reviewed every single one of the 308 references—checking the authors and the journals where they were published. When we highlighted all the problematic sources (those written by known anti-vaccine advocates, retracted papers, and preprints, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed sources masquerading as journals), the pattern was striking: starting at citation 193 onward, the list is essentially a sea of red flags.

Pasting in screenshots of the full highlighted citation list would push this essay well over the page limit, but here’s a video of us scrolling through, where we highlight at least 73 of the 308 references (nearly 1 in 4) with at least one of the red flags mentioned above:

Here’s what we discovered:

The Same Names, Over and Over

When we catalogued the authors cited, we noticed that the same small group of anti-vaccine advocates appeared repeatedly:

• Papers by Mark and David Geier (Mark’s medical license was revoked in multiple states for unethical autism “treatments”)

• Studies by Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic (several retracted for manipulation)

• Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield’s analyses (repeatedly debunked and/or retracted)

• The McCullough Foundation authors citing their own previous work

This circular citation creates an illusion of widespread scientific support. They cite their own papers to validate their claims, then use those claims as evidence in new papers. It’s academic three-card Monte—the same bad data shuffled around to look like multiple independent sources.

Instead of fairly examining all relevant research and before deriving conclusions, the authors only focused on studies that agreed with their narrative. This is an extreme case of selection bias, where any study that doesn’t fit their narrative is written off as having “serious methodological flaws”.

The Journal Problem

We also examined where these 308 references were published. Many appeared in:

• Predatory journals without a peer review process

• Pay-to-publish outlets where anyone can be published if they hand over enough $$$

• Journals with editorial boards stacked with anti-vaccine activists

• Non-indexed journals with no scientific credibility

They even included papers from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (a publication known for promoting HIV denialism and other medical misinformation) and the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research–both of which are not indexed in PubMed because they do not meet basic scientific standards.

How They Manipulated the Numbers

In the conclusion, the report claims that of 136 vaccine studies they reviewed, 107 (79%) show a link to autism. Achieving this shocking percentage required some creative accounting:

What They Counted as “Evidence”:

• Retracted papers, including Wakefield’s original fraud

• Animal studies using doses hundreds of times higher than human vaccines

• Test tube experiments that can’t be directly extrapolated as human evidence

• Online parent surveys with self-selected participants and unverifiable data

• The same data published multiple times by the same authors in different journals

• Law reviews

For example, a “study” from TheControlGroup.org (citation 291 in the report) is based on mail-in reports, phone calls, and interviews with self-selected participants. The author, Joy Garner, openly admits she’s “neither a PhD, nor a statistician” but rather “a tech inventor (hardware/video games) and patent-holder with an above-average IQ.” That is certainly not high-quality evidence (or evidence, at all).

Not included in the analysis but included in background materials were references to a news article and a YouTube video (oddly enough, a video from Dr. Sanjay Gupta about how vaccines don’t cause autism).

How They Dismissed Contradictory Evidence

They do cite major studies—including the recent Danish aluminum study that followed 1.2 million children. But these major studies are dismissed, and here’s how:

• The same old “no true unvaccinated” argument: They claim these studies are invalid because they don’t have “genuinely unvaccinated control groups.” With clear evidence that vaccines save lives, withholding vaccines from children merely to create an “uncontaminated control group” would violate clinical equipoise and is extremely unethical. Even if such a study were done, it could create a scenario of classic survivorship bias: unvaccinated children in the control group would be at greater risk of dying from preventable diseases before autistic traits could be diagnosed, while vaccinated children would consistently live long enough to have autistic traits observed. This misleadingly fuels claims that “only vaccinated children develop autism,” when in reality, the unvaccinated group is simply less likely to survive long enough to be observed.

• Statistical nitpicking: They claim that studies that did not find an association with autism used “overadjusted statistical models,” “registry misclassification,” and “ecological confounding”. By claiming that models were “overadjusted”, the authors are insinuating that they have better subject-matter knowledge regarding a causal relationship than other researchers who have examined this relationship before them. In this vague claim, they fail to make explicit the variables they think are overadjustments and do not provide any additional “expert evidence” to back their claims. Though some degree of misclassification is inevitable in any registry-based study, errors large enough to completely erase an association are extremely rare. Ultimately, these are manufactured and technical reasons to dismiss studies that don’t support their conclusions.

• The double standard of verification: They complain that “only a few case-control studies verified vaccination through medical records,” while simultaneously including unverified parent surveys and blog posts to support their conclusions.

As a clear example of their dismissal of reputable evidence, let’s take the Danish aluminum study from earlier this year. This study of 1.2 million children found no link between aluminum in vaccines and 50 different conditions, including autism. Rather than acknowledge this as massive contradictory evidence, they simply dismiss it as having methodological flaws.

They also attempt to discredit vaccine research from Denmark by highlighting Poul Thorsen, a researcher who was arrested for embezzling CDC grant money. Financial fraud is serious, but it doesn’t invalidate the dozens of other studies conducted using Denmark’s comprehensive health registry system. In fact, this is guilt by association: they are dismissing an entire nation’s research infrastructure because of one person’s financial crimes over a decade ago. The hypocrisy here is staggering: they criticize Thorsen’s financial misconduct while including Andrew Wakefield as a co-author–the same Wakefield who was paid by lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers, who manipulated data, and who planned to profit from the MMR vaccine scare he created.

The Burden of Proof Fallacy

The authors exploit a fundamental logical problem: it’s impossible to “prove” a negative. We can’t definitively prove vaccines don’t cause autism any more than we can prove they don’t cause people to become left-handed. No matter how many studies find no association, someone can always demand more evidence.

The authors take advantage of this, arguing that because absolute proof of non-causation is impossible, vaccines must be a cause. The burden of proof lies on those making the claim. After decades of research and millions of children studied, credible evidence for their claim simply doesn’t exist.

The Hypocrisy Cry

The report criticizes mainstream science for supposedly ignoring inconvenient facts, but it ends up doing the same thing. The authors pick out weak or discredited studies that support their views, treat personal stories as solid evidence, and dismiss all research that disagrees with them as flawed or corrupt. They reject large, well-designed studies showing no link between vaccines and autism, claiming those studies have “methodological problems,” yet their own report relies on unverified papers, biased online surveys, and isolated case reports — none of which meet proper scientific standards. To make matters worse, the report doesn’t clearly explain how the papers were chosen, doesn’t check for bias, and doesn’t reveal any financial or personal conflicts of interest. In short, it breaks the very rules of transparency and good science that it accuses others of violating.

The Bottom Line

After reviewing all 308 references and analyzing the report’s methodology, what new evidence does the McCullough Foundation’s report actually present? None.

This isn’t a breakthrough study with novel findings; it is simply a reanalysis of existing literature… the same papers that have already been included in multiple systematic reviews, all of which found no link between vaccines and autism. The authors haven’t conducted new research or uncovered hidden data; they’ve simply reinterpreted known studies through a different lens to support their predetermined conclusion.

Think of it as anti-vaccine Mad Libs: Take existing studies, add selective interpretation, include some non-peer-reviewed sources, dismiss contradictory evidence on technical grounds, bypass peer review, and present it as revolutionary. But the underlying data hasn’t changed; only the interpretation has.

The scientific consensus remains firm because it’s based on overwhelming evidence: studies involving millions of children across multiple countries and decades. The recent Danish study alone followed 1.2 million children and found no association between aluminum-containing vaccines and autism or any of 50 other conditions examined.

What’s most telling is what this report doesn’t include: any new clinical trials, any novel epidemiological data, or any previously unknown biological mechanisms. When your most prominent co-author is Andrew Wakefield—whose original study was retracted for fraud over a decade ago—you’re not advancing science, you’re recycling old (debunked) arguments.

---

For parents seeking answers about the causes of autism, this report offers nothing helpful beyond a continued acknowledgment that autism is complicated and multi-factorial. It doesn’t point to new research directions, doesn’t identify actual risk factors we can address, and doesn’t contribute to our understanding of autism’s complex etiology. It’s simply a repackaging of claims that have been thoroughly investigated and found wanting.

The evidence remains clear: vaccines are safe, vaccines save lives, and vaccines don’t cause autism. This report, despite its length and technical language, doesn’t change any of that.

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science

Want to support our work? The best way is to subscribe to our Substack and share our content. While all our articles are always completely free to read, paid subscriptions help sustain our in-depth reporting on public health and science topics. Thank you for considering it!