The Perils of Medical Hubris


James Lyons-Weiler

Allison Park, PA

June 22, 2019

Signs that a “Genetic Disorder” is Neither “Genetic” Nor a “Disorder”

There are a few serious disconnects between the science of genetics and the application of that science to medicine, and it’s putting millions of people at risk of exposure to unnecessary medical interventions, including life-long exposure to psychotropic medicines. These exposures are starting at an increasingly young age.

First, I will outline the signs that a “genetic disorder” is not genetic:

(1) The variation in the human genome involves “common variants”. Common genetic variation, whether it be in the form of SNPs, or mitochondrial variation, non-synonymous substitutions or, or insertion/deletions, are ancient, pre-dating not only the development of psychiatry, but pre-dating the development of Western Medicine – and Western Civilization itself. These genetic variants nearly all pre-date the invention of the airplane, cars, houses, and roads.

Examples include common variations in the MTHFR gene, and the 12 SNP loci identified in a study of ADHD that reports the “first” evidence of genetic variation linked to that condition.

While the traits associated with the “disorder” are “heritable”, that is only because those traits are heritable in the human population. It is important to note that it is the specific genetic variation that is associated with the “condition” that is ancient – not just the highly conserved functionally important parts of the genome, and some coverage of that study has confused these two entities.

(2) No grandparents have the condition – and many parents of people with the condition do not have it.

Autism is found in a startling 1 in 56 Americans – with rates as high as 1 in 25 boys. These children’s grandparents certainly do not have the tell-tale signs of not talking, hand-flapping, toe-walking, lack of eye contact, and difficulty in navigating socially. In the 1980s and 1990s, parents of the newly diagnosed children not only never heard of “autism” – many did not even ever hear of any child with the same set of symptoms that their children were exhibiting. Most autism-related genetic variation also involves common variation, although much of the variation is de novo  (i.e., unique to the child)  representing mutations, perhaps from environmental toxins that the parents – or, in the cases of mothers’ DNA, the grandmother – was exposed to.

(3) The genetic variation explains too little of the traits in question.

The common understanding of “genetic” traits – such as eye color – is that they show very specific reproducibility in appearance from generation to generation, even when they are are influenced by multiple loci. This high-fidelity transmission can occur in discrete traits that occur in categories, or in traits that are continuous traits with variations on a theme, within narrow bounds. At the population level, eye color is determined by numerous loci, leading to variations within categories, but the inheritance is very clearly discrete.

Heritability studies in autism only explain around 50% of the inheritance of the phenotypes (traits) that lead to autism. This estimate is done at the population level, not at the individual level – a parent of a child with autism is not 50% autistic. The 12 new loci discovered in ADHD only explain 74% of the trait – meaning that environmental factors have a large influence in determining whether the occurrence of the traits occurs in an individual or not. In autism, the largest studies point to a lot of room for environmental factors. The right types of studies that look at both genetics and environmental exposures in the same individuals have not been conducted in ASD nor in ADHD. If they did, we would know the significance of the interaction term between environmental exposures and genetics.

So there are times when a “genetic” condition cannot be labeled “genetic”. Here are some reasons why a “genetic condition” might not even be the right “condition” to be concerned with.

Source %G %E %missing

Hallmayer 38(h2) 58 4

Sandin 46 54 0

Colvert 56 30 8

Table from “The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism” reviewing %Genetic, %Environment(%E) and %Unexplained (missing) from genetic studies of autism.

(1) The “condition” itself is a sequela of one or more true underlying conditions.

If a person has no problem with specific environmental exposure, but then develops a condition as a result of another condition, they may be confused with having a condition they would not otherwise have. This is a type of co-morbidity, and if the symptoms of the actual underlying, sometimes hidden condition are lessened, the indirect resulting condition may become alleviated. An example is encephalopathy leading to autism involving the exposure of the brain to toxins from food and gut bacteria due to conditions with lesions in the intestine. The intestinal epithelium layer is the largest surface area by which we interact with our environment. Dignoses of ASD can result with neither the parents – nor the doctors – aware that the issue is chronic exposures to toxins leading to brain inflammation.

(2) The risk of the outcome of an environmental exposure is heritable, not the condition, and the severity of the condition is driven by environment.

If a condition comes and goes with changes to exposures to specific environmental triggers, the sensitivity is the primary condition, not the symptoms. An example would be food allergies that lead to altered mental states, or to simple rashes resulting from food or chemical exposures. These sensitivities are often not genetic – the parents may or may not have certain similar sensitivities – and they often involve immunological responses with a component of autoimmunity. Another example would be seasonable allergies and asthma. Remove the trigger, the sensitivity remains, but the root cause is an autoimmunological response made possible by prior exposure to allontigens in the presence of a substance that over-activated the immune system, such as aluminum hydroxide in vaccines.

(3) The”genetic condition” can be modified by changes in diet, restrictions to food triggers, removal of toxins, or other seemingly unrelated improvements.

Studies have now shown long-term benefits from correcting the gut microbiota in autism, leading to a 50% reduction in the severity of ASD symptoms via fecal microbiota transpant (FMT). Not only are the improvements apparently permanent, they also appear to help every child. As the moms have been saying for years: Heal the Gut, Heal the Mind.

The risk of psychosis from ADHD psychotropic medicines is estimated to be 1 in 660. In my book, “Cures vs. Profits”, I have a chapter on ADHD entitled “Overdiagnosis of ADHD: It’s their mind, not yours” and also a chapter on FMT. Clearly the improvements made by FMT are historic, and every parent of a child with ASD would do well to read as much you can about FMT. I’ll end this article with a list of links to articles on the ASD studies as a start toward what will hopefully be a better future for kids with ASD and their families.

I wonder if FMT might have permanent benefit for ADHD as well?

Related links:





The Toxins We Avoid and That Concern Us the Most

In a very (VERY) unscientific, informal survey conducted among those who follow my Facebook page, I asked two questions, in separate posts

Question #1.

“Other than toxins in vaccines and glyphosate and lead and fluoride, which corporate toxins do you avoid the most? #CorporateToxins”

After five hours, the replies numbered 217, and the results were very interesting.


In spite of specifically excluding toxins in vaccines, and glyphosate (an herbicide), a signals reflecting those concerns seem to push through the collective psyche.

Artificial dyes, “fragrances”, aluminum, and artificial sweeteners ranked highest followed by GMO’s, flame retardants (pthalates), detergents, and the list goes on (See Figure 1, above).

The second question followed:

“Five hours ago, I asked an open-ended question: “Other than toxins in vaccines, glyphosate, and lead and fluoride, which corporate toxins do you avoid the most?” In 217 mentions, the toxins you are most concerned about are listed below. NEW QUESTION: Of the toxins listed below, WHICH >>THREE<< CONCERN YOU THE VERY MOST?”

The question was met with a large number of “why only three?”.  Fair question: to quantify the toxins that people avoid the most is different from the toxins that concern us the most.  I wanted to characterize the respondent’s priorities in the following terms: of the toxins people typically avoid, which concern you the most?

In the 356 mentions of toxins that rank highest, the following result is telling:

Of the top four, mercury and aluminum came through as highest concerns – alongside herbicides and GMOs.

So, in spite of instructions to leave vaccines and glyphosate out of their concerns, the respondents are clearly very focused on the toxins found in vaccines even if they come from other sources.

I’ll have thoughts to share on this later.

James Lyons-Weiler

Allison Park, PA


To School Administrators: Why The Unvaccinated Should be Welcome in Your School

YESTERDAY IN OREGON, I gave testimony, registered as neither for nor against, to educate the Ways and Means Committee on scientific facts relevant one of the most draconian bills conceived (HB3063). Oregon has classically been among the most politically diverse and yet tolerant society among all of the US States. The aim of the bill is to remove religious and personal exemptions recognized by the State for school attendance after a handful of measles cases, many in adults. The argument in support of the bill is that immunocompromised kids attending school might become infected with measles, mumps, pertussis, or any of the other allegedly “vaccine preventable diseases”.

The religious exemption removal is breathtaking in its scope, and will likely be found to be unconstitutional if passed. Clearly, if the medical community fails to attribute vaccine adverse events to the vaccine, the law will prevent parents from exercising a personal exemption after a vaccination that their child is vaccine intolerant that their own doctor believes is not due to the vaccine.

A couple of pediatricians gave testimony before mine describing how terrible pertussis infection is in very young infants, and they claimed that vaccination could prevent those infections.

Originally I had intended to testify on asymptomatic measles transmission, but in my two minute period I felt compelled to use time to address the fact that TdaP and DTaP are recognized as failed vaccines and that they can create carriers of pertussis infection without symptoms. These potential asymptomatic carriers including anyone who is vaccinated, as has been robustly shown by a baboon study. This includes school nurses, teachers, pediatricians and ob/gyn doctors as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles and older siblings of newborn infants, and so pointed out that I found it odd that out of the thousands of non-vaccinating families I have come to know, none have told me that they have had a pertussis infection, and yet here we see families who receive allopathic care including vaccination against pertussis have infants that develop pertussis infections. I suggested that perhaps they should consider mandating that doctors be tested weekly for pertussis infection to find the hidden reservoir of asymptomatic carriers.

In a compelling piece of testimony, a school Superintendent told the Ways and Means Committee that he would not comply with the exclusionary policies that would result if the bill were to pass. His reasoning was that the school would by denying that child access to education, and that his school would lose federal funding for every child that left the school to be homeschooled.

In the hallway afterwords, I was interviewed by the press, and during that time I brought up the reality that science shows that like pertussis, like the mumps, measles can be transmitted via asymptomatic carriage and transmission (See For Health Officials and School Boards: Asymptomatic Transmission is Real). I made the point that the logic of excluding the unvaccinated from schools is therefore dangerous because schools cannot know that they have an active transmission chain of measles, mumps, pertussis or chickenpox unless some kids develop symptoms, and therefore excluding the unvaccinated places the immunocompromised at higher danger of unknowingly being exposed. Therefore, the unvaccinated are a boon to public health. This reality shows the fatal flaw in the logic of excluding the unvaccinated from school: it only works if you deny asymptomatic transmission.

So why would vaccines, which most people think were designed to prevent infections, lead to subclinical infections and to asymptomatic transmission? Part of the answer is that the current vaccines from companies with contracts from the CDC are getting old. The MMR mumps vaccine came on the market in the early 1960s and still targets the Jeryl Lynn strain of the mumps. A whistleblower case in the Commonwealth of PA alleges that the mumps component is now so weak that scientists at Merck were forced to spike human samples with rabbit antibodies to bring the apparent efficacy of the MMR against mumps up to the desired 96%. In other words, Merck (allegedly) defrauded the FDA and thereby the US population. If they are found guilty of fraud, legislatures who have mandated the MMR without personal and religious exemptions will look foolish, or worse.

The people who use vaccine exemptions often do so after first-hand experience with vaccine injury. CDC classifies febrile seizures as mild, and yet they can lead to seizure disorders and can kill. CDC denies that vaccines cause autism (although not all vaccines have been tested for causing autism and the studies conducted on the MMR are truly poor science).

In Salem yesterday, after I left to fly back to Pittsburgh, the vote passed out of the first Ways and Means Committee along party lines. Democrats who want to pass legislation mandating this and other flawed products are mandating them not only for Democrats but also for children of Republicans, for Independents, and for Greens.

There is a strong message here for those who seek truth. Vaccines are not only not safe for everyone. Vaccines also perpetuate the perception of the need for vaccination while perpetuating invisible transmission chains that can kill the immunocompromised via asymptomatic transmission. The palliations that the pediatricians will provide medical exemptions are unfathomably untrue: the CDC’s misinformation campaign that “Vaccines Are Safe” requires vaccine risk, injury and death denialism, and medical doctors are facing persecution in California where Senator Pan was pushing a bill the very same day as HB3063 to restrict medical exemptions because, according to him, there are too many medical exemptions.

This issue is quickly become a very risk, divisive and partisan issue. I know ten people in Oregon who told me yesterday that they left the Democratic Party. A lifelong Democrat myself, I left last year and registered as an Independent.

There is an even more dire message here for Democrats: The vaccine injured population grows every week with more and more families joining as a result of vaccine injury. These families have massive amounts of pent up anger and resentment which has been building up since Congress indemnified Pharma and doctors for vaccine injury.

I predict that if the bill passes in Oregon, it will be eventual political undoing of the Democratic party in that legislature.

I predict that if HB3063 passes, the blame for all vaccine injuries and deaths from 2019 may fall at the feet of the Democratic Party, and pending a party line vote to pass the bill, that is, in my somber but professional view, precisely where the responsibility will belong.

The Senator who brought HB3063 forward had previously pulled a similar bill in 2015 because the discussion centered on the science instead of what she called the health of the people of Oregon. The health and lives of the vaccine intolerant and the vaccine risk aware matter. I did some calculations while in Oregon: there are between 35,000-40,000 families who are not fully vaccinated. Of these, if 80% stopped vaccinating due to injuries, Oregon can expect between 18,000-22,000 new vaccine injuries per year. Vaccines risk is likely genetic. While vaccines do not check your party affiliation before they injure, they also create political activists who are vaccine risk aware, and they turn Democrats into Independents or Republicans.

Listen to Oregon State Senator Dallas Heard’s passionate plea to his colleagues made just prior to the vote.





Measles Outbreak Exposes National Security Readiness Problems and False Narratives

The US military intelligence and Homeland Security community is surely aware that enemies of the US exist who desire to harm American citizens by any manner possible. Images of trucks traveling through major metropolitan areas misting the air with bioterrorism weapons are enough to make any parent shudder and keep Homeland Security policy makers awake at night.

Recently, former Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge offered their views in USA Today that the measles cases in the US represent a national security threat. Citing H1N1 flu as a previous example of a deadly disease that provided a past scare, they refer to the measles as the current deadly disease.

While their concerns over bioterrorism and national security are warranted, their hyperbole over measles morbidity and mortality is unfounded. According to CDC, the US say 450-500 deaths per year prior to 1960, in a population of 180,000,000 citizens. Any of those citizens who experinced measles and survived developed lifelong immunity. This contrasts with people vaccinated against measles with the MMR who now face news that as adults, they, too, might “need” an MMR booster. The US believes they are dependent on Merck to save us from measles and mumps – and to the extent the previously vaccinated require boosters for bouts of temporary immunity of increasingly short duration, the dependency is a construct, created by trust given to a corporation who has betrayed the public health trust time and again, with 55,000 fraud-based deaths from Vioxx.

Why is there only one measles vaccine in the US, and why does the Lieberman/Ridge narrative ring hollow?

In my view, they have missed their mark completely by portaying the measles infections as a threat to national security in part because measles is not a deadly disease in the US. But more importantly, as I tweeted out last month, the fact that the entire recently vaccinated crew of a Navy ship (The USS Fort McHenry) is still quarantined at sea after her crew developed paratoditis – mumps in all but name – means that the MMR vaccine itself may be a serious thrat to national security (this point was seconded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr).

In reality, every jab creates another patient (civilian or otherwise) dependent on future vaccination for their immunity, and there are signs of waning efficacy due to mutations that occur every year in both the wild type measles and mumps viruses and in the vaccine type, propagated by serial passages in cell lines. The evidence is all around us: outbreaks of mumps and measles in highly vaccinated populations, evidence of asymptomatic infection and transmission of both viruses and the pertussis bacterium, pointing to the vaccinated as unknowing reservoirs of wild-type pathogens which cannot be eradicated due to the use of mismatched vaccines that make wild-type imfections silent in some, and more deadly to others.

The fact is that the US has no readiness plan to deal with waning vaccine efficacy of aging vaccines other than more increasingly futile boosters. And that is no plan at all.

Billions of Dollars Heisted in False Zika Narrative

The horrific encephalopathy in newborns reported following whole-cell pertussis vaccination that led to the development of acellular pertussis vaccines was later denied by a false narrative of “unsubstantiated reports” and “rumors”. For vaxtremists, only issues detected with epidemiological studies occur – and even when no such has been conducted, the absence of evidence carries the same weight as a gold standard double-blinded prospective randomized clinical trial. This habit is unscientific and unacceptable.

In 2016, during the months following Zika season in Brazil, no increase in microcephaly was detected. No increase in microcephaly occurred outside of Brazil, either – even during the 2015 microcephaly scare. What did occur in 2015/2016 – which I can prove with emails- is that the scientist involved in a new whole-cell pertussis vaccine study in the slums of NE Brazil – the epicenter of the microcephaly outbreak – was informed of a concern that perhaps her whole-cell pertussis vaccine was causing microcephaly. The cessation of that research could explain the sudden end to microcephaly in Brazil.

The basis of the CDC’s conclusion that Zika infection caused the increase in microcephaly came in the form of a report from one aborted fetus. The autopsy was not conducted in the US, and the result has not been reproduced. We do not know the incidence of MC in cases of Zika infection, nor vice versa – especially given no increased in microcephaly in 2016 in spite of infection rates on par with 2015, something is amiss.

The fact is that the Lieberman/Ridge analysis is shallow because even a minor scratch beneath the surface shows a repeated pattern of the use of fear and exaggerated threats to maintain a multi-billion dollar governmental complex via which corporations routinely access billion dollar contracts. Since CDC and health departments are unwilling to provide full-spectrum public health policies founded on Science instead of shallow, one-note songs that lead inevitably and singularly to more vaccinations, the agenda is to use a cynical paternalism to induce an expectation of widespread unquestioning compliance for the eventuality of a bioterrorism attack.

The problem with this approach is found in its cynicism. Most vaccine refusal is derived from religious objections to the practice and to the manifestation of ill effects of vaccines that occur in some people which, in spite of the CDC’s best effortd, are now impossible to deny. The awkward, ineffectual and legally questionable practice of government induced – and possibly coerced – censorship of discuasions of vaccine risk on social media has only served to increase distrust of government public health policies, compounding the mistrust derived from vaccine injury and death denialism amidst the growing recognition of flaws and alleged fraud in vaccine safety studies.

If maintaining bioterrorism readiness is to be used to motivate support for increasingly extreme vaccination policies, which re: measles includes no plan to deal with subclinical infections and asymptomatic transmission, nor any plan to accommodate those who will be injured, then certainly a fair and salinet question is how much of the billions bilked from the US Treasury for an unnecessary Zika vaccine is being used to create readiness for a recombined Frankenstein bioweapon? Where was US readiness in 2014 and 2015 during the largest Ebola outbreak in history?

The lack of readiness was then, is now and will be attributable to a private industry that has captured public agencies, has hijacked Congress, and that has dictated massively profitable agendas that have alienated and dischenfranchised much of the US public.

I and others have been calling for safer vaccines and have laid out a clear path to renewing the public trust. These voices do not care to perpetuate contracts for Merck, GSK, or other vaccine developers. We care about accountability and product improvement, which are impossible without product liability.

Summary: Vaccine injury and death denial-based policies have failed, and mandates without exemptions designed to mask transmission chains will only serve to increase vaccine risk awareness and will further fuel mistrust of vaccine-centric public health policies in the US and abroad. Attempts to sustain public support for vaccination-based public health policy based on gross exaggerations of risks to childhood illnesses is irresponsible because it will likely backfire and reduce the public’s confidence in calls to action when national security is a under sincere and credible imminent threat.





Why I Use the Term “Fascism” – and Why I Am Unafraid To Do So


WHEN GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS WORK TOGETHER to advance and perpetuate their power and wealth at the cost of the average citizen’s well-being, we have a few terms that we can use. Some use “corporatism”, but, in a capitalist society, being pro-corporation has a positive sheen. It’s intermingled with being “pro-American”.

The corporatism that has a stranglehold on our regulatory bodies has occured via a process call “regulatory capture”, which means nothing less that a take-over of certain arms of the executive branch of government. Regulatory agency directors are appointed, not elected, and thus pro-corporate policies can take hold and stay in place as long as the officials in the agency remain in place. That’s why CDC can get away with scientific fraud, with not doing the right science, or even with not doing more of the wrong science. They are guarding the bodies – and this will eventually be their legacy: criminals acting at the behest of corrupt and greedy corporations hiding behing the guise of protecting public health, when, in reality, they are protecting contracts for aging and increasingly ineffective vaccines.

One step that is taken by fascist dictators is to dissolve the separatation of powers. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (aka “Vaccine Court”) is administered by the HHS. They are an arm of the executive branch that expresses HHS (executive) policy. This is wrong. There is a move afoot to increase the use of “Special Masters”in many areas of law that impact liability – and when corporations write the rules, they remove themselves as defendants, make the government the defendant, and the corporatist government arm that is the defendant (as HHS is in every vaccine injury case), the defendant oversees the “judges”. That turns my stomach.

Every American citizen whose grandfather- or grandmother- fought European fascism in World War II should bristle and act upon how corporations have all but consumed US regulatory agencies. Those who stand to profit from this neofascism actually applaud regulatory capture. But in a US in which corporations can make unlimited donations to political candidates, including via dark-money organizations and SUPER PACS, either we work to change the rules, or will submit to a new form of government of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation.

It’s all too easy to throw the term “fascism” across party lines, as if undue corporate influences that better the position of candidates in one party is more evil than the same level of undue corporate influences that better the positions of candidates in another party. As fascists keep the people separarated and confused along “party lines” defined by token divisive variations on social norms, partisans tend to fall into the trap of demonizing their fellow citizens across party lines without being able to see the puppet strings of those who want to keep the populus separated, numb and uninformed to the chronic pilfering of our wealth, and our health.

I honestly wonder if modern fascists realize they are fascists?

James Lyons-Weiler, PhD


Allison Park, PA

