The conservative Christian website Canberra Declaration has published claims by discredited researchers that “cumulative childhood vaccination schedule is a modifiable risk factor for autism spectrum disorder.”
The story by Kurt Mahlburg, “Autism Linked to Childhood Vaccinations in 79% of Research: Landmark Meta-Study,” is based upon the work of doctors with a history of disputed claims about Covid and Autism.
The publisher of the study, the McCullough Foundation, is led by one of the authors, Dr Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist who had his certification revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 2025 for his misinformation during Covid. This included advocacy for treating Covid with hydroxychloroquine (a malaria medicine) and ivermectin (a treatment for parasites). In a Jo Rogan appearance, McCullough claimed that the Covid epidemic was planned.
Andrew Wakefield, another author of the study, was struck off as a doctor in the UK for the fraudulent Lancet study that claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
The Lancet formally retracted Wakefield’s 1998 paper in 2020.
Lead author Nicholas Hulscher has been cited for publishing unfounded conclusions about the effects of covid vaccines, for example, in extrapolating the excess risk of myocarditis attributable to vaccination in the population.
There is interesting developments in current research into Autism, in particular the conceptualisation of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as a “cluster” rather than a single, uniform diagnosis. This is a move away from the idea DSM-5 that there is only one spectrum. This is presently a contested set of ideas.
Each cluster may respond to different treatments, and it may be that we are about to learn a great deal more about Autism.
Separating research into Autism from culture wars, which are in part a hangover from the Covid era, is not only sensible but a foundation for good commentary on this human condition.