It reads like a mystery thriller, a lone whistleblower, akin to All the President’s Men’s Deep Throat, spills the government’s secrets. But like the film Contagion, what’s at risk is the health of millions!
But fiction it is not. This remarkable chronicle wades directly into the maelstrom that is the vaccine/autism controversy. Kent Heckenlively’s Inoculated: How Science Lost Its Soul in Autism may initially read like a spy novel but unfolds to a complete accounting of all the actions and documents that comprise a government cover-up, putting a vast number of the nation’s children at great risk to trigger autism once inoculated with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Heckenlively, a science teacher and attorney, uses both of these exacting skills to demonstrate how the Centers for Disease Control’s deliberate choice to inaccurately report test results that showed a distinct correlation between the vaccine and increased autism statistics — and a lack of courage by those who could have spoken up in the early 2000s when indicators began to surface, but instead stayed silent or deliberately perverted the truth, have resulted in an entire generation of autism-disabled children — and a fast-rising tide of more.
Beginning with whistleblower Dr. William Thompson, a CDC scientist with the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, revealing the manipulated and falsified results to Dr. Brian Hooker, a college biology professor, scientist and autism-activist with an autistic son, Heckenlively traces how the red flags arising in the true results should have spurred international concern, and considerably more vital science to spotlight what was really happening. Instead, the government administrators, so deeply committed to the idea that vaccines are the only path to keeping the world’s people saved from harm — and Big Pharma — went into overdrive to bury the information and stem any further research. Heckenlively, furthermore, shows how bad science only compounded the problem.
Heckenlively, the father of a child stricken with autism after being vaccinated—who remains unable to speak—reviewed some of the most damaging government documents with deep emotion as he realized that had the information been made public in 2000 when the initial indicators were surfacing, he and his wife could have made informed choices that could have saved his children from their struggles.
As he further notes, “there would have been no ‘Vaccine War’ or dismissal of autism parents as ‘anti-science’—just researchers and parents working together to find solutions for disabled children.”
Whether you already believe there was a government cover-up, that vaccines can be harmful to children—or you haven’t made up your mind, you owe yourself a look at the facts in Inoculated.
ABOUT KENT HECKENLIVELY
5Kent Heckenlively is a science teacher, an attorney, and a founding contributing editor of Age of Autism. During his undergrad years at St. Mary’s College, Heckenlively worked for U.S. Senator Pete Wilson and was the school’s Rhodes Scholar candidate. In law school at Golden Gate University, he was a writer and editor of the school’s law review, spending his summers working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco.
Heckenlively served on the Executive Council of the San Ramon Valley Education Association for several years and was the Health and Safety Committee Chairman for the teacher’s union, representing more than 1,600 educators, therapists, and psychologists
In the fight against chronic diseases, Kent finds great wisdom in the strategy used by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Mandela believed change could only come about when one engaged in satyagraha, a Buddhist concept which insists on speaking the absolute truth, while at the same time practicing ahimsa, a commitment not to harm those who might be your adversaries.
In November of 2014, Heckenlively published PLAGUE: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth About Human Retroviruses, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases, with Dr. Judy Mikovits, a 20-year government scientist and former head of the Lab of Anti-Viral Drug Mechanisms at the National Cancer Institute. The book quickly became one of the best-selling virus books of the last 30 years and has garnered extensive praise from the patient community and leading physicians.
“I must confess that the two years spent writing PLAGUE have changed many of my views,” said Heckenlively. “I’ve been deeply impressed by the humanity and compassion of so many scientists, while at the same time have become more keenly aware of the political and financial obstacles that prevent scientists from making the kind of significant contributions to the well-being of society that they dreamed of when they began their careers
