The Record
Reporting, posts and video from the researchers, physicians and organizations leading this fight, in one place. Every item links to the original. Items marked AJF Original are our own reporting.
New papers, preprints and federal data on what is driving autism rates. Latest Autism Studies headlines on the Live Wire
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This is the federal government’s own survey, published in the flagship pediatrics journal, and it shows autism rising faster than at any point in the CDC’s recent data. Children’s Health Defense asks the question the paper leaves open: what is driving it?
For decades families who reported a reaction after a vaccine were told it was a coincidence. HHS is now building a clinic to study those cases and paying doctors to report them. It is the most concrete step yet toward the vaccine-safety research Kennedy promised.
PostThis is the post that took the McCullough Foundation’s new NHIS paper viral. Read it alongside our write-up of the study, which explains what the survey data can and cannot show.
This is the McCullough Foundation’s newest paper, posted today, and it uses the federal government’s own National Health Interview Survey rather than a private dataset. That makes it easy for anyone, including HHS, to check. It is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed yet.
The administration promised a hard look at what causes autism. The money is now committed, and it is worth being precise about where it went: the largest federal award pool of the year funds thirteen projects, and not one of them studies vaccines. The vaccine question sits with a separate, much smaller contract that has yet to report anything.
Nicolas Hulscher has become the reform movement's most-requested expert witness, appearing before both the U.S. Senate and the Michigan House inside a single year. Behind those appearances is a specific, checkable body of published work, and readers deserve to see what it actually consists of rather than take the label 'epidemiologist' on faith.
Families wait months, sometimes years, for an autism evaluation. Kennedy used his Children’s Health Defense keynote to announce a federal research program aimed squarely at that bottleneck.
Aluminum adjuvants are the movement's newest scientific front, a shift from the older thimerosal argument toward the mechanism debate now driving federal research requests.
PostThe Henry Ford Health birth-cohort study was discussed at the September 2025 Senate hearing, became the subject of Del Bigtree’s film “An Inconvenient Study,” and is the data Hulscher later presented to Michigan lawmakers. This paper is the written, citable version of that argument.
Most people will never read a reanalysis. A film reaches them. Bigtree’s documentary is how the Henry Ford study became a household argument, and it is free to watch on The HighWire.
This is the most comprehensive synthesis the reform movement has produced, and its lead author, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher, sits at the center of the expert testimony now reaching Congress and state legislatures.
The vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparison is the study design the reform movement has demanded for years. In 2025 that line of research was placed directly into the congressional record.
