Here are some statistics about children in the United States:

• 1 in 3 are overweight1

• 1 in 5 are obese2

• 1 in 6 have learning disabilities

• 1 in 11 have asthma

• 1 in 59 have autism

• 1 in 10 have ADHD

• 1 in 20 have food allergies

• 1 in 2 children have a chronic illness

American children are the most vaccinated on the planet, yet have more diseases and disabilities than other Western children.

For years, I have been asking why the CDC does not study whether vaccines are responsible for the autism and other chronic health problems children are suffering from. For instance, back in the 1970s autism was occurring in the United States at a rate of 1 in 10,000 people. Today it is 1 in 59. That’s a 169- fold increase in autism in just 45 years.

The naysayers claim autism is increasing because of better diagnosis. That is just plain wrong. Talk to any teacher who has been teaching since the 1970s or 1980s, and they can tell you the increase in sick children is real.

My own experience matches theirs: When I was a young doctor, I saw very few autistic children; now, it’s much more common.

How can we tell if children are being made ill by receiving too many vaccines? The gold standard in clinical trials is to conduct a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in which two groups of subjects are randomly chosen to receive either a medical therapy (in this case vaccines) or an inactive placebo. But that study is currently impossible to do because too many doctors believe it is unethical to not vaccinate everyone.

So if we can’t conduct gold standard testing on vaccines, what can we do?

The answer is easy: We can compare vaccinated to unvaccinated children and see if there are significant health differences between them. This is called an observational study (as opposed to a clinical trial).

Of course, the naysayers would then say that even if there were an association between sicker kids and vaccines, it doesn’t prove anything. And that is, to some extent, correct. Association between two incidences in a medical study does not prove causation.

But a strong association would certainly point to causation, and necessitate further study.