DEAR EDITOR:

April is Autism Awareness Month. Autism is a disorder that now today in 2022 1 in 44 children across a spectrum that ranges from very high-functioning people to lower functioning.

Some autistic individuals go to college. But some never graduate from wearing diapers. Some have multiple health issues like gut problems, allergies, immune system deficiencies, mitochondrial dysfunction and seizure disorders interrelated to their “autism,” and some people don’t have any of these problems.

Everything is just bundled under the psychiatric label of “autism” — a label that really serves no one very well and makes

it difficult to understand “autism” from one person to the next.

My son seemed “normal” as a baby. He was hitting his developmental milestones, engaging with us, happy and seemingly healthy until after receiving a set of vaccines at his 12-month checkup. After that, he lost skills he already had acquired and started doing odd things that eventually got him diagnosed with autism. A nagging problem that surfaced for him at this time was he started getting sick all the time. He has struggled with many health problems his entire life (at 21 years old, he became epileptic, and things got really hard).

People like myself are labeled “anti-vaccine” simply because we talk about what happened to our kids. We had our kids vaccinated, and they got sick and became autistic.

Children are expected to get 48 doses of various vaccines by the time they are 6 years old (today 69 doses, plus COVID-19 vax added for those as young as five). Are all these vaccines really necessary? And can every child handle all these vaccines in the time frame and way in which they are administered?

In 1989, the pediatric vaccine schedule started to expand, and it hasn’t stopped. Since that time, autism diagnoses have exploded. Other childhood chronic diseases also have skyrocketed, such as diabetes, asthma, life-threatening allergies and many psychiatric and behavioral maladies. What is happening to our children? Why are they so sick?

Of course, all of this is all chalked up as “coincidence” by mainstream medicine, or it’s blamed on faulty genetics. Despite being the most vaccinated country in the world, we are certainly not the healthiest.

Experts have no idea what causes autism. All they tell us is it’s not the vaccines. They ignore and dismiss parents who have anecdotal stories as well as medical records that tell and show the stories of happy, healthy babies who regressed and became ill following vaccination.

ANDREA KELLER

Canfield