By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

I. RCTs Are Not the Exclusive or Final Criterion

As I showed in my two previous articles, the exclusive focus on double-blind, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by Evidence-Based Medicine is ridiculous because:

There are no proper RCTs of vaccines. Pharma and regulators do not want any data that might contradict their biases and interfere with their profits.

The Contract Research Organizations (CROs) that conduct clinical trials (usually in China and the Third World) work at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry and use a wide variety of tricks to give their clients any results they want.

RCTs perform no better than other types of studies according to the former head of the MHRA in the UK (Michael Rawlins, 2008) and the former head of the CDC in the U.S. (Thomas Frieden, 2017).

Even Bradford Hill, one of the key figures in the development and popularization of modern RCTs, cautioned against overreliance on them, saying, "Any belief that the controlled trial is the only way would mean not that the pendulum had swung too far but that it had come right off the hook" (Hill, 1966).

During World War II, RCTs showed that antibiotics can treat some bacterial infections. By the early 1970s, the pharmaceutical industry figured out how to rig RCTs to produce any results they wish. And so now RCTs are just a way to give the appearance of safety and efficacy to toxic, useless, and deadly drugs.

We can and must do better than this, particularly when it comes to autism research.

II. Activist-Initiated Participatory Science and Samizdat Literature

It turns out that independent autism research is the best example of Activist-Initiated Participatory Science in history - but almost none of the mainstream academics in this field will talk about autism because they don't want to lose their jobs.

From my doctoral thesis:

According to Moore (2006), Activist-Initiated Participatory Science has a long history going back to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that were alarmed by the role of scientists in the chemical and weapons industries. Scientists were both targets of and sometimes participants in these activist social movements.

Activist-Initiated Participatory Science has often been a key feature of anti-toxics/anti-pollution campaigns [Brown, 1992; Bullard, 1994; Lichterman, 1996; and Allen, 2003] and health-related social movement groups [Morello-Frosch, 2006].

Many of these studies could also be considered examples of "popular epidemiology" which is defined as "the process by which laypersons gather scientific data and other information, and also direct and marshal the knowledge of other experts in order to understand the epidemiology of a disease" [Brown, 1992].

As I will show below, in the autism debate some of the most insightful data are from:

parents' groups;

censored, banned, and blacklisted academics and doctors;

independent and foreign scholars;

court proceedings;

registries and testimonials; and

documentaries.

Historically, this was called the "gray literature" in academia and library sciences (neither the mainstream "white literature" nor the completely inaccessible classified "black" documents). But this term does not do justice to the context in which this groundbreaking autism research is being produced. A more fitting description is Samizdat literature. From Grok:

Samizdat literature refers to the clandestine production, reproduction, and distribution of written works, often political, literary, or dissident in nature, that were banned or censored by authorities, particularly in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries during the 20th century.

The term comes from Russian, meaning "self-published" (sam = self, izdat = publishing), and typically involved individuals or small groups secretly copying and sharing manuscripts, poems, essays, or books using typewriters, carbon paper, or other rudimentary methods to evade state censorship.

Independent autism research is bei...