How a CDC epidemiologist said evidence linking the MMR vaccine to autism was discarded and hidden from the public
The story that unfolded between 2013 and 2014, as told by Dr. Brian Hooker and centered around CDC epidemiologist Dr. William Thompson, reads like a textbook illustration of what critics describe as a self-protecting ecosystem, a tight orbit between regulatory bodies, pharmaceutical influence, and scientific publishers. Regardless of where one stands on the broader debate, the narrative exposes a pattern recognizable in many industries: institutions shielding themselves from internal contradiction.
According to Hooker, the first crack in that wall came in 2013, when he received an unexpected phone call from Thompson, an official who, years earlier, had dismissed his concerns. Hooker recalls Thompson speaking with the weight of someone trying to unload a burden he had carried far too long:
“In 2013, I received a … call from one Dr. William Thompson, the same epidemiologist who brusquely dismissed my concerns about vaccines and autism many years earlier.”
“Dr. Thompson was very different and, in a way, sought forgiveness for his role in the CDC’s cover-up of the relationship between vaccines and autism.”
Thompson, in Hooker’s telling, opened the door to an archive of hidden history. He handed over thousands of pages, emails, analyses, drafts, documents that, according to Hooker, revealed data the CDC had quietly buried.
“Bill Thompson released to me thousands of pages of emails, reports, and results of the studies he conducted.”
“He also revealed the actual background documents showing that the CDC was indeed finding a statistically significant relationship between thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, as well as the MMR vaccine and neurodevelopmental disorders.”
What Hooker describes next is not just scientific disagreement, it is an institutional reflex. It is the instinct of bureaucracies to eliminate variables that threaten a predetermined conclusion. And according to him, this reflex took physical form.
“The co-authors of the study agonized over what to do with such a compelling finding.”
“To Coleen Boyle, one of the senior authors of the paper, it was easy: simply roll a bunch of blue recycle bins into the conference room and SHRED all evidence of the finding.”
Here the alleged dynamic becomes clear: regulatory bodies manage information, not just data; they manage narratives. And the surest way to control a narrative is to erase its inconvenient origins.
Hooker says Thompson not only preserved these documents but also guided him toward the same datasets used in the original analysis, ensuring Hooker could reproduce the results independently.
“He also showed me to the proverbial front door of the CDC where I could directly request public use data sets in order to repeat the analyses of the CDC, which I did straight away for the MMR vaccine.”
When Hooker ran the numbers, he says he found exactly what Thompson had seen over a decade earlier.
“When I received the data from CDC officials in 2014 … I saw that African-American males receiving the MMR vaccine on time were over 3.5 times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis compared to those boys who received their first MMR vaccine after their third birthday.”
“I immediately called Bill and his reaction was: oh, you found it.”
“He found the same results on November 7th, 2001.”
But this story doesn’t end with regulatory suppression. It continues with the publishing world, which functions as the final bottleneck through which scientific narratives must pass. Gatekeeping—whether driven by caution, pressure, or institutional loyalty—decides what becomes “settled science” and what is discarded as fringe.
According to Hooker, the moment Thompson publicly acknowledged his role and supported Hooker’s analysis, the publication that had accepted Hooker’s paper pivoted sharply.
“The same day that Bill issued a statement through his attorney revealing the cover-up and supporting my paper, the journal [Translational Neurodegeneration] decided to remove my paper from its website saying initially that it was a threat to public health, then changing the message to a trumped-up false charge that I had an undisclosed conflict of interest.”
What followed was a swift and total retraction—a process Hooker describes as procedurally hollow, predetermined, and orchestrated to redirect attention away from the whistleblower’s claims.
“By October 6, 2014, the journal fully retracted the paper after a sham peer review process.”
“The retraction changed the narrative of the CDC whistleblower story so the mainstream media could report on the flawed and fraudulent paper of Dr. Brian Hooker rather than the original flawed and fraudulent paper of CDC scientists.”
The result, as Hooker frames it, is not merely a scientific dispute but a portrait of systemic insulation:
Regulatory bodies accused of burying findings.
A whistleblower allegedly holding onto records others tried to destroy.
A journal retracting a paper on the same day its findings gained public support.
Media focusing on the retraction rather than the allegations that prompted it.
Whether one sees this as proof of corruption, bureaucratic self-preservation, or something else entirely, the narrative Hooker presents is fundamentally about genocidal power, how it is protected, how it circles the wagons, and how it can crush whatever threatens the stability of its institutions.
Authored By: Global GeoPolitics
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