In this interview, J.B. Handley, founder of Generation Rescue, discusses autism and what he believes can be done to help turn this tragic trend around. This is also the topic of his book, “How to End the Autism Epidemic.”

A Parent’s Worst Nightmare

Handley’s son has autism, and his personal experience ultimately motivated him to write this book. He describes the family’s experience, and what led them to take a nonconventional approach to their son’s treatment:

“My wife and I were what I would characterize as very mainstream parents, which meant that when our second son was born in 2002, we basically handed him to our pediatrician and did whatever he told us to do, which meant following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommended [vaccine] schedule.

We started to watch our son decline physically after every vaccine appointment at 2 months, at 4 months, at 6 months and at 12 months. He got eczema. His belly became distended. He had sleep disturbances. He had dark circles under his eyes. We kept going back into the doctor and saying, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening with him? Where is this coming from?’

We could never get a plausible explanation for what was happening. Then, shortly after my son turned 1 year old, he started to decline neurologically. He lost his words. He lost many of his normal mannerisms. He started doing these really unusual behaviors.

He started craving certain foods — all these things that somebody like you knows are red flags for a child heading towards autism. But at the time, we were ignorant to this and our pediatrician didn’t help us at all.

We were living in Northern California. We took our son to University of California San Francisco (UCSF) where they diagnosed him with severe autism. At the same time, we visited a Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) doctor in Pleasanton … Dr. Lynne Mielke.

We were presented with two completely different worlds. At UCSF, autism was genetic. It was lifelong. He was likely to be institutionalized. There was nothing we could do about it, except to prepare ourselves.

But in Pleasanton, thirty miles away, autism was triggered by vaccines. It was an environmental illness. If you vetted the diet and started to do things differently, some of these children recovered completely. Here’s my wife and I, both educated at Stanford, both very mainstream, and we’re put at these crossroads for what to do for our son …

In our case, we went to the facts. We went to the reality of how our son had declined after being on a normal path of development. We ultimately made a decision that we did believe that the vaccines triggered our son’s autism. We did believe that biomedical interventions could work for him.

That opened a whole new door to us. Soon after that, in ’05, my wife and I founded Generation Rescue. The reason that we founded it was to share the information that we had learned with other parents. That’s where our journey began.”

Recovery Is Possible

Today, Handley’s son is 16, and has made dramatic improvement through biomedical intervention. He regained his speech, learned to read, and can go on long family trips without incident.

Still, he continues to be affected by autism, and this is a reality for many parents. While some children are able to make a complete recovery, others do not. Most, however, can make improvements. Even at 16, Handley’s son continues to improve, and new biomedical interventions are becoming available. Prevention is key, though, and making vaccination decisions are an important part of that.

“I think, in many ways, that the jury is in on this. My book is bolstered by the fact that two of the titans of the mainstream autism medical community have changed their tune through depositions, and now support the things that parents have been saying for decades.

I think that those two scientists [Dr. Andrew Zimmerman and Dr. Richard Kelley], who people don’t know about, and the way they’ve changed their tune are going to have a dramatic impact on this debate.

We’re talking about scientists from the Kennedy Krieger Institute at Johns Hopkins University, arguably the pre-eminent institution in the country focused on autism, who are saying exactly what parents are saying — that in a vulnerable subset of children, vaccines are, in fact, the trigger of autism.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6nwXs8yFcc