It took seven years for a "gender affirming care" practitioner at Children's Hospital Los Angeles to disclose the politically inconvenient results of her federally funded study: Gender-confused children on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones do not show mental-health improvement.

But it took even longer for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention senior scientist to disclose he and colleagues withheld a "statistically significant finding" from their peer-reviewed study of autism and measles, mumps and rubella vaccination in 2004: African-American males inoculated under age 3 had an increased risk for the disorder.

William Thompson's 2014 admission through whistleblower law firm Morgan Verkamp, which followed the release of secret recordings of his phone conversations with Simpson University biologist and autism researcher Brian Hooker, prompted attempted takedowns for the next several years in the media and pro-vaccine movement.

It appears in the 2016 documentary Vaxxed by British pediatric gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, which was deplatformed by Robert De Niro's Tribeca film festival.

Thompson's mea culpa takes on renewed relevance in the wake of President Trump yanking Dave Weldon's nomination as CDC director last week because "he did not have the votes" in the Senate, a decision Weldon traces in part to his interest as a Republican congressman, 20 years ago, in Wakefield's lightning-rod research on MMR vaccine side effects.

Investigative journalist Jon Rappoport elaborated on the connections in a Substack essay after Weldon's nomination died. 

"Hey Dave, now that they dumped you on the side of the road […] how about giving inquiring minds a hand?" he wrote.

The CDC, which has a special page dedicated to MMR vaccination and autism, transferred Thompson in 2016 to the Division of Viral Hepatitis, where he remains a senior scientist. He has published several papers related to COVID-19 but not on vaccines.

Thompson told Just the News the CDC prohibits him from answering questions without permission, including whether it subjected him to stricter conditions at any point following his 2014 statement, which said the CDC gave him a "performance-based award" after he blew the whistle, and that "I have experienced no pressure or retaliation" from the agency.

"Ask the press office," he said when asked where the CDC gag order is documented. The agency didn't respond to queries.

Folic-acid deficiency and a generic too cheap to invest in further trials

The mainstream media and scientists have long looked for alternative explanations for autism to marginalize the vaccine narrative, and they recently found one: folic-acid deficiency based on a brain-receptor problem in children who develop autism.

CBS Evening News in mid-February featured doctors pursuing the hypothesis including pediatric neurologist Richard Frye, who is studying the off-label use of leucovorin.

A generic drug derived from folic acid that is prescribed for chemotherapy's side effects, leucovorin has produced speech improvements in autistic children in three randomized controlled trials in France, India and America, the latter led by Frye.

The problem is the drug is so cheap that there's no profit incentive to invest in the larger clinical trials needed for Food and Drug Administration approval to treat autism, Frye said.

Now, Weldon's derailed nomination – in the context of the medical establishment's two decades of trying to eradicate the vaccine-autism narrative – may have temporarily sucked the oxygen out of the room for alternative explanations for autism.

The CDC study coauthored by Thompson claimed similar percentages of children with autism (70.5%) and without (67.5%) were vaccinated for MMR between 12 and 17 months, and "similar proportions" each before 18 and 24 months, "the age by which atypical development is usually recognized in children with autism."

"No significant associations for either of these age cutoffs were found for specific case subgroups, including those with evidence of developmental regression," said the paper,  published in the American Academy of Pediatrics' journal Pediatrics.

While the full paper is hidden behind a paywall, the abstract page shows no sign of update 11 years after Thompson disclosed the findings for African-American males under 3.

The only apparent change is a 2018 retraction demand posted to the abstract's comments section by autism researcher Toby Rogers, now a Brownstone Institute fellow.

"I have a boss who's asking me to lie"

In one of Thompson's surreptitiously recorded phone calls with autism researcher Hooker, the CDC senior scientist said "the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism" that it was 10 years behind on research. 

Hooker's own study, which reanalyzed the CDC data used by Thompson, found the same effect on African-American boys but starting with inoculation before age 2. It was published by Translational Neurodegeneration the same day as Thompson's law firm statement.

The journal retracted it several weeks later, citing "undeclared competing interests" and "the validity of the methods and statistical analysis." 

Hooker told CNN the CDC study excluded children without birth certificates. The agency said it gave results for "all children initially recruited for the study" and a subset with birth certificates, which included "more complete information on race" and other traits. 

The CDC was not being "transparent" and Congress should demand its data for an "independent constructor" to review and have autism advocates "intimately involved in the study," Thompson told Hooker. "I have a boss who's asking me to lie," and if Thompson were "forced to testify … I'm not going to lie. I basically have stopped lying."

Thompson's since-removed statement through his law firm takes pains to emphasize his support for childhood vaccination in general. 

"My concern has been the decision to omit relevant findings in a particular study for a particular sub­ group for a particular vaccine," he said.

"I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information" from the Pediatrics paper, he said. "Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed."

Thompson spoke with Hooker over 10 months about CDC research on "vaccines and neurodevelopmental outcomes including autism spectrum disorders" and agrees that "CDC decision-making and analyses should be transparent," but said Hooker hid recording and did not give Thompson "any choice" on his name and voice being made public.

He is giving information to Florida GOP Rep. William Posey, "will continue to cooperate with Congress" and has "offered to assist with reanalysis of the study data or development of further studies," but Thompson will not answer further questions "at this time," he said.

Posey has repeatedly spoken of his interest in what causes autism, at least as far back as a 2012 hearing. He did so again in a 2014 hearing before Thompson's disclosure and specifically mentioned Thompson's statement in a 2015 floor speech and again several weeks later, "speeches that have generated little congressional reaction," The Hill reported.

"I actually give hundreds of vaccines every year"

The day before Weldon's scheduled confirmation hearing, medical publisher STAT ran a 2,200-word feature on his "long and deep" support for "anti-vaccine theories" based on his congressional archives at the Florida Institute of Technology and interviews with health officials.

After his pulled nomination, Weldon told supporters the White House gave him 12 hours' notice before the hearing and that Health and that Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told him Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins "now had reservations" about his nomination. 

Collins' staff had "suddenly" turned hostile to Weldon at their March 11 meeting, he wrote in the letter, because he had "raised some concerns about childhood vaccine safety" as a congressman and they now considered him "antivax," despite Weldon's assurance that "I actually give hundreds of vaccines every year in my medical practice."

Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy, R-La., had already asked "once" to withdraw Weldon's nomination, "throwing around the claim that I was 'antivax' or that I believed that vaccines cause autism which I have never said," Weldon said, so "losing Collins too was clearly too much for the White House."

Cassidy also ordered National Institutes of Health nominee Jay Bhattacharya to not further study a possible vaccine-autism link.

Weldon suspects the pharmaceutical industry "put serious pressure on Collins and Cassidy" because it couldn't tank Kennedy's nomination. "Many people feel big Pharma actually feared me more than they feared Bobby because of my credibility and my knowledge of science," he said.

Months after The Lancet's editors applied a scarlet letter to British pediatrician Wakefield's 1998 paper on MMR vaccines and autism, based on allegedly undisclosed conflicts of interest with a vaccine-injury group, STAT reported Weldon sought House Appropriations Committee funding for an autism research center led by Wakefield.

In the same March 2004 Lancet issue, 10 of Wakefield's 12 coauthors issued a "retraction of an interpretation," declaring the "data were insufficient" to show a "causal link" between MMR vaccination and autism – an erroneous view with "major implications for public health."

Wakefield and two coauthors retorted that the paper never claimed "a causal association" but said Wakefield "bears some responsibility" for his comments in a press briefing that were based on "a detailed investigation of the history of [the] MMR vaccine and its safety," including a 2003 systematic review by the international research collaborative Cochrane.

The Lancet retracted the study in 2010 on the grounds that the paper made false claims about the recruitment of children and ethics approval, based on the U.K. General Medical Council's finding nine days earlier that Wakefield had acted unethically. The GMC's report said "this case is not concerned with whether there is or might be" an MMR vaccine-autism link.

Weldon said Wakefield had been railroaded. 

"To defend himself in court would have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars, so he let them take his license away," he told supporters.

"The CDC was charged with the responsibility of repeating the Wakefield research and showing that the measles vaccine was safe, but they never did it the right way," conducting "epidemiologic studies instead of a clinical study" and allegedly "changing the protocol and data analysis until the association went away," Weldon said.